Elyn’dariel - “Echo of the Silver Sky”
In the twilight of a world drowning beneath its own unraveling, when even the continents seemed to heave with mortal agony and the sky peeled open in lesions of void-born fluorescence, a singular and impossible idea surfaced among those who had not yet surrendered to despair. It began as a murmured conjecture between dying scholars, but desperation has a way of making heretics of the wise. Soon, the notion spread like a fever among heroes and monsters alike:
If their world could not be wrested back from annihilation, then another might yet be warned - or saved.
From that heresy rose the most profane and magnificent collaboration the dying world had ever conceived: the forging of the Elyn’dariel.
It was an undertaking that no sane age would have permitted. Only a dying age could justify it.
A Solution Beyond Time
The Void had not merely invaded this Azeroth; it had adapted into it. It slithered between seconds, unthreading causality with surgical cruelty. Armies vanished from their own histories. Cities collapsed because their foundations were devoured retroactively. Even the Bronze flight - fractured, faltering, and led in part by a Murozond who suffered intervals of terrible clarity - found their mastery of time undone.
It was in one of these lucid moments that Murozond proposed a solution so forbidden that even Nozdormu, in another world, would recoil in horror:
“Not a step backward, nor forward…
...but sideways.”
Not time travel. Not escape. A trans-reality crossing - an act that mocked Titan decrees and dared to treat the Infinite Timeways not as sacred constraints but as a lattice of doors.
“Time is a rope,” he rasped to Khadie, dragging a lone sand-grain across his palm. “Pull hard enough, and threads touch. Bind them, and you may walk from one to the next.”
Khadie - Guardian by consequence rather than inheritance - understood that every other path had closed. She agreed. Thus began the search for materials no single reality had ever brought together.
The Quest for the Forbidden Substances
To forge the Mirror was to gather the most perilous artifacts ever to scar a world - substances the Titans themselves forbade from coexisting, lest the fabric of existence grow curious about what alternatives it might hold.
Eternalite - Metal That Remembers Death
The expedition’s first destination was Icecrown, where the corpse-palace of the Lich King lay abandoned but not silent. Beneath the Frozen Throne’s ruin, embedded in permafrost older than mortal memory, they found a vein of Nerubian Eternalite.
Eternalite is no ordinary metal. It absorbs the final moment of every being slain within its presence, collecting deaths like tally-marks. It groans with their memories.
To extract it, Khadie brokered a truce with Kel’Thuzad, who remained half-bound to his shattered master. In return for knowledge he could not live long enough to use, he opened the necrotic vaults and allowed the living to steal from the dead.
The metal screamed as they cut it free - a choir of extinguished worlds.
Carbuncle Crystals - Hearts of Unborn Timelines
Next they delved into Khaz Algar, into the buried Aegis-Forges that pulsed like the heartbeats of buried titans. Here the earthen - some lucid, some fractured - led the group to a chamber where Aetheric Carbuncles bloomed like mineral predators along a ruptured Azerite vein.
Carbuncles do not form in a single world.They occur only when multiple timelines collide in resonance, when a moment fractures and refracts into alternate possibilities.
The earthen called them: “Worlds that never had the opportunity to fail.”
Their hum set Khadie’s teeth on edge.
The Wound of Sargeras - A Thread of Cosmic Heresy
From Silithus, they harvested something no mortal should touch: a filament of crystallized energy drawn from the scar of Sargeras’ blade, where the world-soul’s blood boiled in paradox. Neither Fel nor Arcane nor Life nor Shadow - but a contradictory echo of the cosmic wound that had mutilated the planet. It was not matter. It was the idea of matter struggling to decide what it should be. Illidan himself helped extract it, his fel runes burning violently in its presence.
Argent Sigils - Light Reflected Through Night
They traveled to the Moon Temple, long abandoned, where Tyrande - now consumed by the final dregs of her vigil - surrendered fragments of shattered moon sigils. These runes carried Elune’s sight, not as illumination, but as reflection - the light that sees what mortals cannot.
Their glow was gentle, mournful, and entirely incompatible with everything else the Mirror required. Which is why they were necessary
Mardum Stabilizers - Fel Runes that Anchor Chaos
Illidan contributed further, offering stabilizing runes stolen from Mardum’s shattered heart. These glyphs did not prevent chaos; they defined it, giving it shape and boundary. Without them, the Mirror would have erupted in uncontrolled chronal chaos.
Ichor-Glyphs - Void Denied Its Hunger
Last came the forbidden runes carved from the carapaces of fallen Aqir exiles - creatures who had glimpsed eternity and clawed their way back. Their ichor-glyphs inverted the Void’s pull, silencing its whispers for fleeting moments.
Cho’gall carved them into stone with trembling reverence, muttering that “even gods must sometimes be gagged.”
The Breath of Murozond - The Sacrifice No Dragon Names
And then came the final ingredient, the only one no expedition could retrieve.
Murozond inhaled.
Dragons do not speak lightly of breath. It is not mere wind - it is identity, the core memory of one’s existence in the Timeways. As he exhaled, the cavern shuddered.
A fissure tore open beneath his ribs, spilling sands no dragon should ever possess: the sands of unmade timelines, each one a universe dying before it had the chance to be born. Bronze bled to black. Possibility collapsed into grief. His roar silenced itself into a whisper.
And with each breath he gave, breath-glass formed - molten chronal substance that rippled like water yet cut like truth.
No dragon could witness it without bowing their head.
