Chapter 3: The Tower
The days unspooled, each one layered over the last like vellum pages in one of Medivh’s endless tomes. The sharp horror of the observatory and the violent, shameful dreams began to blur at their edges. Time, in the stagnant air of Karazhan, had a dulling effect.
Khadgar’s magic did return. It flowed from his fingers, obedient and strong, when Medivh asked him to re-catalogue the resonant frequencies in the west library or to stabilize a flickering ward in the cellars. It was still blue. Mostly. Sometimes, when he was tired or distracted, he’d glance down and see the faintest green shimmer at the core of the arcane stream, like moss on a stone at the bottom of a clear creek. It would vanish when he focused on it. He stopped focusing on it.
The hum never left. It was the tower’s heartbeat, and now it was his. He woke with it, worked with it humming in his teeth, fell asleep to its rhythm. It wasn’t oppressive anymore. It was a constant. A companion. Sometimes, in the quiet, it would shape itself into a thread of thought that felt so natural he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t his own. The third rune on the left is flawed. The porridge is bland. He is watching you from the shadow of the stair.
Medivh was… kind. Patient. The guilt-ridden, frail mentor. He never mentioned the crystal experiment again, except for one offhand comment over a sparse supper of bread and thin soup.
“I trust the residual phantasms have subsided?” he’d asked, not looking up from his bowl.
“Yes,” Khadgar had said, too quickly. “Just dreams.”
“Good.” Medivh had nodded, a faint, sad smile touching his lips. “The mind is a fortress, but its walls can be seeped through by the wrong sort of rain. We must be more careful with our weather, you and I.”
He’d taken to calling Khadgar “Young Trust.” It started the morning after the draught—which had, in fact, been left outside his door in a simple clay cup and which had granted him a deep, dreamless oblivion he’d drunk down with desperate gratitude.
“Your name,” Medivh had said, watching him return the empty cup. “Khadgar. It’s a dwarvish word, did you know?”
“I… no, I didn’t.”
“Means ‘trust.’ A fine thing to build a foundation on.” Medivh had coughed, a wet, rattling sound. “Perhaps a better thing to call you than ‘boy.’ Less presumptuous. If you don’t mind.”
Khadgar hadn’t minded. It felt like an anchor. A name within a name. It was easier to answer to “Young Trust” than to reconcile the person he’d been in Dalaran with the one who now jumped at shadows and saw green in his own magic.
Their routine solidified. Mornings were for theory, usually in Khadgar’s own cramped quarters. The room had become a secondary study, parchment spreading like a fungal growth from the desk to the floor, annotated maps curling at the edges. The air smelled of ink, cheap tallow candles, and the peculiar, ozone-tinged dust that was the scent of old, unattended magic.
“The ley lines here,” Medivh would say, a bony finger stabbing at a point on a map of the Burning Steppes. His touch left a faint smudge. “Like a circulatory system for the world. But you know this. The Kirin Tor loves its abstract models. What they miss is the pain.”
Khadgar looked up from his own notes. “Pain?”
“When a line is cut. Or poisoned.” Medivh’s eyes were distant. “The land screams. It’s not a metaphor, Young Trust. It’s a sound only the very mad or the very attuned can hear. A shrill, tearing noise. I’ve heard it. More often lately.”
He said things like that. Statements that hovered between profound wisdom and the ramblings of a decaying mind. Khadgar would note them down, unsure which column they belonged in.
Afternoons were for practical application. Medivh, despite his frailty, was a meticulous, brilliant teacher. The lessons were never about fireballs or shields. They were about perception. He had Khadgar spend three hours listening to the “conversation” between two different stones in the foundation. Another day was spent tracing the path of a single sunbeam through the tower’s stained glass, noting how its magical conductivity changed with the colour of the glass it passed through.
“Power isn’t about shouting,” Medivh wheezed, perched on a stool as Khadgar painstakingly sketched the energy gradients. “It’s about listening. The world is always whispering. Most mages are too busy chanting to hear it.”
It was during one of these afternoon sessions, in a dusty gallery lined with spectral, silent portraits, that the first real test came.
“Reach out,” Medivh instructed. “Not with a spell. With your intent. Find the binding resonance of that frame.” He pointed to a painting of a stern-looking woman in elven robes. The frame was simple iron, blackened with age.
Khadgar closed his eyes. He pushed aside the instinct to cast a diagnostic spell. He just… listened. He felt the hum of the tower, the quieter hum of his own blood. He let his awareness drift towards the painting. For long minutes, there was nothing. Then, a faint vibration. A single, stubborn musical note sustained across centuries. The iron’s memory of the forge.
“I feel it,” he murmured.
“Good. Now, match it. Sing its note back to it. Not with your voice. With your will.”
It was an intensely subtle exercise. Khadgar furrowed his brow, imagining that single pitch. He tuned his own internal resonance, the one that had hummed green since the crystal, trying to mirror the iron’s dull, grey song. He struggled. His note was off-key, too complex, filled with the harmonics of living things.
Frustration sparked. The green hum in his core twitched in response, a sympathetic ripple.
Let me, the thought came, smooth and effortless. Not a voice, just an impulse. An instinct.
Without thinking, Khadgar stopped fighting his own resonance. He stopped trying to mimic. He simply pushed the green hum, the one that lived in him now, outward towards the iron.
The effect was instant and profound.
The iron frame didn’t just resonate. It shivered. The dull note vanished, swallowed by a rich, vibrant chord that was Khadgar’s own signature. The portrait’s paint seemed to deepen in colour for a second. A sense of connection, of ownership, snapped into place. It felt like slipping a key into a perfectly fitted lock.
He opened his eyes, exhilarated. “It worked!”
Medivh was staring at the frame, his expression unreadable. “Yes,” he said slowly. “It did. A different method than I intended. More… direct.” He looked at Khadgar, that familiar, weary admiration returning to his face. “You didn’t listen to its song. You gave it yours. And it preferred it.”
“Was that wrong?”
“There is no wrong,” Medivh said, shrugging. “Only effective and ineffective. That was profoundly effective. You made a stranger into a friend with a handshake, instead of learning its language. A viable tactic.” He paused. “How did it feel?”
Khadgar looked at his hands. They were trembling slightly, not from exhaustion, but from the clean, potent thrill of that connection. It had felt easy. It had felt right. “It felt… good.”
“Power often does,” Medivh said, turning away with another of his wet coughs. “That is its first and most dangerous gift. Come. The light is fading. We should salvage some herbs from the rooftop garden before frost claims them entirely.”
The rooftop was a tangled mess of widow’s peak and broken gargoyles, dotted with stubborn, bitter herbs growing in cracks filled with ancient soil. The wind was sharp here, cutting through Khadgar’s robes. Medivh moved with a brittle caution, pointing out sprigs of kingsblood and fading sorrowmoss.
As Khadgar knelt to pick a silverleaf plant, the wind whipped a fragment of parchment from a crumbling stack near a chimney. It fluttered against his leg. He picked it up, intending to toss it aside, when the sketch on it caught his eye.
It was a rough, hurried drawing, done in the same red ink Medivh used on his prophecy maps. It depicted a star, but not a natural one. This was a stylized, hateful sigil, all jagged points and cruel angles. At its centre was a single, staring eye. Below it, in blocky lettering, was a single word: SARGERAS.
A cold that had nothing to do with the wind shot through him. The green hum in his chest seemed to coil tight.
“What is this?” he asked, his voice barely carrying over the gale.
Medivh turned, his eyes narrowing at the parchment in Khadgar’s hand. For a fraction of a second, something raw and terrible flashed in his gaze—not guilt, but fear. Then it was gone, buried under a wave of dismissive irritation.
“Old madness,” he shouted against the wind, shuffling over. He plucked the parchment from Khadgar’s grip. “The ramblings of a sick mind trying to give a name to the poison. The sound the screaming ley lines make. I told you I’d heard it.” He crumpled the paper in his fist. A tiny wisp of green flame, so faint it might have been a trick of the light, consumed it to ash in his palm. “Pay it no mind, Young Trust. It’s just a word. A name for a particularly bad headache.”
He scattered the ashes into the wind. “The herbs, please. The cold is in my bones.”
That night, back in his room, Khadgar couldn’t shake the image. The jagged star. The eye. Sargeras. It meant nothing to him. No legend, no demon in the Kirin Tor bestiaries. Just a word. But Medivh’s reaction… that flash of primal fear…
He pulled out a fresh sheet of parchment. He dipped his quill in blue ink, the colour of Dalaran. He began to write a report, the kind he’d been trained to write. Observation: Guardian Medivh exhibits sporadic paranoia, fixates on auditory hallucinations described as ‘screaming ley lines.’ New Symbolism Observed: Recurring sigil associated with the name ‘Sargeras.’ Possibly a personalized manifestation of his degenerative condition…
He got that far before his hand stalled. The quill hovered. The green hum was a low thrum in his wrist.
He is crumbling, the hum seemed to pulse. And he is afraid. You felt his fear on the roof. It was sweet, wasn’t it? To see the mighty brought low. To know something he fears.
Khadgar stared at the words on the page. They were logical, clean, correct. They were what a Kirin Tor mage would write.
He slowly lowered the quill. He took the parchment, crumpled it as Medivh had crumpled the other, and held it in his fist. He focused on the green warmth inside him, the same impulse that had harmonized the iron frame. He thought of Medivh’s fear, a bright, sharp flavour on the windy roof.
A tiny, controlled sputter of emerald flame erupted from his knuckles. It licked over the parchment, consuming it without smoke, without heat on his skin. In seconds, it was gone, leaving only a sprinkle of cool ash on his desk.
He hadn’t spoken a word. Hadn’t woven a single arcane gesture. The magic had come from the place where the hum lived. It had obeyed a desire, not a formula.
He brushed the ash into his palm, opened the window, and let the wind take it. Below, the twisted spires of Karazhan speared the deepening gloom. The hum in his chest resonated with the tower’s own, a perfect, silent chord.
He was not writing reports anymore. He was keeping secrets. And the secret, warm and green and potent, was knitting itself into the very fabric of his will. The fear on the roof hadn’t just been Medivh’s. For a moment, it had been his own. But as he watched the ash disappear, he realized the fear was gone now, too. Replaced by something quieter, and far more patient.
Replaced by something quieter, and far more patient.
The days folded into one another, a monotonous liturgy of study and subtle, unmentioned power. The sharp fear over the sigil of Sargeras softened into a dull curiosity, another artifact of Medivh’s decay filed away. The green hum was a fact of his anatomy now, like the beat of his heart or the rush of his breath. He used its effortless resonance to smooth his work, to quiet the whispering stones, to make the stubborn iron frames in the gallery sing his tune. Medivh watched, and coughed, and called him Young Trust, and the name began to feel less like an anchor and more like a leash he no longer needed.
Months bled past, marked only by the thickening frost on the tower’s windows. The violent, prophetic dreams had ceased entirely, which Khadgar took as a sign of hardening stability. He slept deeply, often, exhausted by the constant low-grade output of containing the new energy within him. His old self was not a flickering candle anymore; it was a buried fossil, a layer of sediment under the fertile, green soil of his current mind.
He was in the library, a real book open before him—a tedious genealogy of Arathi bloodlines—when the fatigue pulled him under. His head dipped, his chin touching his chest. The transition from wakefulness to the dream was seamless, a door opening without a sound.
He was still in the library, but the air was different. Thick, warm, and scentless. The book before him was the same, but the words were smears of black ink. A shadow fell across the page.
“You’re working too hard, Young Trust.”
The voice was Medivh’s, but it was a voice from a forgotten past, rich and smooth and untouched by phlegm or pain. Khadgar looked up.
Medivh stood beside the reading desk, but this was not the broken Guardian. This man was in the prime of his life. His hair, thick and black as a raven’s wing, was pulled into a tight tail at his nape. His face was unlined, his jaw strong, his skin glowing with vitality. And his eyes… they were a green so deep and luminous it made the emerald heart of the crystal seem pale. They held a wicked, knowing light.
Khadgar could only stare, his mind scrabbling for logic and finding none. This was a dream. It had to be.
The young Medivh smiled, a flash of white teeth. He moved with a predatory grace the real Medivh had lost decades ago. He came behind Khadgar’s chair, and his hands settled on Khadgar’s shoulders. They were warm, the grip firm and certain. Khadgar froze, a deer sensing a wolf.
“So tense,” the dream-Medivh murmured, his breath hot against Khadgar’s ear. His hands began to move, kneading the knots from Khadgar’s shoulders, sliding down his chest. It was an intimate, possessive massage. One hand splayed across Khadgar’s stomach, pulling him back against the hard plane of the body behind him. The other drifted lower, tracing the line of his hip.
“Relax,” the voice whispered, a velvet command. “This is a gift. For your service.”
Before Khadgar could form a protest, that wandering hand slipped deftly beneath the waistband of his trousers. Cool fingers brushed through coarse hair, and then circled his soft cock. Khadgar gasped, a shock of pure sensation erasing thought. The hand was expert, knowing. It stroked him once, twice, and his body, traitorous and hungry, responded with devastating speed. He hardened in that grasp, blood rushing south, his cock swelling to fill the dream-Medivh’s confident hand.
“There we are,” Medivh chuckled, the sound vibrating through Khadgar’s back. He began to stroke in earnest, a slow, deliberate rhythm that made Khadgar’s hips twitch. “See? Your body understands. It remembers what your mind fights. It knows its master.”
He worked Khadgar with a brutal, exquisite efficiency, his thumb smearing pre-cum over the head on each upstroke. Khadgar’s head fell back against Medivh’s shoulder, a moan trapped in his throat. It was shameful. It was obscene. It felt better than anything he’d ever known. The green hum in his core wasn’t humming now; it was roaring, a furnace stoked by this degrading, incredible touch.
“Please,” Khadgar heard himself whimper, not sure what he was begging for.
“Shhh. Let me see.”
The hand withdrew, slick and gleaming. With efficient tugs, the dream-Medivh yanked Khadgar’s trousers and smallclothes down to his thighs, trapping him in the chair. The cold air of the dream-library hit his exposed flesh. Medivh stepped around to face him, those devastating green eyes drinking in the sight of Khadgar’s fully erect cock, lying thick and flushed against his stomach.
“Gods,” Medivh breathed, a genuine awe in his tone. He reached out and wrapped his fingers around Khadgar’s length, giving it a possessive squeeze. “My new master is already so gifted. And this is just the beginning. This will grow. As you grow. As we grow.”
He released Khadgar and began to unfasten his own trousers. Khadgar watched, hypnotized, his breath coming in ragged pants. Medivh freed himself, and Khadgar’s mind blanked for a second.
It was not human.
It was a column of dark, segmented chitin, like black armor plating. Between the plates, a network of veins pulsed with the same violent green energy that had filled the crystal. The head was a smooth, cruel flare, dripping with a luminous, green slickness. It was a demonic thing, a weapon made flesh.
Medivh saw his stare. He fisted himself, stroking that monstrous cock, a low groan of pleasure escaping him. The green veins glowed brighter.
“Don’t be afraid,” Medivh whispered, though his eyes said you should be. “This is just the torch being passed. The vessel being prepared. You need this. I can feel your hunger from here.”
And Khadgar realized, with a jolt that was half-terror and half-exultation, that he wasn’t afraid. The revulsion he should have felt was smothered under a wave of sheer, desperate need. The green roar inside him was screaming yes. His body ached, his hole clenching around emptiness. He needed that alien cock inside him. He needed this strong, vibrant, terrifying version of Medivh to ruin him with it.
“Yes,” Khadgar hissed, the word torn from him.
Medivh’s smile was triumphant. He pushed Khadgar forward, bending him over the reading desk. The genealogy book crumpled beneath his chest. He felt the hot, dripping head of that cock nudge against his entrance. It was impossibly large, the chitin weirdly hot and smooth.
“It will hurt,” Medivh murmured, not sounding sorry at all. “And then it will feel better than anything. You will thank me.”
He pushed.
The pain was a white-hot spike, a tearing, brutal invasion. Khadgar screamed into the vellum, his back arching. It was too much, it was splitting him apart. Then, the green veins on the cock flared, and a wave of that familiar, addicting warmth erupted inside him, flooding his veins, melting the pain into a overwhelming, full sensation. Medivh sheathed himself to the hilt with a grunt, his armored pelvis slapping against Khadgar’s ass.
“Fuck,” Medivh groaned. “So tight. So perfect for me.”
He began to move, pulling out almost all the way and slamming back in. Each thrust was a punishment and a benediction. The strange texture of the chitin rubbed against Khadgar’s raw inner walls, the green energy suffusing him, rewriting his nerves to interpret the brutal fucking as pure, undiluted pleasure. Khadgar babbled, nonsense, pleas, cries. He was being unmade. He was being rebuilt. He was coming, untouched, his cock jerking and spilling onto the floor beneath the desk, his orgasm a seizure that seemed to have no end as Medivh hammered into him.
“Take it,” Medivh chanted, his voice slipping, becoming deeper, layered with a thousand echoing whispers. “Take your inheritance. Take my fire. Be the new hearth.”
With a final, deep snarl, Medivh shoved in and held. Khadgar felt a scalding, liquid heat flood his guts, different from the warmth of the energy. It was a physical spill, a claiming. The green glow from Medivh’s cock intensified, blinding, and then—
Khadgar jolted awake in his chair in the real library, a scream strangling in his throat.
He was alone. The genealogy book was still open, dry and untouched. His robes were fastened. His body… his body was throbbing. A deep, sore ache pulsed in his ass, a phantom fullness. The front of his trousers was stained with cold, sticky cum. His heart was a frantic drum against his ribs.
The hum in his chest was silent. For the first time in months, it was utterly, terribly still. A vacant quiet where the constant presence had been.