Lordaeron, Royal Palace.
A tall, stately man stood by the window, which offered a magnificent view of the city and the lake shimmering in the distance beyond the city walls. And although his dark hair was considerably touched by gray, no one seeing this man would doubt that he had personally taken part in the war against the green-skinned alien brutes that had recently thundered through the human lands. Yes, Terenas Menethil II, the ruler of these lands, was still sturdy and strong, despite the idle lifestyle of the last few peaceful years.
The King's gaze was calm but pensive. Staring blindly at the sun-drenched capital, hearing neither the cry of the seagulls, nor the voices of the guards sweltering in the heat, nor the city hum reaching even the center of the palace, Terenas reflected on a truly royal problem—the future of his people...
Not that it looked bleak, but the presence of such a powerful neighbor, whose guardianship had recently become quite intrusive, still made him ponder the prospects.
"Magic is the cornerstone. It is a wonderful support for the throne, but it is also the worm that constantly gnaws at it from within... A good example of the former is the Order of the Silver Hand—no matter what the Paladins say about not being Mages. A no less obvious example of the latter is those arrogant expatriates from Dalaran... Not to mention the elves—it's not for nothing they say the first word elven children utter is 'mana,' not 'mama'..."
One look at Quel'Thalas or Dalaran itself, and it immediately becomes obvious that the future belongs to magic. "Eh, it's just a pity that such a tool of governance and development goes to waste! Why do the vast majority of human Mages' aspirations lie in the planes of theological research or are aimed at destruction? Why can't they develop a weak spell or a simple artifact for tilling the soil? Why must they make a three-meter iron golem and, handing it a shovel, send it to trample peasant crops?! Some 'field sentinels' they found... Don't even get me started on the special breed of dairy cows that eat meat... What are the heads of the creators of these outrages against common sense filled with?! Sometimes it seems to me it would have been better to accept that Dwarf offer of an alliance... Though, who am I kidding? With elves living right behind the neighboring mountains, playing intrigues with the bearded ones is to sign one's own death warrant..."
"Father, what does this mean?!" The end of his reflections in general and his post-lunch break in particular was brought about by a girl bursting into the office.
The man slowly turned to his daughter, who at nearly seventeen remained a flighty girl. He didn't need to guess much about the reason for the unexpected visitor's indignation.
"Aren't you glad? Queen Azshara has declared world peace," Terenas said with a hint of irony, and then added in a more serious tone. "And now, for the sake of maintaining it, you will no longer have to marry some 'ancient old geezer,' as you like to call our worthy aristocrats."
"That's all wonderful," the young princess faltered for a second, as she hadn't even thought of complaining about that nuance, but she quickly recovered. "But why do you want to send me to Stratholme, after my brother?! The whole court is whispering about why you sent him there, and now they'll say the same about me! I can already hear them calling me an elven concu—"
"Enough!" the King raised his voice, something he hadn't allowed himself with his daughter for a long time, who was his eldest but favorite child. "I will tear out their tongues if anyone dares to spread rumors defaming you! And anyway—calm down! I didn't send you there for that: you have an older brother for that. I wanted to give you a gift for your eighteenth birthday, but since your mother has such a long tongue, I'll have to 'gift' it now. So—I have an agreement with the elves for your magic training at the capital academy of Quel'Thalas."
Calia Menethil opened her mouth to speak but closed it again, unable to find the right words to describe the emotions of joy that overwhelmed her. However, a girl wouldn't be a girl if she couldn't find her own personal fly in the ointment even in such a moment. And she presented her grievance.
"But why Quel'Thalas? Why to the elves? I so wanted to go to the Dalaran academy, almost all my friends are there, including Jaina!"
"Dalaran..." Terenas drawled indefinitely, but no further clarification followed; instead, being quite experienced in recent years in dealing with impulsive teenagers, he asked: "Don't you want to brag to your friends that you are being taught by the most skilled Mages on the continent? And how many humans can afford to claim they have visited the elven capital, let alone studied magic there?"
During the conversation, the man approached his daughter and was already coaxing her, placing his hands on her shoulders.
"Well, yes, but..."
"Calia Menethil, such an opportunity comes only once in a lifetime," he interrupted her attempts to evade with emphasis in his voice. "And you'll always have time for Dalaran. It's our only city of Mages, so your friends aren't going anywhere."
"Fine, father. I agree," the girl nodded, and seizing the moment his grip loosened, she slipped from her parent's hands and was gone.
Watching her run off, the King only shook his head.
"As if you had a choice..."
———
Kezan Island.
Jawas-like Goblins were scurrying about the pier. The wealthy, ordinary residents, workers enslaved by their kin—green midgets of all classes wandered the wooden planks of the dock awaiting the arrival of a vessel. Above the masts of the ship moving slowly through the waves, flags with the symbol of a six-toothed gear fluttered.
One of the owners of the cargo currently on board, unable to stand the wait, exclaimed:
"What's taking them so long?"
His companion, who had also come to oversee the unloading of goods, replied with no less dissatisfaction:
"As if you don't know these 'sixes': when it's time to get an advance, they're first, but when it's time to do the work—you can't find them for love or money."
Even if these traders weren't the most successful or shrewd individuals on the island (otherwise they wouldn't have had to be personally present for the unloading operations), nevertheless, each of them had a guard standing behind them, which provided their main color in the eyes of others. It was one of the bodyguards who proved to be the most attentive and vigilant among all the kin participating in the meeting.
"Something's wrong," the Goblin guard said, peering intently at the approaching ship and frowning more and more as the vessel's bow, rocking on the waves, covered more and more distance to the pier. "Not a single sailor is visible on deck."
The imagination of the alarmed employer immediately produced the most undesirable assumption for his commercial affairs:
"Pirates?"
"No," the second guard, also staring suspiciously at the approaching ship, immediately dismissed this version as groundless. "There isn't a single sail on the horizon. No pirate would attack a port with only one pennant. And besides..."
The more people listened to the conversation, the faster the other voices died down, and the more Goblins were gripped by anxiety. The spectators ripened for a while, and then the same vigilant guard suggested:
"Let's retreat closer to the city gates. If everything is normal, we'll come back."
"Yes, perhaps," the employer seized the suggestion; he had been gripped by a vague premonition of danger at the sight of the advancing ship and would have turned tail long ago if not for the fear of losing his authority.
Most of the Goblins present, under the mocking gazes of the most fearless or the most brainless, followed the merchants. Which ultimately helped them enjoy a few extra minutes of their bustling lives as mortal creatures...
When the ship, still showing no signs of life, was about a hundred meters from the pier—or in other words, half a minute's travel—a black figure of humanoid shape appeared over the side. And the word "black" referred by no means to the color of skin or clothing. Streaming Darkness enveloped the stranger, obscuring the outlines of the silhouette. The time allowed by the unknown for observation ended very quickly for the witnesses of the attack. It seemed that, besides his sudden appearance, the ship's passenger had not made a single movement, but a terrible fate befell the green shorties remaining on the pier.
From the seawater, right from under the wooden flooring, black pikes shot upward, crushing the pier planks to dust in their path. By the will of the caster, not a single hair fell from the heads of the hapless laborers who had decided, defying danger, to get ahead of their cowardly competitors and earn money from unloading. For the attacker had very different plans for them than simple and senseless murder. The pikes, which until recently had seemed the height of solidity, blurred, collapsed, and buried those Goblins who were "lucky" enough not to fall into the water or who lacked the wit for it. Universal screams rang out, filled with horror and pain. To the spectators frozen in fear at the walls of the port city, it became obvious that contact with the Darkness, which was the materialized energy of The Void, was not good for the health of Kezan's inhabitants. The cries of the unfortunates quickly died out; in place of their bodies, black bubbles appeared, swaying as if ready to burst from the "pus" overfilling them at any moment.
However, the green swimmers also shared the fate of their land-bound brothers; the fate of those who disappeared underwater simply remained unknown to the observers, and therefore a false seed of hope for salvation from the visiting nightmare was planted in their minds.
Only a moment had passed since the attack began, and the ship reached its destination, but at the same time, the city guard finally shook off their stupor. A flower of a cannon shot bloomed on the wall, the ears of those gathered rang from the roar, and a good third of the side of the vessel seized by the unknown Mage or creature was blown to splinters. Comrades hastened to support the artilleryman. The former pier, along with the ships moored there, was engulfed in fire, and the approaches to the city were shrouded in smoke from cannons that burst during firing: what can you do, even now, in the minutes when their lives were at stake, the Goblins could not overcome the clumsiness of their race.
When the roaring flame died down, it became clear to the witnesses that the loner who had challenged an entire city didn't care about the defenders and their efforts. In the circle of charred debris floated fat, nervously twitching dumplings of black color, looking undamaged and completely whole. The uninvited guest, having mystically crossed the couple of hundred meters of the former pier, appeared on the shore, surrounded by a seemingly unremarkable translucent gray film of a protective sphere. The opponent, no longer hiding behind the side of the destroyed ship, appeared in all his glory, turning out to be a four-legged creature like a centaur. A horned black centaur.
Not a couple of seconds passed before snake-like creatures began to crawl out of the water across the entire visible space: mighty warriors with a huge dorsal crest and heavy Arms in their hands, and slender female creations with the clear attributes of Wizards. The newly formed army enveloped itself in Magic Shields and began to rapidly close the distance to the city fortifications. The artillery did not fail this time either, but at the same time, two dozen killed Nagas who broke out of the barriers' zone of effect could in no way pass for the embodiment of the city defenders' dreams of an ideal bombardment. In response, powerful spells crashed onto the walls, incinerating, freezing, or corroding the city defenders, who proved practically powerless against strong magical support. Perhaps that is why the enemies chose the Goblins as the first step toward world domination... The battle for Kezan had begun.
In the heat of the battle, no one noticed how the ranks of the attackers were replenished by several green-skinned warriors whose skin was permeated with dark veins, while at the same time, the black bubbles disappeared from the surface of the sea...
———
Kezan Island. A little earlier.
Shuffling papers day in and day out—it's boring... you might say, and you'd be right. However, for some individuals, such as Goblins, for example, it was a delightful occupation. Especially if those papers were actually the basis of the fortune and well-being of one of the representatives of a famous family of bankers. The trade tycoon Gallywix, being the head of the Bilgewater Cartel—the largest and richest Trade Coalition in Kezan—was exactly one of the latter.
And even if this Goblin had once seized the position of head of the trade guild only thanks to luck, now he rightfully conducted his trade affairs in luxury, silence, and peace, and one of the most-most mansions in Kezan provided all this to its owner.
A cannon shot nearby and the full Salvo that followed forced the unofficial ruler of Kezan to jump in place. However, even though he possessed a decent nose for trouble, even his well-developed paranoia could not convince him to literally drop everything and run to save his skin toward the nearest airship... After all, he was in the heart of his little empire; where else but here was the safest place on the island?
The mansion, located on the edge of the city, far from the city slums, was an incredibly high-status property, but alas, on this specific day, this fact played a cruel joke on its owner. The Nagas, bursting into the elite Goblin residence just a minute after the cannonade ended (by the way, it lasted only five minutes), caught Gallywix with his pants down, so to speak. The fat Goblin was trying on the move to shove a thick stack of papers into an incredibly bloated, unclosable satchel. A Naga, hissing something like "For N'Zoth!" in strange elvish, casually swiped off the head of the hapless banker and rushed off in search of more agile servants...
But to the credit of the entire Goblin race, not all representatives of the former engineers had greed dominating over their Will to Survive. Here and there, desperately smoking, airships took to the sky. And even if Goblin workmanship sometimes failed its creators, preventing some vessels from soaring to the heavens, at least a couple of dozen unsightly zeppelins succeeded. And all would have been well, but the Goblins, who had begun to celebrate their salvation from the serpentine threat that had swallowed all of Kezan, suddenly realized that although their altitude was rapidly increasing, for the magic of the snake-women, a few dozen meters were not any significant hindrance...
In the end, out of twenty, only five airships managed to slip out of the trap, and that was only due to the presence of protective artifacts: it was not for nothing that these specimens of aeronautics belonged to the richest Goblins. True, by a "strange" coincidence, not a single one of the owners was on board...
This time, the passengers and crew took their mistakes into account and were in no hurry to celebrate victory; on the contrary, they were making every effort to get as far away from the island as possible. Except they didn't know that the spells falling short and crumbling from loss of energy belonged by no means to the strongest opponents. The enemy commander, who until recently had been indifferently observing the quick assault and the subsequent massacre, became animated at the sight of the escaping prey. Naturally, such a thing was not part of his Master's plans, and therefore in a couple of seconds, he formed and sent into flight five Shadow Bolts—one for each of the remaining targets. They looked like ordinary spells, but in fact, they were constructs of Void energy, possessing good speed and flight range at the expense of power. The latter was provided by the type of Mana used. Against the handiwork of local artifactors, it was just the thing!
And the Magic Defense of three airships, which was moreover on its last legs after the breakthrough, did not hold, crumbling and allowing the enemy magic to reach the protected object. Neither the wooden hull nor the sheets of metal plating became a hindrance, and three dark spheres appeared in the air. Splinters and scraps of the burst leather bag that had previously supported the wooden ship in the air—that was all that remained of the Goblin transport.
But contrary to all predictions, a pair of zeppelins somehow miraculously stood their ground against the not-so-common variety of magic, although they completely lost their protective spheres. Now the helmsmen of the aerial vessels were desperately trying to gain extra degrees to take the shortest path to deliver themselves and their passengers to the nearest cloud. From the side, their venture did not look doomed to failure, but the chances of success were... just there. Especially considering the short formation time of the spell and the high flight speed.
It seemed the result did not disappoint the black "centaur-mage" in the least, but he formed the next arrows even faster and endowed them with a much larger reserve of energy: after all, the zeppelins had managed to move quite a distance away. And there were four projectiles now, two for each surviving vessel.
Another cloud of wood dust framing a sphere of Darkness became a monument to someone's unfulfilled hopes. But this interested few people now: time on the surface seemed to stand still, almost all the Nagas froze, staring into the sky. A dazzling white screen that appeared in the path of the black arrows reflected the enemy's onslaught on the last refuge of the escaping shorties without visible effort. If the creature that was the commander of the snake-men army had retained the ability to be surprised like his soldiers, then this pause could not have been interpreted any other way. Но in reality, he was simply concentrating on weaving a higher-ranking spell. A huge black spear, though much slower than its younger "colleagues," possessed the ability of self-guidance judging by the arc traced in the air and overall inspired dread. It wasn't for nothing that its elemental analogs were called Dragon-slayers...
The airship, fleeing at full steam, managed to disappear into a real cloud, but ten seconds later, the gift from the invader of Kezan dissolved into the dirty-white haze after it.
One, two, three minutes passed... now the fifth second was ticking by, and even to the most thick-headed Naga, it became obvious that something had gone wrong. Now the leadership was starting to hurriedly cast another spell, but there was still no reaction in the sky. No black explosions, no falling remains of the defeated fugitive, no white flashes of the previous defense—nothing. The second spear successfully locked onto the target and purposefully disappeared into the milky-gray shroud after its brother...
The third spear was dispelled halfway. As if receiving a silent command, the Mage headed toward a small active volcano rising in the center of the island, paying no attention to the soldiers who had returned to searching for survivors.
———
Exactly five minutes had passed since the moment when the illusion fell from the elderly Goblin woman who had reflected the triple strike of enemy magic, and the young-looking Elf hiding behind it collapsed in a faint. However, this time was quite enough for the shock of losing the island to subside slightly, and some individuals managed to come up with a couple of conspiracy theories, casting their savior as the main culprit of the attack.
"Overboard with her! This is all because of this Long-Ears witch!"
That same pair of former merchants from the pier, surrounded by five guards, were more level-headed beings, and therefore did not support such a categorical opinion from the rest of the survivors. On the contrary—they saw huge prospects in the fact that a representative of Quel'Thalas was on the airship, because no matter how you look at it, the elves were the most influential and powerful in all of Azeroth. The mere fact that they survived was a vivid confirmation of this fact, and therefore they clearly had no intention of handing over their chance for a better life to the mob for execution.
Meanwhile, the determined passengers were approaching the voluntary defenders of the unconscious Elf. All these Goblins had enough sense to drop everything and flee, or they were simply by chance near the airship at the moment of the attack, and therefore were able to survive. The ship's crew, however, had no time for squabbles, and they continued to work tirelessly to increase the gap in distance between the aircraft and their home city, left far astern.
"Stop!" from the side of the Goblins surrounding the lying body came an attempt to resolve the matter with words. "If the monsters had come specifically for her, she would have just escaped with a teleport: you saw for yourselves how strong she is!"
"Right!" the second trader supported his comrade. "Besides, she saved our lives and, perhaps, will save them again... How can you be so ungrateful?!"
Despite the sincere indignation shown on his face, in reality, this representative of the merchant brotherhood feared the wrath of the elven queen more if something happened to her spy (and the disguised Elf could be nothing else) than he seriously counted on the gratitude of the elven authorities for saving the infiltrator.
The crowd, with sullen and in some places openly angry faces, surrounded the advocates, but some argument found the right response, and the Goblins were in no hurry to move from words to action.
A minute or two, and the situation stabilized. The passengers, grumbling dissatisfiedly, dispersed across the deck, breaking into several groups. The merchants exhaled with relief and immediately looked with concern at their lying savior: she still remained unconscious. They had "only" to cross half of Azeroth and deliver the Elf alive to her kin. However, compared to the recent situation, the task truly looked insignificant...
Goblin airships were not the fastest, so the news reached Azshara with a significant delay. And when the Queen, fully armed at the head of a small army, arrived "for reconnaissance" through a teleport to Kezan, her sight was met by a destroyed island, the absence of any enemies, and... for some reason, an extinguished volcano.
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