Chapter 8: The Summoning Chamber's Secret
The air in the lower vaults tasted of chilled earth and old lightning. Medivh stood at the heart of a sprawling mosaic of arcane sigils, each one etched into the black basalt floor with a mixture of powdered saronite and his own blood. The chamber was a nexus, a raw wound in reality where the walls of the world wore thin. Above him, the ceiling vanished into a swirling vortex of dormant emerald energy, a sleeping pupil waiting for the command to open.
His entire being was focused on the ley lines.
He could see them now, not with his eyes, but with a sense deeper than sight. They threaded through the stone of Karazhan like luminous veins, rivers of raw magic flowing from the heart of Azeroth. His task was to reroute them. To twist their pure, blue-white flow into a knot of impossible tension right here, at this scarred point. A knot that, when pulled, would tear a hole straight through to the swirling chaos of the Twisting Nether.
Failure was not an option. Not while his master depended on him.
Sweat beaded on his brow despite the chill. His new body did not tire easily, but the concentration required was immense. With a whispered word, he extended his will. A ley line, glowing like a hot wire in his perception, resisted his touch. It was meant to nourish, to sustain. He needed it to become a drill. He pushed, layering compulsion sigils around its ephemeral form, applying metaphysical pressure until he felt a subtle, sickening give. The line’s color flickered, a streak of virulent green flashing within its core. One down. Seventeen more primary conduits to corrupt and align.
He worked for hours, a composer orchestrating a symphony of ruin. Each adjustment was precise, surgical. A miscalculation by a fraction of a degree would not mean the portal failed to open; it would mean it opened wrong. A chaotic rift could vaporize the tower, or worse, attract entities even Sargeras might not wish to deal with yet. Medivh’s old arrogance, refined by desperation and a new, dark purpose, allowed no error. He was the only one who knew this place well enough to do this. His mastery, perverted, was their greatest weapon.
As he finalized the alignment of the third keystone sigil, a tremor of fatigue, purely mental, finally shivered through him. He straightened, rolling the tension from his shoulders. The portal framework was stable for now, a loaded crossbow awaiting the trigger. The trigger would be a massive surge of fel energy, channeled from Sargeras through Khadgar. That part was not his concern. His part was ensuring the crossbow was perfectly aimed.
He left the vaults, the heavy door sealing behind him with a groan of ancient stone. The comparative warmth of the upper library was a palpable blanket. Here, the smell was parchment, dust, and the peculiar ozone of Khadgar’s constant, restless magic.
Khadgar was not in the main chamber. Medivh found him in a small, cluttered adjunct study, hunched over a table strewn with maps of Draenor. His brow was furrowed, his fingers stained with ink. He looked every bit the young, ambitious mage, save for the eyes that burned like banked hellfire when he glanced up.
“The conduits are aligned,” Medivh said, leaning against the doorframe. “The lattice will hold. It’s ready for the final infusion.”
Khadgar nodded, a distracted gesture. “Good. The Red Pox worsens on Draenor. The orc clans are desperate. Their shaman can no longer hear the elements. They’ll be hungry for a new world. For war.” He tapped a spot on the map. “Gul’dan is ready. He’s chomping at the bit. He doesn’t know he’s the needle, and we’re the thread.”
“He’ll know soon enough,” Medivh murmured. He watched Khadgar work, the intense focus, the youthful energy coiled in his frame. A sharp, proprietary ache twisted in his chest. This—this vital, fierce, corrupted beauty—was his. He had helped make it. He would not watch it be consumed.
“I need the third volume of Thal’kiel’s Transmorphic Principles,” Khadgar said without looking up. “The one with the silver clasp. I think it’s in the Restricted Alcove.”
Medivh pushed off the doorframe. “I’ll fetch it.”
The Restricted Alcove was a misnomer. It was a labyrinth of towering shelves stacked with tomes that hummed, wept, or occasionally screamed. Medivh navigated it by instinct, his fingertips brushing spines. He found Thal’kiel’s volume, a heavy thing bound in what felt like cooled lava. As he pulled it from the shelf, a smaller, nondescript codex of tarnished copper slipped from behind it and thudded to the floor.
He knelt to retrieve it. The cover had no title, only a single, complex rune that pulsed with a faint, rose-gold light. He knew this rune. It was not of the Legion. It was older, subtler. A rune of binding, of preservation. Of stasis.
His heart began a slow, heavy beat. He glanced toward the alcove entrance. Silence. He opened the codex.
The pages were vellum, the ink a rusty brown that might have been blood. The script was a looping, elvish derivative used for the most intimate and dangerous of arcane biologics. His eyes scanned the diagrams: interlaced bodies, channels of energy flowing from one to the other, complex runic arrays centered on the heart, the solar plexus, the groin. It was a treatise on synergistic anchoring. A way to tether two life forces so completely that decay in one was halted by the vigor of the other. A metaphysical symbiosis.
His hands trembled. This was it. The foundation he’d been searching for in fragments.
He read faster. The rituals described were… intimate. Profoundly so. They spoke of energy exchange not through spellwork alone, but through the most primal act of connection. The body was a circuit. Pleasure was a conduit. Ecstasy could forge a bond stronger than any dwarven steel. The principle was clear: to anchor Khadgar’s fleeting mortal form against the ravenous, soul-consuming hunger of a Titan, he needed a counterweight. A reservoir of life, willingly and repeatedly offered, to feed the vessel so the passenger did not have to devour it from within.
Him. He would be the reservoir. His own restored youth, his stolen vitality, fed back to Khadgar through a filter of desire and magic. It would be a closed loop. Sargeras would burn within a vessel that never charred.
It was a side project. A secret. And it required sex.
He closed the codex, holding it tight against the Thal’kiel volume. When he returned to the adjunct study, his face was a placid mask.
“Here,” he said, placing the large tome before Khadgar.
Khadgar took it, his fingers brushing Medivh’s. He paused, his predatory senses flickering. “You’re… excited. Your pulse is racing. The conduits went that well?”
“Better than expected,” Medivh lied smoothly. “The alignment is flawless. It made me… energetic.”
A slow smile spread across Khadgar’s face. He pushed the maps aside. “Energetic. I can feel that.” He stood, circling the table. He reached out, hooking a finger in the front of Medivh’s robe. “You’ve been down in the cold vaults all day. Let me warm you up.”
This was the opening. Medivh let himself be drawn in. “I have a… theory,” he said, as Khadgar’s mouth found his neck. “About channeling. About efficiency.”
“Mm?” Khadgar mumbled against his skin, hands already pulling at the robe’s fastenings.
“The rituals we use are brute force. Push power from A to B.” Medivh tipped his head back, giving Khadgar better access. His own hands worked at Khadgar’s trousers. “But there’s another model. A circuit. A loop. Where energy isn’t spent, it’s… cycled. Amplified through feedback.”
Khadgar pulled back, his eyes intrigued. “Go on.”
Medivh leaned in, kissing him, pouring every ounce of deceptive passion into it. He guided Khadgar’s hand to his own chest, over his heart. “Here. The core. And here,” he took Khadgar’s other hand and pressed it low on his own abdomen. “The furnace. If we link them, during the act, open the channels completely… the energy you expend is returned to you, magnified. It would make you stronger. More resilient. The vessel would be under less strain.”
Khadgar’s breath hitched. The idea of increased power, of greater resilience, was a narcotic to him. To the thing inside him. “Show me.”
That was all Medivh needed.
He pushed Khadgar onto the cleared table. Parchments fluttered to the floor. He didn’t bother with subtlety. He yanked Khadgar’s trousers down around his thighs, freeing his already hard cock. He bent, taking him into his mouth in one swift, deep motion.
Khadgar groaned, his hands flying to Medivh’s hair. “Fuck, yes…”
Medivh worked him with a ruthless, wet rhythm, his mind clear and focused. As he sucked, he began to trace the first rune. Not on skin, but in the air beside Khadgar’s hip with his fingertip, painting it in faint, shimmering arcane light. A rune of receptivity. Of open flow.
He released Khadgar’s cock with a slick sound. “My turn,” he panted, his own need genuine now, fueled by purpose. He turned, bracing his hands on the table, presenting himself. “Do it. And follow my lead. Channel with me.”
Khadgar needed no further encouragement. He spat into his palm, slicked himself, and drove into Medivh with a force that stole the air from both their lungs. He set a hard, immediate pace.
Medivh closed his eyes, reaching for the magic. Not the fel, but the deeper, more personal well of his own restored life force. He began to chant, low and guttural, the words from the copper codex. With each of Khadgar’s thrusts, he visualized a root, a golden filament, extending from his own core into Khadgar’s. He drew the energy up—the physical thrill, the electric pleasure—and instead of keeping it, he pushed it back.
He etched another rune in the air, this one over his own shoulder. A rune of transmission.
“Do you feel it?” Medivh gasped, pushing back to meet Khadgar’s punishing rhythm. “Take it. Take what I’m giving you.”
Khadgar’s movements stuttered. A shudder wracked his frame. “What… what is that?” he breathed, his voice full of wonder. “It’s… warm. It’s like you’re pouring sunlight into my veins.”
“It’s stability,” Medivh grunted, the effort immense. He was a conduit, a living battery willingly discharging. “It’s strength. It won’t degrade you. It will fix you. Now give it back to me. Complete the loop.”
He guided Khadgar’s hand to the rune over his shoulder. Khadgar, understanding dawning in his fel-green eyes, pressed his palm against it. He pushed.
The feedback was instantaneous and overwhelming.
Power, now tinged with Khadgar’s unique fel signature but burnished with stolen vitality, surged back into Medivh. It wasn’t draining. It was exhilarating. It magnified the physical sensation a hundredfold. Every nerve ending screamed. The stretch and fill of Khadgar inside him became the center of a screaming, ecstatic universe.
“Oh, gods,” Khadgar moaned, his thrusts becoming frantic, primal. “It’s… it’s building. I can feel it in my bones. They’re not aching. They’re singing.”
“Yes,” Medivh cried out, the ritual consuming him. The runes glowed brighter, a visible circuit of rose-gold light connecting their heaving bodies. “The circuit is closed. It’s working. You’re stable.”
The revelation pushed Khadgar over the edge. With a raw, animal shout, he came, his orgasm tearing through him. The power that pulsed from him into Medivh was not just seed, but a shockwave of solidified will, of anchored corruption. Medivh caught it, channeled it through the loop, and felt his own climax detonate as a sympathetic echo, a blinding white heat that left him seizing, dripping across the table.
They collapsed together onto the hard wood, gasping, the runes fading slowly from the air. The connection lingered, a faint, humming thread between their chests.
Khadgar was the first to speak, his voice full of stunned awe. “My head is clear. The whisper is… it’s still there, but the static is gone. The gnawing feeling in my joints…” He flexed a hand, staring at it. “It’s gone.”
Medivh turned his head, a weary, triumphant smile touching his lips. He had done it. He had forged the first anchor. “It’s a preservation ritual. To keep the vessel intact. To keep you intact.”
Khadgar looked at him, the green in his eyes softer, more focused. He leaned down and kissed Medivh, deeply, possessively, but with a new thread of something that felt terrifyingly like gratitude. “You brilliant, devious bastard. You did this for me.”
“For us,” Medivh corrected quietly, the truth a half-shadow in the room.
Khadgar held him close, their bodies cooling on the table. The Dark Portal awaited its trigger in the vaults below, a cataclysm in waiting. But here, in the afterglow of a stolen ritual, Medivh had woven a different kind of magic. A secret stitch in the fabric of their damnation, meant to hold the most precious thing in his fallen world together.
He had stabilized the instrument of the apocalypse. And in doing so, he had bound Khadgar to him with chains far stronger than fear or obedience. Chains of dependency, forged in ecstasy and hidden runes. The side project was no longer just an idea. It was a lifeline, and he would pour every ounce of his stolen youth into it, night after night, until Khadgar was eternal.
And as Khadgar drifted into a contented sleep against him, Medivh saw the flicker in those green eyes—not just the chaotic fire of Sargeras, but a steady, hungry flame that was purely, irrevocably his own.