Muradin found Leylin in the inner courtyard an hour before the portal to Silvermoon was scheduled to open.
The dwarf was sitting alone on the carved marble rim of a dry fountain, his broad hands resting on the thick nape of Arcturis's neck. The spirit bear's massive, translucent blue head lay heavily across Leylin's lap, his spectral ears twitching at the distant sounds of Dalaran's morning routines.
Muradin had already packed. His heavy leather rucksack rested by the courtyard gate, his twin storm hammers were strapped tightly across his broad back, and he held an unsealed brass flask that he had clearly intended to offer five minutes ago before forgetting it was in his hand. The mountain dwarf looked like a man who had spent the entire night composing a long, formal speech of farewell, only to throw every draft into the hearth fire.
"You're leaving before the main column," Leylin observed, his voice quiet.
"Aye. Magni won't wait for me to finish being sentimental." Muradin sat down beside him with a heavy, metallic grunt. The ancient fountain's stone creaked under the sudden weight of the dwarf general. "Ironforge first. I need to deliver the official casualty reports to the King. Then I'm walking back up to the Storm Peaks myself, whether my brother likes it or not."
Leylin turned the dwarf's words over in his mind, his spatial network mapping the subtle, anxious pulse in Muradin's posture. "That's what I wanted to talk to you about."
"Aye," Muradin sighed, staring straight ahead. "I figured as much."
"Brann." Leylin kept his voice low, well below the hearing of two Kirin Tor apprentices across the yard who were hauling arc-light crates and bickering about logistics. "He was under the Old God's direct influence longer than anyone else in the column. Thrall broke his own connection through sheer spiritual discipline. The Argent Crusade veterans were stunned out of their possession in minutes. But Brann was held while Vurenn performed the counter-intrusion, and he was back in the thick of the fight afterward while Yogg-Saron's residual reach was still active in the room."
"I know." Muradin's heavy jaw tightened, his beard bristling. "I was standing right there, Leylin."
"I know you were. That's why I'm bringing it to you." Leylin looked at the dwarf directly, his dark mask catching the cold morning light. "Vurenn's spiritual reading declared him clean. I trust Vurenn's capability. But a clean reading after the fact doesn't tell us what happens three weeks down the line. Void corruption doesn't always pack up and leave in the same hour its core is shattered. Sometimes it goes dormant. Sometimes it waits for a night when a man is exhausted, or isolated, or buried deep in an archive." He paused, letting the silence settle. "And you know better than anyone how completely Brann loses himself when he finds something that fascinates him."
Muradin said nothing for a long moment. He unthreaded the cap of the brass flask, took a long, burning pull, and offered it to Leylin. It was fine Ironforge whiskey—the deep, smoky kind that tasted of slow-burned peat and ancient oak barrels.
Leylin took a small sip and handed it back.
"He's been dreaming," Muradin admitted quietly, his eyes fixed on the flagstones.
Leylin went completely still. "Explain."
"Last night, in the Violet Citadel's lower quarters. He wasn't sleeping in the main hall with the rest of us. But Mimiron sent a high-frequency ping through that brass comms-unit he gave Brann, and one of the Kirin Tor mages relayed the message." Muradin stared down at his heavy leather boots. "Brann woke up at four in the morning, drenched in cold sweat, and told the guard he'd been counting. Counting something in the dark. He didn't know what the numbers meant. He just knew the counter was getting smaller, and he was terrified of what would happen when it hit zero."
The faint hum of Dalaran's morning magic seemed to fade into a cold, hollow vacuum.
"It could be a standard psychological residue," Leylin said carefully, analyzing the data. "He was possessed by an Old God. A mortal mind takes time to process an intrusion of that magnitude."
"Aye. It could be."
"It could be an ordinary nightmare. Anyone would suffer tremors after what we saw down there."
"Aye." Muradin finally turned his head, and the veteran soldier's face was not hardened with anger. It carried a far heavier weight—the helpless, agonizing look of a man who loved his brother fiercely and had just discovered how little his hammer could do to protect him. "But you wouldn't have brought it to my attention if you thought it was just a nightmare, lad."
"No," Leylin admitted flatly. "I wouldn't."
"Then say the rest of it."
"Go back to Ulduar," Leylin urged softly. "Don't go to Ironforge first. Send Magni's official report ahead with a Gryphon courier if you must." He took a slow breath. "Stay in the upper halls for a few weeks. Don't tell Brann you're monitoring him. Don't act like a guard. Just be present. And if he starts counting again, or sleepwalking, or falling into that hollow silence people drop into when something else is whispering to them... write to me. Don't wait for a formal courier. Use the spatial relay device. Contact me immediately."
"And if it turns out to be a real lingering seed?"
"Then we gather Vurenn, Velen, and every master of divine and arc-arcane warding on this continent, and we burn it out of his mind before it takes root," Leylin answered, his voice firm and unyielding. "He is not alone, Muradin. None of us are."
The mountain dwarf reached out and slammed a heavy, iron-armored gauntlet onto Leylin's shoulder. The grip was crushing, grounded, and utterly steady.
"You've a terrible habit, Leylin," Muradin rumbled gruffly, "of stating the exact things nobody in the room wants to hear, and being entirely right about them."
"It is not a habit I take any pleasure in."
"Aye, well." Muradin pushed himself up from the fountain rim, shouldered his massive pack, and cleared his throat with a sound like grinding river stones. "I'll go to the Storm Peaks first. Magni can wait a few weeks for a drink. He'll understand once I explain it to him." He hesitated at the courtyard gate, turning back. "And lad..."
"Yes, Muradin?"
"Thank you. For noticing. I'd have missed it entirely. I'd have just thought, Ah, that's just Brann being his usual strange self."
"He is always strange."
"Aye, that's the real problem, isn't it?" Muradin offered a faint, fleeting grin. "Safe roads, Leylin."
"Safe roads, General."
The dwarf turned and walked through the high archway without looking back. Leylin watched his broad silhouette disappear into the bustling morning crowds of Dalaran, remaining on the stone fountain for a few minutes longer with the brass flask still warm in his hand.
Arcturis nudged his gauntleted arm, letting out a low, rumbling huff.
"I know," Leylin whispered, scratching behind the spirit bear's glowing ears. "I know."
The Silvermoon portal deposited the vanguard onto the grand platform of the Sunstrider Gate, and for a long moment, nobody in the group moved a single step.
The Eversong Woods had changed. Leylin had been informed of the ecological recovery in formal reports, and he had read the spatial summaries Scholar Aminel compiled over the years—tracking the gradual cleansing of the Dead Scar and the tree-by-tree restoration of the ancient barrier wards.
But reading cold data points in a frozen Northrend outpost was nothing compared to standing here in the flesh. The late-autumn sun bathed the white stone spires in a rich, amber light, smelling of damp soil, pine needles, and the sweet, nostalgic perfume of late-blooming sun-lilies.
Golden leaves drifted lazily through the warm air. In the distance, the grand bells of Silvermoon chimed three clear, resonant notes—marking the noon hour just as they had for thousands of years. A merchant's chocobo-drawn cart rattled down the paved road below. The elf driver glanced up at the heavily armored, battle-worn group on the platform, did a double-take, and nearly dropped his leather reins.
"Is that... is that the Ranger-General—"
"Don't," Alleria said, her voice dry with the bone-deep exhaustion of a hero who had spent too many decades being recognized in places she simply wanted to pass through silently.
The merchant snapped his mouth shut, whipped his reins, and drove off at a brisk pace, his neck craned backward until he cleared the tree line.
"That'll be the primary topic of conversation across the entire bazaar by nightfall," Vereesa noted with a faint grin.
"Good," Sylvanas said flatly. "Let them talk."
It was the first sentence the Ranger-General had uttered since they boarded the portal in Dalaran, and it caught everyone off guard. She stood at the absolute edge of the sunlit platform, her longbow held loosely in her pale left hand, her crimson eyes fixed on the winding road that led toward the Farstrider Enclave. Her expression was completely unreadable, but the harsh, bitter scowl that usually defined her features was absent. She looked like a soldier listening intently to a song she had half-forgotten over a century of war.
"I am heading straight to the Enclave," Sylvanas announced.
"We know," Alleria replied gently.
"There will be administrative reports piled high as a tower," Sylvanas continued, her fingers adjusting her grip on her bow. "Halduron has been managing the patrol rotations single-handedly since we marched for Northrend. If I do not personally inspect what he has done with the eastern perimeter posts, he will have reorganized the entire border strategy and convinced himself it was an operational necessity."
"It probably was an operational necessity," Alleria pointed out smoothly.
"That is entirely beside the point." A tiny, almost imperceptible twitch appeared at the corner of Sylvanas's lips. She turned her pale gaze toward Leylin, the faint humor dissolving into something far graver. "The Helm of Damnation."
Leylin had been expecting the topic. "I assumed you would wait until we reached the spire to bring it up."
"I assumed so as well." She paused, the warm breeze ruffling her dark cloak. "I told you on the glacier that I disagreed with your assessment. I told you I understood the cold arithmetic of leaving the Lich King on that throne. I still do not know if I was right to accept your logic."
"You were entirely right to voice your objection, Sylvanas."
"That is not what I asked, Leylin."
"I know." Leylin met her crimson gaze without flinching. "I don't believe anyone is absolute in their rightness regarding that crown. I made a calculation that could have cost thousands of lives if the Scourge broke free. Bolvar made a sacrifice that cost him his humanity. All we truly possess is the reality of what occurred, not the ghosts of what might have been."
Sylvanas remained silent for a long, heavy moment.
"Bolvar Fordragon," she said softly, "sat upon that frozen seat like a man slamming a heavy iron door he never intended to open again. I have thought about his face every single night since. I thought about it through every corridor of Ulduar." She looked back out over the golden woods. "I do not know if I can ever truly forgive the arithmetic. But I am not sorry I trusted your hand when the moment came."
It was, Leylin understood with absolute clarity, the most profound resolution Sylvanas Windrunner was capable of offering. He inclined his head in silent acknowledgment.
"Go see Halduron," Leylin said quietly. "Make him justify every single patrol rotation."
"I fully intend to."
And with a fluid, shadow-like turn, Sylvanas vanished down the stone steps. She moved with a pace that began as a ranger's long stride and quickly melted into a full, effortless run—a dark, majestic figure gliding between the golden trunks of ancient trees.
Vereesa watched her sister disappear into the canopy. "She'll come to the spire for dinner tomorrow night."
"She'll claim she's far too busy with border logistics," Alleria noted.
"She'll show up anyway."
Alleria smiled softly. "She always does."
The rest of their party dispersed over the next half hour.
Scholar Aminel and Tyr'ganal were the first to depart, amidst a chaotic flurry of overlapping instructions regarding archive cataloging and a heated debate over whose turn it was to carry the main leather telemetry case. They were already fifty yards down the marble path toward the Sunfury Spire when Tyr'ganal suddenly stopped, remembered something vital, and came jogging back up the slope.
"Leylin! The spatial monitoring relay! The Dragonblight anchor array! Someone needs to perform a diagnostic sweep on the mana-conduits before—"
"Aminel has the maintenance schedule," Leylin interrupted calmly.
"Aminel has seventeen different schedules!"
"Then ask her which one takes priority today."
Tyr'ganal opened his mouth to argue, closed it, and offered a solemn, resigned nod—the exact look of a scholar who had just been handed a monumental task and an intense migraine simultaneously. "I shall do that."
He sprinted back down the path after Aminel, who had already vanished into the golden foliage with the heavy archive case clutched tightly to her chest like a priceless treasure.
Lady Liadrin was the last of the vanguard to take her leave. She had stood near the edge of the platform, watching the scholars' retreat with quiet, matriarchal amusement. When the path was finally clear, she turned to face Leylin and Alleria.
"The Blood Knight initiates," Liadrin said, her voice warm. "I have been absent from the Sanctum far longer than I intended. Some of the newer recruits have never completed a full trial cycle without my direct oversight."
"I am certain they survived, Liadrin," Alleria offered.
"They will have improvised," Liadrin corrected darkly, though her eyes glinted with humor. "I dread to discover what that means in practice."
She placed her gauntleted hand over her heart in the traditional blood elven fashion—a crisp gesture of deep respect—and then paused, her gaze settling on Leylin.
"The Holy Light burned with extraordinary purity inside that dark prison," Liadrin said softly. "Far brighter than I anticipated. I do not believe it was merely my own warding that sustained us." She hesitated briefly. "If you ever wish to discuss what you saw in the dark... the doors of the Sunwell Sanctum are always open to you."
"I will remember that, Liadrin. Thank you."
"Good." She bowed her head gracefully and turned away. The afternoon sun caught her polished golden armor, casting a radiant halo around her form as she crossed into the quiet shade of the woods.
Then, there were three.
The road to Windrunner Village wound through the oldest, most pristine reaches of Eversong, tracing paths carved long before the first Sunwell was ignited. The three of them walked at an unhurried, peaceful pace; there was no longer an operational deadline pushing them forward.
Arcturis had emerged from the portal in a foul mood, shaken out his glowing fur, and then promptly discovered an entire primeval forest overflowing with unfamiliar scents. The spirit bear was currently investigating a patch of wild ferns with the grave, unblinking focus of an archmage deciphering ancient runes.
"He's going to be utterly insufferable for an entire week," Vereesa remarked, watching the bear snort loudly into the brush.
"He earned the right to be insufferable," Leylin said.
"He earned a very long bath, too."
Alleria let out a sudden, genuine laugh—a bright, ringing sound that surprised even herself. Leylin realized with a quiet jolt that he could not remember the last time he had heard her laugh like that. It wasn't the sharp, guarded amusement she used in war rooms or on the battlefield. This laugh came from deep within her chest, unburdened and free.
They passed the ancient granite waystone marking the eastern estate fork. They passed a crumbling, moss-covered watchtower being slowly reclaimed by wild ivy. At the second bend in the road, a small elven child darted out from the golden undergrowth, a carved wooden sword clutched in her hand. She skidded to a dead stop in the center of the road, her wide blue eyes darting between three tall, heavily armored adults and a massive, glowing spirit bear, before letting out a shriek of pure delight.
"Mama! It's the Ranger-General!"
"Which one?" Vereesa asked, thoroughly amused.
The child pondered the question gravely, then pointed her wooden sword directly at Alleria. "The one who shoots the dragons!"
"I have never shot a dragon," Alleria noted mildly.
"You will!" the child declared with absolute, unshakeable certainty, before spinning on her heel and bolting back into the woods to spread the news.
Leylin watched the golden leaves settle where she had vanished. "She is going to inform the entire village."
"She is going to tell everyone you were here," Vereese corrected innocently, "and that you brought a giant glowing bear."
"I do possess a spirit bear."
"A very large, very terrifying bear."
Arcturis, hearing his species mentioned, looked up from his fern patch and gave Vereesa a look of profound, long-suffering dignity.
Windrunner Village appeared between one turn of the road and the next, as though the ancient forest had suddenly decided to part its golden curtains.
It was smaller than Leylin had pictured from Alleria's descriptions over the years. A few dozen elegant, white-stone houses clustered around a central, slate-lined well, built in the soaring, high-arched style of ancient Quel'Thalas. Terracotta roofs glowed crimson in the low evening light. Thin plumes of sweet woodsmoke curled from stone chimneys. Somewhere near the square, someone was playing a wooden flute—badly, but with immense, undeniable enthusiasm. Two elderly elves sat on a wooden bench outside the local tavern, engaged in a fierce, low-registered debate about something that was clearly of vital historical importance to both of them.
And high above the village, resting gracefully upon a green hill overlooking the valley, the newly rebuilt Windrunner Spire stood proud against the twilight sky.
Alleria stopped dead in the middle of the road.
Vereesa quietly stepped up beside her, taking her elder sister's arm without a word. The two Windrunner sisters stood shoulder-to-shoulder, gazing up at the white towers, and the silence between them was heavy with decades of loss, war, and quiet endurance.
Leylin stayed back a few paces, granting them the moment. Arcturis, who understood the boundaries of grief and home far better than most mortals, sat quietly at Leylin's side, resting his large head against Leylin's hip.
"It is still strange," Alleria whispered at last, her voice barely audible over the breeze. "Seeing it standing whole."
"It has been standing for three years now, Alleria," Vereesa said softly.
"I know. I have visited. But every time I look up at those spires, it feels..." Alleria trailed off, searching for the words. "It feels as though I am borrowing it. As though someone else should be living inside those walls."
"Someone is living there," Vereesa said gently, squeezing her arm. "We are."
Alleria exhaled a long, shuddering breath. She slowly turned around to look at Leylin, and the expression on her face was one he knew he would carry in his memory for the rest of his life. It wasn't raw relief, nor was it a simple victory. It was the look of a warrior who had carried an agonizing weight for so long she had forgotten what her shoulders felt like without it, and who had just, for a single heartbeat, experienced the absolute lightness of setting it down.
"Come on," Alleria said, a warm, genuine smile breaking across her face. "I want to show you the kitchen."
Leylin blinked behind his mask. "The kitchen?"
"It is, without question, the finest room in the entire spire," she declared. "Trust me."
It was, in fact, an extraordinary kitchen.
Warm, low-ceilinged, and smelling richly of dried herbs, roasted garlic, and polished wood. Heavy copper pots and iron skillets hung from hand-carved oak rafters overhead. A massive, scarred wooden table occupied the center of the room, easily large enough to seat twelve people, surrounded by an eclectic collection of chairs that didn't match in the slightest. Someone had left a wicker basket of late-harvest red apples on the counter, alongside a fresh loaf of crusty bread under a linen cloth.
"Our housekeeper," Vereesa explained, pulling back a chair. "She comes up from the village twice a week even when the spire is completely empty. She maintains that ancient houses begin to sulk if they aren't cared for by living hands."
"She sounds remarkably practical," Leylin noted.
"She is utterly terrifying," Vereesa countered. "You will meet her tomorrow."
Leylin pulled out a chair and sat down at the heavy wooden table.
It was the first time in over five years that he had sat anywhere without his spatial monitoring network running at a high-intensity combat operational baseline. He realized, with a faint sense of irony, that he was still doing it out of pure, ingrained habit—his mind automatically expanding outward, scanning the village, the forest perimeter, and the sky for anomalous energy signatures or tactical threats.
Nothing.
Only birdsong in the high canopy. The soft whisper of the autumn wind through the eaves. And the terrible wooden flute in the square, still playing, still entirely off-key.
"You are scanning," Alleria said, stepping up to the table.
"Habit," Leylin admitted quietly.
"I know." She sat down directly across from him, reaching into the basket and sliding a bright red apple across the scarred wood. "Stop it."
"I am merely—"
"Leylin."
He looked up, meeting her deep green eyes. She looked back at him with no teasing, no wariness—only the calm, absolute steadiness that had anchored them through the worst horrors of Icecrown and Ulduar.
"There is nothing out there," Alleria said softly, her voice an absolute anchor. "No marching undead. No void monstrosities. No celestial auditors with self-destruct codes. It is just a village. It is just a kitchen." She tapped the red apple gently. "Eat."
Leylin picked up the apple, pulled back his dark face-covering, and took a bite.
It was crisp, sweet, and slightly tart at the edges. It tasted of autumn soil, sunlight, and a world where nobody was keeping a running countdown toward oblivion.
Vereesa dropped unceremoniously into the chair beside them, pulled the loaf of bread toward herself, and began tearing off a thick crust without the slightest pretense of formal etiquette.
"I am going to sleep for three full days," Vereesa declared around a mouthful of bread.
"You will sleep for one," Alleria countered smoothly.
"Two days. Absolute minimum."
"Done."
They sat together at the old wooden table as the light pouring through the high arched windows shifted from brilliant gold to deep amber, and finally into the soft, rosy twilight of early evening.
Arcturis found a wide patch of warm floorboards beside the cold stone hearth, circled twice, and collapsed with a massive, rumbling sigh that made the hanging copper pots clatter softly against the rafters. Somewhere down in the village square, the terrible flute finally ceased, replaced by the warm, distant sound of elf folk laughing together in the dusk.
For the first time since he had opened his eyes on the frozen cliffs of Dragonblight five years ago, Leylin permitted the quiet to simply be quiet.
Not a temporary lull before a tactical assault. Not a brief operational pause between cataclysms.
Just a quiet evening in a warm house at the edge of an ancient forest, surrounded by the people he loved.
He knew, with cold intellectual clarity, that this peace was not permanent. The world was far too vast, far too broken, and far too full of unfinished dark things for absolute rest to endure forever. There was Brann's sinister countdown in Ulduar, Bolvar's silent vigil upon the Frozen Throne, and the deep, unseen fault lines waiting in the dark corners of Azeroth that his spatial network would eventually have to face.
But none of that mattered tonight. Tonight, there was fresh bread, the sweet taste of an autumn apple on his tongue, and Alleria's warm fingers weaving tightly through his across the scarred wooden table. Tonight was enough.