The Eye of Sargeras was fracturing the world.
Malfurion did not need a scout's report or a physical lens to see it; he felt it down in the marrow of his bones. He felt it the way a druid perceives a distant, cataclysmic storm—through the sudden, agonized screaming of the earth's interconnected nervous system.
Across the vast expanse of the sea, a jagged, violent energy was tearing through the ancient bedrock of Northrend. It was the specific, crushing resonance of a primeval artifact being forced to its absolute limit, a structural assault so immense that the deep roots of the world registered each pulse like a hammer striking an old wound.
He had been tracing the fungal rot of Tirisfal's blight when the first shockwave hit him. It arrived not as a sudden flash, but as a secondary, terrifying layer of consciousness that forced itself into his mind, drowning out the local murmurs of the forest.
Northrend. Illidan was using the Eye to strike at the Lich King's citadel at Icecrown. The sheer scale of the spell defied the laws of magic—bridging the massive, frozen distance between Lordaeron and the roof of the world with the indifferent, terrifying power of a god's weapon.
But Illidan wasn't just targeting the Frozen Throne; he was using the planet's own deep geological and magical veins as the conduit for his wrath.
The mechanism was a catastrophe. The earth's subterranean vaults and glacial shelves were not inert stone and ice; they were part of a living balance. Illidan's spell was a torrent of raw, pressurized energy tearing through a fragile pipe.
The conduit itself was eroding, fracturing the northern ice caps, destabilizing tectonic plates, and ripping the ley-lines apart. The world itself was being broken to get to a single monster.
Malfurion broke his connection with the soil and strode back toward the encampment. He found Maiev outside the shattered gates of Dalaran. Her command post was exactly what he expected—stark, functional, stripped of a single comfort or unnecessary tent.
It was an environment built for a machine, not for living. He delivered his findings with the breathless, urgent rhythm of a general whose lines are collapsing, watching her receive the news with that unblinking, iron discipline that made her look more like a statue than a woman.
Then, she broke his heart. She told him about Tyrande with a blunt, clinical directness that felt like an axe to the chest. She simply stated that the High Priestess that had been swept into the River Arevass, and that the undead forces downstream were far too dense for anyone—even Tyrande—to survive. She delivered the notice of his wife's death with the same cold cadence she would use to report a lost shipment of arrows.
The words struck him in slow, heavy waves. First came the sound of them, then the visceral image of Tyrande lost in the grey foam, and finally, the suffocating, crushing weight of the conclusion Maiev was forcing upon him.
Tyrande is dead. A raw, primal darkness opened up inside him. It wasn't a thought; it was the acute, blinding agony of a man whose horizon has just been extinguished.
For ten thousand years, the thought of her face had been the tether that pulled his spirit back from the trackless wilds of the Emerald Dream. Now, the tether was gone.
The ground beneath his boots felt unstable, as if the earth itself were weeping with him. But the Eye was still pulsing in the distance. The world was still breaking. He forced his hands to stop shaking, swallowing the ash in his throat, and stepped forward into the command tent.
The grief would have to wait. There was a monster to catch. The naga summoners were the lynchpin of the disaster.
As they approached the ritual site within the broken spires of Dalaran, Malfurion mapped the flow of the magic. The Eye of Sargeras was a wild, chaotic beast; it couldn't simply be pointed at a target and left to fire.
It required an active, delicate web of focus to guide its energy across the sea. A circle of naga chantresses stood at the focal points, their serpentine bodies swaying as they channeled their own life force to keep the spell from collapsing into a localized explosion.
If the summoners fell, the spell would die.
Malfurion threw himself into the vanguard alongside Maiev's Watchers and Capernian's remaining spellbreakers.
He fought with a desperate, terrifying fury that the druids of Hyjal had never seen in him. He didn't just command nature; he weaponized it. Guided by the vibrations in the stone, he located the hidden summoners through the walls of the ruins.
With a deafening roar, he summoned massive, gnarled roots out of the ancient foundations, crushing the naga chantresses before they could even break their focus.
The spell shattered. The destabilization was instantaneous and violent. The Eye of Sargeras lost its alignment, its focused beam scattering into a blinding, multi-colored storm of uncontrolled cosmic energy.
The sky above Dalaran turned a violent shade of violet before the artifact exploded, the concussive backlash vaporizing the ritual altar and sending a tremor through the hills that knocked every soldier to their knees.
The Eye was gone. The world's crust stopped screaming.
Out of the smoke stumbled Illidan. His demonic features were twisted into a mask of pure, unadulterated fury—the rage of a man who believed he was performing a grand, necessary surgical strike, only to have his hand knocked aside by fools.
"Fools!" Illidan roared, his voice an unnatural, echoing hiss as his yellow eyes burned through the haze. "The Frozen Throne was within my grasp! The Scourge would have been leaderless, broken! I was fulfilling my pact, ending the monster that threatens your precious forests, and you... you blind, self-righteous zealots have ruined everything!"
Malfurion stood before him, his staff trembling in his grip, his voice rising from the deepest caverns of his chest. He didn't hear the tactical logic; he heard only the voice of the boy who had spent ten thousand years demanding the world acknowledge his brilliance.
"You speak of consequences, Illidan?" Malfurion's voice thundered, vibrating with the full force of his freshly broken heart. "Look at what your ambition buys! Look at the ash! You have never once looked at the cost of your arrogance! Tyrande is dead because of your mad quest! She held a crumbling bridge against the monsters you dragged into her woods! Her blood is on your hands, brother, just as surely as if you had driven a warglaive through her heart!"
Illidan flinched, the demonic fire in his eyes flickering, standard human shock bleeding through his monstrous visage. "Tyrande...? No. No, she was leading the Sentinels..."
"She is gone," Malfurion whispered, the anger suddenly evaporating, leaving only a vast, cold cavern of sorrow.
"My lords," Grand Astromancer Capernian broke in, her voice calm, cutting through the familial tragedy. "If I may... the High Priestess may yet draw breath."
The words were like a lightning strike in a dark room.
Malfurion whipped around, his gaze locking onto the young elf. "What do you mean?"
Capernian stepped forward, her amber eyes shifting intentionally toward Maiev before returning to Malfurion. "The river was swift, yes, but she fell with her armor intact and the grace of her goddess upon her. The undead were numerous downstream, but we did not see her fall to them. The Warden's report... it was confident in a conclusion that the evidence did not fully provide."
Malfurion turned his gaze slowly toward Maiev. The Warden did not flinch, but her posture stiffened. It was the subtle, defensive shift of a soldier who had been flanked in her own camp. She didn't offer an excuse. She didn't look down.
In that silence, the pieces of the puzzle fell into place with a sickening, frozen clarity. Maiev had lied to him.
She had taken the uncertainty of Tyrande's fate and dressed it up as a corpse, knowing that if Malfurion thought there was even a single, flickering chance his wife was alive in that river, he would have abandoned the hunt for Illidan within the hour. She had manufactured a death to keep her hound on the leash.
"You," Malfurion breathed, a sound more terrifying than his roar.
He didn't waste time on words. He didn't demand an apology. He slammed the butt of his staff into the cracked stone of the plaza, and the roots of Tirisfal—corrupted, slick with blight, but still fiercely loyal to the Arch-Druid—exploded upward from the flagstones.
They swarmed over Maiev's spiked armor like nesting vipers, wrapping around her limbs, her waist, and her shoulders, binding her to the ancient stone with an unyielding, living vice.
She didn't cry out. She simply stared at him through the narrow slit of her iron visor, her jaw set in a hard, unrepentant line. She had made her calculation, and she was prepared to live with the weight of it.
Malfurion turned his back on her, his gaze landing on his brother. Illidan was watching him, his massive wings half-unfurled, his expression caught in a strange, agonizing conflict between his lingering anger and the sudden, fierce reawakening of the boy who had grown up in Tyrande's shadow in Suramar.
"You know this land better than any scout we possess," Malfurion said, his voice dropping into a flat, dangerous register that brooked no negotiation. "You know where the currents lead. You know where her enemies are waiting. Take me to her, Illidan. Now."
Illidan stared at him through his blindfold for three long beats of his heart. The air between them was thick with ten thousand years of exile, betrayal, and broken bloodlines. Then, with a slow, heavy nod that looked remarkably human, the demon turned and leaped into the air, his wings catching the wind as he cleared the ruined walls of the city.
Malfurion didn't look back at the camp. He leaped forward, his body shifting into the sleek, powerful form of a storm-crow, his wings beating fiercely as he followed the dark silhouette of his brother toward the rushing waters of the Arevass.
Behind them, Maiev remained pinned to the ancient earth, a silent monument to an obsession that had finally cost her everything.