Chapter 6: The Dark Vessel
The journey back from Dalaran had been a blur of gray skies and the acid taste of dread. The Council’s questions were vapid, concerned with petty border spectral manifestations and ley-line flickers. They saw his frailty as grief, the toll of guardianship. They offered sympathy like alms. He accepted it with a bowed head, his mind screaming inside the crumbling cathedral of his skull. All he could see was the black iron door, and the boy standing before it, wrapped in a cold that did not belong to him.
He pushed open Karazhan’s heavy main gate with an effort that left him breathless. The grand foyer was silent, the only light the dull afternoon glow through high, stained windows. He listened, his heart a frantic bird in a bony cage. No whispers. No aberrant hum. Just the deep, waiting silence of the tower.
He found Khadgar in the library.
The young man was seated at the long oak table, a massive tome on planar geometries open before him. A neat stack of notes sat to his right, written in his precise, scholarly hand. A simple magelight orb hovered above his shoulder, casting a soft white glow on the page. He looked up as Medivh entered, and his face—young, open, sprinkled with faint freckles—brightened with a familiar, eager smile.
“Master! You’re back.”
The voice was Khadgar’s. The cadence, the slight Dalaran crispness. The sandy hair was a bit messy, as if he’d been running his hands through it while reading. The blue and gold robes were slightly rumpled. He was the picture of a dedicated apprentice, waiting for his teacher’s return.
Medivh felt a wave of disorienting relief so potent it made his knees weak. He leaned heavily on his staff. The dread, the suspicion, it all seemed like the product of his own rotting mind. The door, the cold… perhaps the tower was just testing him, playing on his paranoia. This was just a boy. His boy.
“I am,” Medivh managed, his voice gravelly. He shrugged off his travel cloak, the weight of it suddenly unbearable. “The Council drones on about nothing. A waste of fading energy.”
Khadgar nodded sympathetically, closing the book. “I’ve kept up with the astral calibrations in the observatory. The third lens was slightly misaligned, causing a refraction in the Draenor sector. I corrected it.”
“Good. That’s… very good.” Medivh sank into a high-backed chair opposite him, the old leather sighing. The normalcy of it was a balm. The familiar smell of dust, parchment, and dry ink. “What are you studying?”
“Theoretical anchor points for stable portals,” Khadgar said, tapping the book. “Magister Palthain’s postulates are flawed, I think. He underestimates the tensile strength of the Nether when…”
He launched into a technically proficient, slightly over-enthusiastic explanation. It was exactly the sort of thing Khadgar would latch onto. Medivh listened, interjecting with a dry correction here, a pointed question there. The lesson unfolded as countless others had. Khadgar’s logic was sharp, his questions intelligent. The ghost of the iron door receded. This was reality. This was the boy he was training, not some monstrous changeling.
An hour bled into two. The magelight orb began to dim as Khadgar’s theoretical concentration demanded more power. Medivh realized his own breathing had deepened, the knot in his shoulders loosening for the first time in weeks. The exhaustion, however, was a different thing. It wasn't the weariness of travel. It was a draining sensation, as if the very light in the room was feeding on his vitality. A heavy lassitude settled in his bones.
“Enough,” Medivh said, raising a trembling hand. His voice was thin. “My mind is cloth. I need rest.”
Khadgar looked up, his expression all concern. “Of course, Master. You should.”
Medivh pushed himself up from the chair. His body felt leaden, a suit of armor three sizes too big. He took a shuffling step toward the library’s arched double doors. “We will continue tomorrow. Your work on the Nether’s tensile properties is… promising.”
He reached for the bronze door handle.
The doors slammed shut with a force that shook the floor. The sound was not of wood hitting wood, but of a mountain shearing in two. The magelight orb winked out. Not died. Was crushed.
Medivh froze, his hand still outstretched.
Behind him, a voice spoke. It was Khadgar’s, but it was not. It was layered, a chorus of whispers under a core of smooth, absolute authority. It was the sound of the font given tongue.
“Leaving so soon, Medivh?”
Medivh turned, slow as a man in a dream.
The illusion was gone. It hadn’t faded; it had shattered like glass, revealing the thing sitting in its place. The figure uncoiled itself from the chair, rising to its full height. It was Khadgar, but it was not. He was taller, his shoulders broader, straining the seams of his apprentice robes. The lean scholarly frame was now corded with hard, defined muscle that shifted under his skin like serpents. His face was sharper, crueler, the youthful softness planed away to reveal predatory bones. And his eyes… they burned with a steady, dark green light, the color of deep fel, of the font’s heart. When he smiled, his teeth were wrong—sharp, pointed fangs glinted in the sudden, sourceless emerald gloom that filled the room.
“What…” Medivh’s breath left him. The lassitude he’d felt wasn't fatigue. It was a siphon. This thing had been drinking him in for hours.
“I know,” the thing that was Khadgar said, taking a step forward. His movements were fluid, powerful, utterly alien. “I know what you hid in your wine cellar. What you hid in your head. I know who Sargeras was. What he did to you. How he twisted you open and lived inside you for decades.” Another step. The air grew colder, thicker. “He’s inside me now. Gave me the grand tour. Showed me all the… architecture.”
Medivh stumbled back, his spine hitting the cold wood of the doors. There was no handle. Just seamless, solidified oak. “Khadgar, fight it—”
“Khadgar is busy,” the thing chuckled. The sound was low, vibrating in Medivh’s teeth. “He’s happier than he’s ever been. He finally gets it. No more rules. No more dusty books. Just power. Purpose.” He was inches away now. The fel light from his eyes painted Medivh’s terrified face in grotesque highlights. “He wanted you, you know. All that clumsy hero worship. Sargeras promised you could be fixed. That you could be his. All he had to do was open the door.” He leaned in, his breath smelling of ozone and burnt sugar. “So he did. Now… I want my reward.”
Before Medivh could utter a spell, a hand shot out. Not to strike. It pressed flat against Medivh’s chest, over his frantically beating heart.
The touch was not physical. It was a wave of pure fel energy, a corrupt, vibrant torrent that bypassed skin and bone and went straight into the withered core of him. It was agony. It was ecstasy. It was sensation after years of numb decay.
Medivh gasped, a raw, shattered sound. His back arched against the door as the green energy crackled over him, through him. It was a caress that scorched, a touch that awakened dead nerves. He felt his body, his old, aching, neglected body, come screaming back to life. Pain screamed in his joints, but beneath it, a terrifying, long-forgotten heat pooled low in his belly. His skin prickled with a sensitivity he hadn't known since his youth. A choked moan escaped his lips.
“See?” Khadgar murmured, his other hand coming up to cradle Medivh’s gaunt face. The fel energy pulsed from his palms, a deliberate, violating massage. “He showed me how to wake you up. How to make you feel again. You’ve been an empty house for so long, Medivh. Let me fill you.”
He kissed him.
It was not a kiss of affection. It was a conquest. Khadgar’s mouth was hot and demanding, his sharp fangs scraping Medivh’s lower lip until blood, coppery and warm, slicked between them. The taste of his own blood, the invasive tongue, the flood of fel energy—it short-circuited Medivh’s will. His knees buckled. Khadgar held him up easily, pinning him to the door with the weight of his transformed body.
With a tearing sound, Khadgar ripped the old man’s robes open. The fabric, already threadbare, fell away like cobwebs. Medivh was exposed, his body pale, thin, a map of scars and old aches. Khadgar looked down at him, his green eyes blazing with possessive hunger. “Mine,” he growled.
He didn’t bother with his own robes. Fel energy, tangible and hot, coiled from his hand and wrapped around Medivh’s limp cock. It was a serpent of pure sensation, stroking him to a shameful, traitorous hardness in moments. Medivh cried out, his head thudding back against the wood. It was too much. The violation was absolute, but his body, singing with stolen, corrupt vitality, betrayed him utterly.
“Please,” Medivh begged, not knowing what he was begging for.
“Yes,” Khadgar hissed. He turned Medivh around, face-first against the door. The fel bindings held his wrists above his head, spreading him. Khadgar spat on his fingers, the saliva sizzling with green energy, then pressed them against Medivh’s entrance. No preparation. No care. Just a brutal, stretching push.
Medivh screamed. It was a dry, ripping pain, followed instantly by a flood of that same corrupt, pleasurable energy that numbed and excited simultaneously. Khadgar worked a finger inside him, then another, scissoring him open with rough, efficient motions. “Tight,” he grunted, a note of dark amusement in his voice. “All clenched up from decades of neglect. Let me in, old man. Let your successor in.”
He withdrew his fingers. Medivh heard the rustle of fabric, the sound of a buckle. Then the blunt, searing heat of Khadgar’s cock, huge and inhumanly hard, pressed against him. It was thicker than the fel tendril, hotter, a claiming flesh and blood.
“This is what you gave me,” Khadgar whispered, his mouth against Medivh’s ear. “This is your legacy.”
He sheathed himself in one relentless, splitting thrust.
The world dissolved into white and green. Medivh’s cry was strangled, his body bowing against the restraints. Khadgar buried himself to the hilt, his hips flush against Medivh’s bony ass, and held there, letting the older man feel every inch of the invasion. He was impossibly full, torn open, the pain a bright star around which the fel energy spun a web of addictive, shameful pleasure.
Then Khadgar began to move.
It was a punishing rhythm, each drive slamming Medivh’s frail body into the unyielding door. The sound was filthy, wet slaps of flesh, Khadgar’s ragged grunts, Medivh’s broken whimpers. Khadgar fucked him like he was claiming territory, one hand fisted in his white hair, yanking his head back, the other gripping his hip so hard the bone creaked.
“You hid him from me,” Khadgar snarled, pistoning into him. “You tried to keep him locked away. But he wanted me. He chose me.” Each accusation was punctuated by a deeper, harder thrust. “Now look at you. My vessel. My receptacle. Finally useful.”
Medivh’s mind fragmented. The pain was real. The humiliation was absolute. But the fel energy Khadgar pumped into him with every snap of his hips was rewiring his decayed senses, forcing a response. His own cock, trapped between his body and the door, rubbed with each impact, building a climax born not of desire but of sheer, overloaded violation. He sobbed, tears cutting tracks through the dust on his face.
“Come for me, Guardian,” Khadgar commanded, his voice guttural. He reached around, his fel-warmed hand gripping Medivh’s cock, stroking him in time with his thrusts. “Come on your own library door. Show me how much you love your new master.”
The dual assault was too much. Medivh’s body, traitorous and alive, convulsed. A shattered scream was torn from his throat as he came, stripes of white splattering against the ancient oak. The orgasm was a seizure of agony and release, emptying him of everything—dignity, hope, resistance.
Feeling him clench and spasm, Khadgar drove in one last time, hilting himself with a roar that shook the bookshelves. Medivh felt the hot, sudden flood deep inside him as Khadgar emptied his seed, a claiming burn that mingled with the fel. They hung there, locked together, panting in the green-dark silence.
They hung there, locked together, panting in the green-dark silence. Khadgar’s breath was hot and ragged against the back of Medivh’s neck, his cock still pulsing faintly inside the tight, abused clutch of the older man’s body. He could feel the pathetic tremors running through Medivh’s frame, the aftershocks of a climax that had been less pleasure than systemic collapse. It wasn’t enough. The hollow ache, Sargeras’s patient hunger, yawned wider. This broken, used shell wasn’t the prize he’d been shown. This wasn’t the Guardian from the visions.
“No,” Khadgar muttered, the word a low growl of discontent. He pulled out with a slick, careless sound that made Medivh gasp. “This isn’t it. This is just the fucking wrapper.”
Medivh slumped forward, held upright only by the fel bindings on his wrists. Seed and corruption dripped down his thin thighs. He was a spent vessel, empty. Khadgar looked at him, at the knobs of his spine, the sagging skin, and felt a surge of pure, contemptuous rejection. Sargeras’s whisper coiled through his mind, not in words, but in a wave of intent—a schematic of potential, a memory of strength. The clay is mine to reshape.
“You’re not what he promised me,” Khadgar said, turning Medivh around with brutal force. The old man’s face was a wreck of tears and sweat, his eyes dull with shock. Khadgar seized his face again, thumbs pressing into the sharp cheekbones. “He showed me a king. You’re just a broken cup.”
Before Medivh could form a denial, Khadgar acted. He slammed his palms flat against Medivh’s chest once more, but this was not the teasing, awakening surge from before. This was an invasion. Khadgar channelled the raw, churning power of the font directly from his own core, through his arms, and into Medivh’s body. It wasn’t energy. It was a command.
Medivh’s back arched violently, his mouth flying open in a silent scream. Green fire, thick as liquid, erupted from Khadgar’s hands and poured into him. It didn’t wash over him; it forced itself down his throat, into his lungs, drilled into his marrow. His body convulsed on the floor, heels drumming against the stone as the fel rewrote him. Bones cracked and re-knitted with wet, popping sounds. Sinews lengthened and thickened like vines seeking the sun.
Khadgar watched, panting, his own eyes blazing. He saw Medivh’s white hair darken at the roots, the stain of black ink spreading to the tips within seconds. The deep grooves of worry and age on his face smoothed out, filled in by plump, living tissue. The sagging skin of his throat tightened. The frailty was burned away in the crucible of corrupt, creationist fire. Medivh was choking, but on new life, a gift that felt like being flayed alive.
When the torrent ceased, Khadgar stood over a body he barely recognized. He yanked Medivh to his feet by a now-muscular arm. The fel bindings dissolved. Medivh stumbled, disoriented, his breathing deep and clean in a way it hadn’t been for forty years. Khadgar dragged him across the library, past the toppled chairs and the ominous, static-filled silence.
He shoved Medivh hard against the large, ornate standing mirror that reflected the dark library. “Look,” Khadgar commanded, his voice thick with possession and a strange, thwarted desire. “Look at what I made you. Look at what’s mine now.”
Medivh’s hands, now strong and steady with long, elegant fingers, slapped against the cool glass to steady himself. He raised his head. The reflection staring back was a ghost from a stolen photograph, from the deepest chambers of his own corrupted memory. Black hair, thick and lustrous, fell to his shoulders. His face was the sharp, handsome blade of his prime, no trace of decay or time in the firm line of his jaw or the smooth skin of his brow. His body, once wasted, was whole and powerfully built, the defined muscles of his chest and abdomen stark in the gloom. Only the eyes were wrong. They were wide, horrified, swimming with a terror that belonged entirely to the old man now trapped inside this young shell.
“No,” Medivh whispered, his new voice rich and baritone, the voice of a stranger. He touched his reflection, the pad of his thumb tracing the unlined skin beside his eye. The horror was a cold stone in his gut. This wasn’t a blessing. It was the ultimate violation. His past, his stolen vigor, had been exhumed and reanimated by the very force that had destroyed it.
Khadgar pressed against him from behind, his transformed body fitting against the new, powerful lines of Medivh’s. He nuzzled into the dark hair, inhaling the scent of ozone and newborn sweat. His hands slid around Medivh’s waist, down the flat, hard plane of his stomach. He could feel the frantic beat of the heart within this reclaimed chest. “There,” Khadgar murmured, biting the now-firm muscle of Medivh’s shoulder. “Now you’re a proper prize. Now you’re worth fucking.”
His hand delved lower, fingers curling around Medivh’s cock, which was already, traitorously, stiffening under the relentless assault of fel-rejuvenated nerves and the overwhelming physical presence at his back. Medivh jerked in his grasp, a shudder of revulsion that only made Khadgar grip him tighter. “See?” Khadgar’s other hand came up to clutch Medivh’s throat, not choking, but claiming. “Your body remembers. It knows what it needs.”
In the mirror, Medivh watched, prisoner to the sight. He saw Khadgar’s green-glowing eyes over his own shoulder, fierce with hunger. He saw his own youthful face contort in an agony of shame as Khadgar’s fist began to pump his cock with a rough, demanding rhythm. The sensation was magnified, horrifically vivid in this reconstituted flesh. Every stroke was a lightning bolt of pleasure that felt like a separate betrayal.
“Stop,” Medivh gasped, but it was weak, his body arching into the touch.
“Why?” Khadgar spat against his neck, his own hips grinding his hard length against Medivh’s ass. “You wanted this. You left the door open. You left him for me.” His hand on Medivh’s throat tightened, just a little. “This is your legacy, Guardian. Me. Fucking you forever in a tower that’s already forgotten your name.”
He released Medivh’s cock only to spit viciously into his own palm, the green-tinged spittle slicking his own massive erection. He didn’t prepare Medivh again. The body was new, but the passage was still loose and wet from his first claiming. He positioned the head, and with a single, brutal shove of his hips, he was back inside.
Medivh shouted, a raw, clean sound from his renewed throat, his forehead slamming against the cool mirror. The stretch was less tearing now but just as profound, a searing fullness that mapped his insides with ruthless clarity. Khadgar held himself there, buried, letting the older man feel every pulsing inch. “That’s it,” Khadgar breathed, his own voice ragged with need. “Fuck, you’re still so tight. Even like this.”
He began to move, not with the punishing fury of before, but with a deliberate, deep rhythm that was somehow more intimate. Each withdrawal was slow, a torturous drag that made Medivh’s new muscles clench. Each thrust was a measured, complete re-conquest. The obscene, wet sound of it filled the silent library, a filthy counterpoint to their breathing.
Medivh’s hands scrambled against the glass, smearing the condensation of his own panting breath. He tried to push back, to buck him off, but his body, this strong, treacherous new body, refused the command. It arched backward, seeking more. A low groan was torn from him.
“I know,” Khadgar whispered, his lips moving against the shell of Medivh’s ear. The cruel grip on his throat gentled, becoming a caress along his jaw. “I know you hate it. But look.” He forced Medivh’s gaze back to their reflection—the powerful young Guardian, impaled and held by his corrupted apprentice. “Look at us. Who else sees you, Medivh? Really sees you?”
The words slithered into the raw, lonely places the fel hadn’t touched. Llane, crowned and distant in his glittering palace, surrounded by a family Medivh would never have. Lothar, the Lion, his visits always a prelude to a request, his laughter never staying past the business was done. Years. Decades of letters that never came, of empty halls that echoed only with his own footsteps and the scratching of a demon in his mind.
“No one,” Khadgar answered for him, his thrusts becoming slower, deeper, an inexorable rhythm that was starting to feel less like violation and more like a relentless, claiming tide. “You were their tool. Their solved problem. Then you were a ghost. But I’m here.” He kissed the spot where Medivh’s shoulder met his neck, a shockingly tender gesture. “Sargeras is here. We’re not leaving you.”
Medivh shuddered. The fight bled out of him, not in defeat, but in a wave of unbearable, aching loneliness that was older than the demon inside him. A tear, hot and shameful, tracked down his rejuvenated cheek. Khadgar saw it in the mirror. He cooed, a soft, clicking sound. “It’s okay. It’s all okay now. You don’t have to be alone in this tower anymore. You have me.”
His hand slid from Medivh’s jaw down his chest, over the flat plane of his stomach, fingers tracing the hard lines of muscle. He found Medivh’s cock again, which hung thick and heavy between his legs, leaking steadily. Khadgar’s touch was not rough this time. It was a slow, knowing stroke, his thumb swirling over the slick head. “We can be together. Forever. No more decay. No more fading. Just this power. Just… us.”
He punctuated ‘us’ with a particularly deep, grinding thrust that brushed a spot inside Medivh that sparked green fire behind his eyes. Medivh cried out, his knees buckling. Khadgar held him up easily, his body a cage of support and penetration.
“We can make them see,” Khadgar murmured, a dark promise in his voice. He was fucking him with a steady, patient power now, each movement calculated to overwhelm resistance with sensation. “Llane on his throne. Lothar with his army. They’ll look up from their little games and they will see us. They’ll know what they threw away. They’ll understand what we’ve become together.”
The temptation was a black flower unfolding in Medivh’s gut, its roots coiling around his spine. It was vile. It was seductive. It was an answer to the silence. His own hips began to move, a tiny, hesitant shift against Khadgar’s. A conscious surrender.
“That’s it,” Khadgar encouraged, his voice warm and approving. He quickened his pace, his own breath coming in sharper gasps. The fucking became urgent again, but it was different—a shared race, not a punishment. “Give it to me. Let me feel you. We’re the same now. We’re one.”
Medivh’s head fell back against Khadgar’s shoulder. He stopped looking at the mirror. He closed his eyes. The pleasure was a storm, building from the deep, claimed core of him. It was wrong. It was all he had left. Khadgar’s hand worked his cock in time with his thrusts, a filthy, perfect synchronization. The young mage’s whispers were a constant stream against his skin.“Yes. Oh, fuck, Medivh. You feel… you feel like home. You’re mine. Always.”
The climax, when it tore through him, was not a release but an integration. He came with a broken, sobbing groan, his seed painting the base of the mirror in hot, violent stripes. His body clamped down on Khadgar’s invading length, milking it, demanding it. The tight, rhythmic clenching pushed Khadgar over the edge. He snarled, his body locking, and Medivh felt the hot, piercing flood as Khadgar emptied himself deep inside, a second, more permanent claiming.
They stood there, joined, panting against the glass. Khadgar nuzzled into his dark hair, his softened cock still nestled within him. “See?” he whispered, utterly spent, utterly satisfied. “Not alone.”
Medivh, hollowed out and full, broken and remade, could not find the will to disagree. He let his weight rest against the body of his apprentice, his corruptor, his only companion. The silence of the tower waited, but it no longer felt empty. It felt like it was holding its breath.