Karazhan shuddered violently. Wards which had once withstood a siege brought forth by the Legion itself finally began to buckle. Its fortifications, reinforced by generations of Guardians, had at last met their match. The enemy beyond the monolithic walls of the tower was relentless, and now there was nowhere left to run.

An explosion rocked the base of the tower. The sound thundered throughout its interior, magnified by the magics that conjured it. Everything in the building shifted violently as the force of the shockwave shattered weaker walls and pieces of ceiling from within. Ancient dust and the debris of countless cultural artifacts filled its many intersecting hallways.

She stumbled to the side as the tower leaned slightly. She caught herself against the elaborate mirror in front of her. The ringing in her ears made it difficult to focus, her vision blurred  — she had been caught entirely off-guard. Even after so many years of losing ground, she was still overconfident. Too soon, she thought. They’ve broken through already?

As the ringing began to fade and the tower quaked against the raw barrage of mortar and magical blasts alike, it became apparent that she hadn’t heard anything. Someone shook her shoulder, and she looked to the side.

“...ie.. had.. die.,” Shaw’s lips moved as if they carried her name. “There’s no more time! You have to go! Open it.”

“No,” she responded. She shook her head in disbelief and turned to the massive tome that was beside the equally grand, draconic mirror she had used to steady herself. She took a wide stance, holding both sides of the book as she studied long strands of magic which scrawled themselves dynamically across the vellum sheets. Whatever it said, she did not appear pleased. “The ritual isn’t able to —”

Karazhan’s foundation began to falter. The domed ceiling, even so far at the top of the tower as they were, was now etched with lengthening faults that wept of grinding mortar. Then the heavy, iron-reinforced door to the chamber opened with a groan. The rallying sound of a Stormwind horn bellowed from the deep, winding staircases below and carried through the open edifice.

Murozond entered calmly and acknowledged the room, his face written with grim tidings. The ebony-scale garb of the Infinite Aspect caught the torchlight and bent it as if each scale was itself a miniature black hole. The sands in his single hourglass epaulet were nearly empty.

“I’m afraid Shaw is right, Khadie,” he said with a curt nod to the old spy master. “We are spent. There are no other options.”

She pursed her lips and closed her eyes tightly for a moment… and then slowly turned to look at the crow-topped staff leaning against the dais supporting the monumental book.

“Then this is the end,” she said. She slowly leaned up from the book and reached to take the staff in-hand. “We can see, we can seek, but we cannot pass through.”

“Use Atiesh and focus, Khadie,” Murozond said as he glanced at the staff and then back at her. “Only the mirror and the ritual will give us any hope now —” Murozond’s words stopped abruptly as the roof above them was sheared away entirely. The wards had failed. Beyond the massive breach there was no sky, just blackness. And an endless sea of hungry eyes.

The entire structure started to crumble and Matthias Shaw was quick to grab hold of Khadie and pull her out of harm's way as great chunks of masonry rained down over the space. As he did, a piece of iron beam found its way through his torso like a spear.

“SHAW!” Khadie yelled. Shaw was dead. The reality of their impending defeat set in with the loss of yet another friend. One more in a long list of fallen heroes.

“We were never meant to have another Guardian,” Murzond said as he stood beside the tome and slit his palm over its pages. He then looked at Khadie. The floor was buckling under them. His blood soaked into the vellum, and the pages began to turn blank. “And yet you accepted the responsibility. Knowing the cost of the battles we have faced . The sacrifices we made.”

Khadie began to summon what remained of her strength as she turned to Murozond.

“What are you doing? What are you going on about? We’ve already given everything to the grimoire, it isn’t ready! We have lost,” she said. The staff thrummed with power. The eyes of the crow atop Atiesh crackled with arcane energy. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was going to do. Her eyes darted from side to side in desperate contemplation, as if searching through decades of notes and theories.

The world all around them howled like a thousand starving abominations. Unholy, and chilling to the bone. Defenders could no longer be heard in conflict. Just scraping, climbing claws thinly veiled by the sound of the collapsing tower.

“One final infusion,” Murozond said. The sands in his epaulet were entirely gone now. He reached up and unbuckled its clasp, allowing the garb to fall free from his body.

“Running?” Khadie asked as her concentration was broken by the sound of his hourglass cracking upon the stone floor. “I suppose that is an option for an Aspect such as yourself.”

A colossal black hand formed and began to descend from the heavens toward the tower’s exposed crown. Karazhan’s center fractured and the sound echoed across Deadwind Pass.

“Perhaps something from Kel’thuzad’s abyssal research might be useful,” he said knowingly with a pause and smirk. “And I’m doing as I’ve always done, Khadie,” Murozond backed toward the low thresold of a broken wall to the outside. He looked out, and then back at her for a final moment. “Buying us time.”

“Fucking Kel’Thuzad?!” Khadie yelled. But stopping an aspect was impossible. What could a Lich do to help in this moment? she thought.

Murozond fell through the hole and with a mighty roar, the Infinite Aspect assumed his true draconic form. Enormous. Magnificent. The brilliant ebony scales of the dragon gleamed with the light of the magic entrusted to him by the Titans. Even in the darkness that consumed the world, he was a resplendent spark in the criticality of their true midnight. He swooped down and then up, around the tower, reinforcing it, putting a stopper in time itself with great fiery breaths of bronze magic  — suspending Karazhan’s collapse.

Khadie turned to the mirror nearby. It was large, ornate, and its glass facade rippled like water. With one hand she channeled a connection with the enigmatic tome nearby, and with the other, she channeled its power through Atiesh like a conduit into the mirror itself. The reflective surface swirled, and an aura chronomancy that was natural only to Murozond’s dragonflight emanated out from its frame. Within the mirror, visions of different times, places, and impossible scenes unfolded.

Murlocs dressed like heroes. Corrupted worlds. Wild worlds. Infinite permutations of Azeroth. Even with the unspeakable price paid to craft the tome and the mirror, neither were ready to bear her passage in or out of the portal to these other timelines. 

It’s too incomplete, she thought as she gazed into the mirror’s kaleidoscope of visions. A living body cannot pass through. The rebound will kill me. Yet Murozond’s final words echoed through her mind with each passing moment. Kel’thuzad. The limitations of the portal… Lich. And then the horror of the truth settled upon her. The only possible solution and its grim necessity.

Above her, Murzond fought with an amorphous enemy. Its blackness swirled around the final living Aspect of their world, its touch burning his scales like acid. The roaring of combat lasted for precious few minutes before Murozond too was seen falling from the sky, consumed by the darkness. With his fall, the braces he had placed upon the tower began to dissolve into motes of faintly shimmering sand.

Khadie looked around. In her thoughts, she had failed to realize that she was now surrounded by the shapeless horrors which had finally ascended the ruins of her former home. They elongated unnaturally, their digits thin and taloned. They did not pounce. They hissed. They watched.  It was almost as if her enemy were stalling to savor her defeat. She looked up at the sky. It looked back. She glanced at Shaw’s lifeless body. And finally she looked into the “eyes” of Atiesh.

“I will come back,” she muttered. “Shaw. Murozond. Vol’jin. Tirion. Alleria. Cairne. It won’t have been for nothing,” she pressed Atiesh to her head in a silent prayer. “It won’t.”

Khadie harnessed all of her arcane power and erupted without warning, turning all of the monstrosities around her to ash. She surrounded herself, the mirror, and the tome with a defensive bubble of pure magic. It suspended the crumbling foundations caught within it high in the air as the rest of Karazhan finally collapsed. All of the grand tower and its legacy fell to roaring piles of rubble. And yet there she was, defiant with a piece of the tower in the air far above.

With Atiesh in one hand and an open palm with the other, she directed all her might into the tome. Her eyes were on fire with raw energy as she poured every last ounce of her strength into it, everything that made her a Guardian, everything that remained  — leaving only enough for what was to come.

Blood began to seep from her eyes and nose. Atiesh surged. She gripped it now tightly with both hands, no longer able to afford anything less. The hungering darkness swept down and began to swirl around the bubble she had created, clawing at it, testing it. Howling. And it too, started to fail.

Finally Atiesh, entirely spent, exploded in her hands. Its splinters fell on the floor around her and she nearly crumpled entirely to her knees. Her breaths were weak. The arcane sphere flickered. Gravity tugged on the platform. Khadie crawled in a scurry to the grimoire, pulled herself up, and placed her bloody hand upon its blank pages. She whispered one final enchantment as she did.

A single moment was then spared, one to send a defiant smile to the enemy in the sky. Then with the last bit of strength and magic she had reserved, Khadie forced the immense tome through the air and into the mirror’s face. It passed through effortlessly and the glossy surface bulged and rippled.

“You... lose…,” she said with her last breath. Her body fell lifelessly to the ground.

As the tome descended into the mirror, the water-like glass stiffened. The image of aurora borealis and the silhouette of Wyrmrest Temple appeared only briefly before the whole of the polished surface shattered irrevocably.

The entirety of the platform and the magic which had suspended it now fell to dust, consumed by darkness as everything else had been. Everything except for her. For even though a living entity could not pass through the mirror, an object could. 

Even a phylactery.