Chapter 7: The Master Becomes the Servant.
He woke to the smell of ozone and fresh sweat, and the profound absence of pain.
For a moment, disorientation held him. The canopy above was the deep purple of twilight velvet, not the cracked plaster of his old room. The sheets beneath him were cool, silken, not rough linen. The weight in his limbs was not the leaden fatigue of decay, but the pleasant, heavy lassitude of deep rest. He stretched, a long, sinuous movement, and felt muscles pull and release in a smooth, powerful symphony. No ache in the joints. No crack in the spine. Just a faint, delicious soreness deep in his core, a lingering echo of being filled.
Medivh turned his head on the pillow.
Khadgar slept beside him, one arm thrown possessively across his waist. The young mage—no, not so young anymore either—looked peaceful in sleep, the fierce green light of his eyes extinguished behind closed lids. His sandy hair was dark with sweat at the temples, his lips slightly parted. He looked sated. The terrifying, angular cruelty of his transformed features was softened.
Carefully, so as not to wake him, Medivh shifted onto his side. He looked down at his own body, revealed by the tangled sheet. His breath caught.
The skin was smooth, unblemished, stretched over a topography of lean, defined muscle. A flat stomach, the hard cut of hip bones. His arms, once thin and ropey with old sinew, now had the clean, sturdy shape of a swordsman’s. He raised a hand, turning it before his eyes. Long fingers, strong, the nails clean and perfect. No tremors. No blue veins standing out like cords. He touched his own chest, his stomach, a slow, exploring glide of his fingertips. The flesh was warm, vital, humming with a low, pleasant energy. It was his body. The body he’d owned at twenty-five, honed by training and untouched by the decades of parasitic rot.
A laugh bubbled up in his throat, sudden and strange. It was a bright, clear sound. He hadn’t laughed like that in… he couldn’t remember.
The corruption didn’t feel like a separate thing anymore. It wasn’t a voice shouting in the back of his skull. It was the hum in his blood. It was the reason his skin felt so sensitively alive, why the slide of silk over his thigh was a small, electric pleasure. It was the source of this strength, this wholeness. The price had been his soul, his purpose, his very self. But as he lay there, feeling the weight of Khadgar’s arm and the profound, absent silence where a lifetime of pain had lived, the bargain seemed… abstract. A ledger entry in a book he no longer had to read.
He let his head fall back onto the pillow. The fel shaped him, not with claws, but with a sculptor’s patience. It whispered not of destruction, but of potential. Memories surfaced, not of Sargeras’s torments, but of his own past. The arrogant young Guardian, brimming with power, turning heads in the courts of Stormwind. He’d been vain then. He’d enjoyed the glances, the whispered admiration. He’d cultivated that image—the mysterious, untouchable Mage-King of his tower. That vanity had been burned away first by isolation, then crushed under the constant, grinding pressure of the Dark Titan’s will. A nuisance.A weakness. He had refused Sargeras then, fought the surrender even as his body was used as a tool.
Now, the vanity returned, but changed. Twisted. It wasn’t about being admired by a court. It was about being adored by this one thing, this beautiful, monstrous being he had created. He was the prize. The artifact. His worth was reflected solely in the hunger of Khadgar’s green eyes.
As if sensing his wakefulness, Khadgar stirred. His arm tightened, pulling Medivh closer. He nuzzled into the space between Medivh’s shoulder and neck, inhaling deeply. His lips brushed the skin there, a soft, sleep-warm kiss.
“You’re thinking too loud,” Khadgar mumbled, his voice rough with sleep.
Medivh didn’t answer. He simply relaxed into the hold, letting himself be gathered. The submission wasn’t a defeat. It was a choice. A relief. To lay down the burden of resistance, of guardianship, of lonely, failing stewardship. His ambition, that old, fiery drive to master the cosmos, hadn’t died. It had simply found a new object: to be the perfect vessel for this new dynamic. To be so exquisite, so perfectly compliant and powerful, that Khadgar—that Sargeras—would never look away.
Khadgar propped himself up on one elbow, looking down at him. The green glow was back in his eyes, but it was a low, contented smolder. He scanned Medivh’s face, his body, with open, possessive wonder. His free hand came up to trace the line of Medivh’s jaw, his thumb stroking over the full lower lip.
“Look at you,” Khadgar whispered, no trace of the demonic chorus in his voice. It was all warm, genuine awe. “Gods, Medivh. You’re…”
“I know,” Medivh said, and his new voice, rich and confident, held a note of that old, familiar arrogance. It felt good. It felt right.
“You’re younger than me now,” Khadgar said, a slow grin spreading across his face. He leaned down and kissed the corner of Medivh’s mouth. “My beautiful, ancient thing. Made new just for me.”
Medivh turned his head, capturing Khadgar’s lips in a proper kiss. It was deep, languid, exploring. He tasted of fel and sleep and himself. Medivh’s hand came up to tangle in Khadgar’s hair, pulling him closer. The kiss broke, both of them breathing harder.
“I feel,” Medivh said, the words a revelation against Khadgar’s lips, “incredible.”
Khadgar chuckled, the sound soft and darkly joyful. He kissed Medivh’s neck, nipping at the pulse point there. “Good. You should. You’re a fucking masterpiece.” His hand slid down from Medivh’s jaw, over his throat, his collarbone, palming the hard plane of his chest. “My masterpiece.”
The touch ignited the fel energy simmering in Medivh’s blood. It was a direct line to his cock, which hardened swiftly, insistently against Khadgar’s thigh. There was no shame in it now. Only a glorious, wanting urgency. This body was made for this. Made for pleasure. Made for use.
“Show me,” Medivh breathed, arching into the touch.
Khadgar needed no further invitation. He pushed Medivh onto his back, moving over him with a predator’s grace. He kissed a hot, wet trail down his chest, his tongue circling a nipple, biting just enough to make Medivh gasp. He worshipped the landscape of his new body with his mouth—the ridges of his abdomen, the dip of his navel. When he took Medivh’s cock into his mouth, it was with a reverent hunger that made Medivh cry out, his hands fisting in the sheets.
Khadgar’s mouth was obscenely hot, impossibly skilled. He swallowed him deep, his throat working around the head, then drew back with a filthy, wet sound, tonguing the frenulum before plunging down again. He worked him with a ruthless, adoring rhythm, one hand cupping and squeezing his balls, the other sliding under him to press against his perineum.
“Khadgar—” Medivh choked out, his hips bucking off the bed.
Khadgar released him with a pop, his own cock standing thick and dripping against his stomach. His eyes were wild, the green fire blazing. “I need to be in you. Now.”
He didn’t ask. He manhandled Medivh onto his hands and knees, the position exposing him utterly. Medivh went willingly, eagerly, presenting himself. He heard Khadgar spit, then felt the blunt, slick head of his cock pressing against his entrance. There was no preparation, but the fel thrumming through him made the stretch a burning, exquisite slide. Khadgar pushed in, one relentless, steady invasion until he was fully sheathed, his hips flush against Medivh’s ass.
They both groaned, a synchronized sound of perfect completion.
“Fuck,” Khadgar hissed, his hands gripping Medivh’s hips hard enough to bruise. “Every time. You feel like you were designed for this. For me.”
He began to move, setting a deep, punishing pace that had Medivh pushing back against every thrust. The slap of skin, the wet, rhythmic noise of their joining, filled the vast chamber. Khadgar leaned over him, his chest plastered to Medivh’s sweat-slick back, his mouth at his ear.
“You love this, don’t you?” he grunted, driving into him. “You love being my perfect, pretty hole. My reclaimed throne.”
“Yes,” Medivh moaned, the admission torn from him. It was true. The submission was total, and in its totality, it was power. He owned this. He was this. The magnificent vessel. The glorious spoil.
“Tell me who you belong to.”
“You.” The word was a plea and a claim.
“Again.”
“You! Khadgar!” Medivh shouted, his voice breaking as Khadgar’s thrusts grew erratic, pounding into that devastating spot with brutal accuracy. His own cock swung heavy and neglected beneath him, leaking a steady stream onto the silk sheets. The pleasure was a coil winding tighter and tighter, fed by the fel, by the possession, by the sheer, degenerate rightness of it.
Khadgar came first with a ragged, broken roar, his body locking as he emptied himself deep inside in hot, pulsing jets. The feeling of that claiming flood tipped Medivh over the edge. His orgasm ripped through him, a silent, blinding convulsion that left him shaking, seed striping the dark sheets beneath him in violent spurts.
Khadgar collapsed on top of him, both of them spent, breathing in ragged harmony. Slowly, Khadgar rolled them onto their sides, not pulling out, keeping them joined. He nuzzled into Medivh’s hair, his breaths slowly evening.
Outside the high, arched windows of the master chamber, a storm brewed over Deadwind Pass. Lightning flickered, painting the tangled sheets and their entwined bodies in brief, monochrome flashes. The tower, attuned to its new masters, hummed a low, contented note in the foundations.
Medivh closed his eyes. He felt Khadgar’s softening cock inside him, the wet, messy evidence of their union leaking down his thigh. He felt the strong arms around him. He felt the magnificent, stolen youth in every fiber of his being.
No ache. No burden. Just the amazing, profound ache of sex, and the deep, fel-warm peace of belonging to the shadow that had once been his apprentice. The corruption was complete. And it was beautiful.
The storm broke just before dawn, its fury a distant echo of the tempest that now lived inside the tower's stones. Medivh watched the gray light bleed into the room, Khadgar’s weight a familiar anchor against his side. He felt the dried streaks on his thighs, the pleasant, deep soreness. A catalogue of evidence. Proof of life.
He slipped from the bed without waking the younger mage. His feet found the cold floor, a slight shock that sharpened his senses. He walked to the window, the muscles in his back and legs moving with a fluid grace he’d forgotten was possible. The black hair falling over his shoulders was a stranger’s curtain, yet the face reflected faintly in the rain-blurred glass was undeniably his own. His, and yet a polished instrument. A gift. A weapon.
He heard the rustle of sheets behind him.
“Where are you going?” Khadgar’s voice was thick with sleep, but the underlying current of demand was already there.
“The wards,” Medivh said, not turning. He let a hint of weary duty color his tone, the long-suffering Guardian. “The storm will have stressed them. The Kirin Tor expects weekly reports. Llane’s latest missive requests confirmation of the borders.” He paused, letting the silence stretch. “It’s what the Guardian would do.”
He felt Khadgar’s gaze on his naked back, a physical heat. A slow smile touched Medivh’s lips. He was learning the shape of this new power, the power of being needed in multiple, contradicting ways. He was the anchor to a world he despised, and that very utility made him precious here, in this corrupted bed.
“Fine,” Khadgar grumbled, but there was no real annoyance. There was interest. “But you’re not doing it alone.”
The study was as he’d left it days—weeks?—ago. Parchment littered the heavy oak desk. A dull crystal for scrying hummed on a stand. The air smelled of ink and dust and the peculiar ozone of active ley-lines. Medivh sat in the high-backed chair, the leather cool through his thin robe. He pulled a fresh sheet of vellum toward him, selected a quill. The first letter was to Dalaran. Empty words about spectral anomalies and stable conduits.
Khadgar padded into the room, naked, his erection already half-hard. He moved behind the chair. His hands settled on Medivh’s shoulders, thumbs digging into the tense muscle with a knowing pressure. Medivh let his head loll forward, a soft sigh escaping him. This, too, was part of the performance.
“The third paragraph,” Medivh murmured, dipping the quill. “They’ll expect a note on the Ban’dinoriel’s resonance. It’s standard.”
“Write it,” Khadgar whispered, his lips against Medivh’s ear. His hands slid down the front of the robe, pushing the fabric open. Cool air kissed Medivh’s chest, followed by the heat of Khadgar’s palms. He pinched a nipple, rolling it to a stiff peak. Medivh’s breath hitched. The quill scratched across the parchment, the letters neat, precise.
“I am maintaining vigilant observation of the Ban’dinoriel’s resonance frequencies,” Medivh wrote aloud, his voice steady even as Khadgar’s other hand drifted lower, over his stomach. “No deviations beyond seasonal variance have been detected.”
Khadgar’s fingers found his cock, already stirring under the attention. He stroked him slowly, a lazy, possessive rhythm. “Good,” Khadgar purred. “Tell them everything is under control.”
Medivh wrote the words. All is in order. A lie, crafted while his body betrayed the truth. He could feel the fel energy stirring, responding to Khadgar’s touch, seeping into his mana channels. He reached out with his senses, beyond the desk, to the intricate web of wards that shrouded Karazhan. He began channeling mana into them, a routine act of maintenance. The blue, arcane energy flowed from him, into the stones.
Then Khadgar bit his ear, sharp enough to sting. At the same moment, he pushed a finger inside Medivh, slick with spit. The sudden, crude penetration made Medivh jolt. A spike of raw, green fel energy, directly from Khadgar’s touch, lashed up his spine and into the stream of his magic.
The arcane blue of the channeling spell flickered, tainted with a thread of virulent green. It bled into the ward matrix. Medivh watched it happen in his mind’s eye, a slow poison seeping into a well. He didn’t stop it. He embraced it. His hips pushed back onto the invading finger.
“That’s it,” Khadgar breathed, working a second finger inside him, stretching him open with a burn that was becoming a welcome signal. “Feed it. Let my power come through you.”
Medivh did. He channeled more mana, now consciously weaving Khadgar’s fel into the fabric of the spell. The wards drank it in, their nature subtly shifting. To an outside observer, they would still hold. But their essence was changing, becoming attuned not to the Guardian’s protection, but to the corrupt will inside the tower. He was grafting a backdoor into his own defenses, with every thrust of Khadgar’s fingers.
“They’ll never know,” Khadgar said, his voice guttural with excitement. He removed his fingers. Medivh heard the wet sound of him spitting into his palm, slicking his own rigid cock. “They’ll trust every word you write.”
The letter to Dalaran was forgotten. Medivh braced his hands on the edge of the desk. He didn’t need to be asked. He pushed his hips back, presenting himself, the robe pooling at his waist. The head of Khadgar’s cock pressed against him, a blunt, demanding pressure.
“Do it,” Medivh said, the command a low growl. “Fuck the taint into me. Let it bleed into everything I touch.”
Khadgar sheathed himself in one brutal, perfect stroke. Medivh cried out, his knuckles white on the desk. The fullness was devastating. Khadgar set a deep, rhythmic pace immediately, each drive punching the air from Medivh’s lungs. The connection was visceral, a circuit closing. With every slam of Khadgar’s hips, a fresh pulse of corrupt energy flooded Medivh’s system. He didn’t just channel it now; he was a conduit, a living filter, transforming the tower’s protections with each shared, ragged breath.
“You feel that?” Khadgar grunted, his hands vise-tight on Medivh’s hips. “You feel what you’re doing? You’re remaking your entire life for me. Your magic. Your home. Your fucking body.”
“Yes,” Medivh gasped, pushing back to meet him. The quill had rolled away, leaving a smear of ink like a black tear on the vellum. The wards hummed in his perception, a chorus now tinged with a familiar, hungry green resonance. It was the most profound magic he’d performed in decades. A perverse, world-altering act of creation. Pleasure coiled, molten and urgent, at the base of his spine.
Khadgar’s thrusts became erratic, harder. He leaned over, his chest hot against Medivh’s back, his mouth at his ear. “Come for me. Come while you poison your own walls. Show me how much you love it.”
The command, the shameful truth of it, the relentless friction—it broke him. Medivh’s orgasm tore through him with silent, catastrophic force. His cock jerked, spilling onto the leg of the desk, onto the fallen letter. His channeling spell flared, a final, violent surge of green-tinged magic that sank into the wardstones and settled there, a sleeping infection.
Feeling him convulse, Khadgar followed, roaring as he emptied himself deep inside with a series of hot, claiming pulses. He collapsed forward, his weight driving Medivh harder into the desk’s edge. They stayed there, joined, panting, the only sound the drip of ink and seed onto stone.
Slowly, Khadgar pulled out. He turned Medivh around, his eyes scanning his face with ferocious pride. He kissed him, deep and slow, licking the taste of exertion from his lips.
“No one could do what you just did,” Khadgar said, his thumb wiping a stray drop from Medivh’s chin. “No one else knows this place. No one else has the access. The authority.” He smiled, a flash of sharp, possessive joy. “You are utterly irreplaceable.”
Medivh leaned into the touch, his body humming with spent power and dark purpose. The letters would be sent. The wards would hold. The Guardian was at his post.
And deep within the stone, in every spelled glyph and warded threshold, a new will slept, waiting for its master’s call. His work was impeccable. His position was secure. He had made himself the keystone of the entire, rotting edifice.
He had made himself the keystone of the entire, rotting edifice.
Days folded into each other after that, a seamless tapestry of murmured spells, tangled sheets, and the slow, deliberate poisoning of reality. The tower’s ambient hum now held a recognizable flavor to Medivh’s refined senses—a green-tinged resonance that tasted of Khadgar’s breath, of his own sweat, of potential. It was their signature. It was home.
One evening, they sat in the observatory amidst star charts and arcane calipers. The air was cool, sharp with the scent of ozone from a dozen dormant instruments. Khadgar traced a line on a massive vellum map with a fingertip that sparked faintly. “The northern ley confluence here,” he said, his voice clinical. “It’s the primary anchor for the dimensional quarantine around the tower. Your original work was… elegant. A spiderweb of arcane filaments meant to snag any unwelcome extradimensional entity.”
Medivh nodded, watching the green ember of Khadgar’s touch hover over the point. He felt a pressure, a vast and patient attention focusing through the young mage. It wasn’t a voice. It was the feeling of the floor tilting, ever so slightly. Sargeras was listening. “It was designed to detect and restrain,” Medivh said. “A net. But nets can be repurposed. The filaments can be turned into conduits. Instead of repelling an incursion, they could amplify one. Channel it. Focus it like sunlight through a lens.”
Khadgar’s grin was sharp, a flash of white in the gloom. “You want to turn your Guardian’s shield into a fucking broadcast antenna.”
“Precisely. The energy requirement would be catastrophic for a normal caster. It would burn out a hundred archmages.” Medivh leaned forward, his own fingers, now steady and sure, tracing adjacent patterns on the chart. “But we are not drawing from the Nether. We are not pulling power. We are opening a door for a power that already exists, that is already pushing. The font.”
Yes. The thought landed in the room, heavy and cold, though no one spoke. The pressure intensified. The ink on the parchment seemed to darken.
“The focal point would have to be the summoning chamber in the lower vaults,” Khadgar said, his eyes losing focus for a second as the knowledge, old and immense, filtered into him. “The stone there is already scarred. It remembers the shape of a gate. We wouldn’t be building. We’d be… reminding.”
They planned for hours. The technical minutiae was a familiar, comforting dance for Medivh. Calculating phase variances, calibrating harmonic resonances, plotting fail-safes that were actually deliberate weaknesses. It was the work he was born to do, turned inside out. Every brilliant solution was a step toward annihilation. He felt a profound, sickening thrill with each completed calculation. This was his masterpiece. Not a defense, but an invitation engraved on reality itself.
As they finalized the sequence for the final ward-layer’s inversion, Khadgar leaned back in his chair. He looked at Medivh, the green in his eyes soft, almost affectionate. He reached out and brushed a strand of black hair from Medivh’s forehead. The gesture was unbearably intimate.
“You’re breathtaking,” Khadgar said, his voice quiet. “You know that? What you’re doing. The sheer fucking audacity of it.”
Medivh said nothing. He basked in the praise. It was the only sunlight that reached him now.
“I want to give you something,” Khadgar continued, his thumb stroking Medivh’s cheekbone. “A reward. For your loyalty. For your mind.” He leaned closer. “If you could have anything in this world, right now, what would you want? Name it. It’s yours.”
The question hung in the ozone-rich air. Medivh’s first, instinctive thoughts were petty. Rare tomes. Celestial artefacts. Things that belonged to the man he used to be. They felt like ash on his tongue. He dug deeper, past the scholar, past the Guardian, into the raw, neglected core that had festered in isolation for decades. The answer that rose from that black water was so vicious, so cruel, it shocked him.
He spoke it anyway.
“Anduin Lothar.”
Khadgar went very still. His hand paused on Medivh’s face.
Medivh’s voice was calm, analytical, as if discussing a problematic ward. “Llane would be useful later. For the political collapse. A broken king makes a fine puppet. But Lothar…” He felt a long-buried knot of something—betrayal, loneliness, a need so profound it had curdled—unravel in his chest. “He was my friend. My only friend. He left me here. He visits only when he needs the Guardian’s power. He looks at the shell I was and sees a tool. A resource.” The words came faster now, heated by a truth he’d never acknowledged. “I want him on his hands and knees. I want that pride shattered. I want him corrupted. I want him begging to be used, as a weapon, as a toy, as anything I deem fit. I want him to understand what it means to be truly, completely mine.”
Silence swallowed the observatory. Medivh heard the echo of his own words, their breathtaking cruelty. The isolation hadn’t just damaged him; it had created this venomous wellspring, and he was drinking from it for the first time. He expected Khadgar to recoil.
Instead, Khadgar’s face lit up with ecstatic, unholy joy. He threw his head back and laughed, a sound of pure, unfettered delight. He grabbed Medivh’s face in both hands and kissed him hard, a violent, claiming press of lips and teeth.
“Perfect,” Khadgar breathed when he pulled back, his eyes blazing. “Gods, Medivh, that’s perfect. It’s inspired. Not just conquest. Poetry.” He laughed again, a short, sharp bark. “The Lion of Stormwind. The kingdom’s heart. You want to break its spine and turn it into your pet.”
Medivh could only nod, his heart hammering against his ribs, adrenaline and shame and wild, giddy power mixing in his veins.
Khadgar stood, pulling Medivh up with him. His excitement was a physical force. “You’ll have him. I promise you. When the gate opens, and the Legion steps through, he’ll come running. He’ll charge in here to save his old friend, to save the kingdom.” He leaned in, his mouth against Medivh’s ear. “And we’ll be waiting. We’ll take him. Together. I’ll help you break him. I’ll hold him down while you show him what his friend has become.”
The image blossomed in Medivh’s mind, vivid and terrible: Lothar, proud and desperate, forced to his knees on the blackened stones. The look in his eyes as he recognized the face of his old friend, now crowned with dark hair and darker power. The sound of his defiance turning to confusion, then to horror, then to a broken, willing surrender. It was a hunger sharper than any he’d ever felt.
Khadgar felt the change in his breathing. He backed Medivh against the cold stone of the observatory wall, his hands already pushing up the dark silk of his robe. “Thinking about it already?” he murmured, biting at his neck. “Thinking about your best friend?”
“Yes,” Medivh hissed.
“Tell me more. What do you do to him first?”
Medivh’s mind, unleashed, offered up a torrent of images. “I… I make him watch. I make him watch you fuck me. I make him see how well I serve. How much I love it.”
Khadgar moaned, fumbling with his own trousers, freeing his hard, thick cock. He spit into his hand, slicking himself roughly. He pushed Medivh’s robe up to his waist, his hands gripping the hard muscles of his thighs. “And then?”
“Then I go to him,” Medivh panted, his head thudding back against the stone. He spread his legs as Khadgar hitched them up around his hips. “I taste the despair on his mouth. And I tell him he can join us. Or he can burn.”
Khadgar drove into him in one fierce, deep thrust. The air left Medivh’s lungs in a brutal gasp. The stretch was immediate, perfect, a white-hot claim that anchored him to the vision. Khadgar fucked him against the wall with a frenzied, possessive rhythm, each slam driving the fantasy deeper.
“He’ll join,” Khadgar grunted, his face buried in Medivh’s throat. “He’ll beg to join. He’ll want what you have. What we have.” His pace was punishing, animalistic. “You’ll own him. You’ll own everything.”
Medivh clutched at him, nails scraping against Khadgar’s back. The pleasure was a ragged, overwhelming thing, fed by the cruel fantasy and the relentless physical hammering. He could see it. He could taste it. Lothar’s fall would be his ultimate conquest, a final, delicious proof that his isolation had forged him into something greater, something that took what it was owed.
“Come for me,” Khadgar snarled, his thrusts losing all rhythm, becoming a frantic, pounding race. “Come thinking about his face. Come for your prize.”
The command, the image, the exquisite friction—it detonated Medivh’s control. He came with a shattered cry, his body clamping down around Khadgar’s cock in violent spasms, his release hot between their stomachs. The intensity yanked Khadgar over the edge with him. He roared, burying himself to the hilt, pulsing jet after jet of scalding seed deep inside.
They slumped together against the wall, a mess of sweat and satisfaction and dark, shared purpose. Khadgar’s breath was hot and ragged against Medivh’s shoulder. He nuzzled there, damp and spent.
“You’ll have him,” Khadgar whispered again, a sacred vow in the dark. “I promise.”
Medivh closed his eyes. In the afterglow, he saw not stars on the charts, but the fiery tide of the Legion, pouring through a gate of his own design. And ahead of it, charging into the trap, the proud, foolish face of the only man who had ever called him brother. He would be waiting.