Arthas was where Leylin had left him. His silver hair was matted with dried blood, his pale skin translucent in the harsh arctic light.
Yet his eyes—hollow, sunken, and burning with a faint, blue embers—tracked Leylin's descent with a cold, dispassionate intellect. He recognized what Leylin carried.
"You went to the throne," Arthas said. His voice was a rasping scrape, like rusted iron drawn over stone. There was no rage in it, only the flat, analytical calculation of a general assessing a catastrophic breach in his lines.
"I did," Leylin replied. He stopped eight paces away—far enough to react to a sudden surge of necrotic magic, close enough to look the fallen prince directly in his dead eyes.
Arthas's gaze shifted to the spiked crown in Leylin's grip. "You could have destroyed it. The summit's heat... you had the power to melt it into slagheap."
"I considered it," Leylin said calmly. "I stood at the apex for a long time and ran the projections. In the end, destruction was a luxury the world cannot afford."
He extended his arms, holding the Helm of Domination out between them. It was not a ceremonial gesture. There was no grand speech, no dramatic declaration of destiny. It was a cold, transactional offer—a trade of absolute horrors.
Arthas stared at the crown. For the first time since Leylin had met him on the battlefield, the Death Knight's expression cracked. A faint, terrible flicker of human comprehension surfaced beneath his pale features. "Why?"
"Because an unchained apocalypse is worse than a jailed one," Leylin said, his voice hard as iron. "If I shatter this helm, the Scourge does not die. Millions of mindless, ravenous undead will break free from Northrend. They will flood across the Great Sea like a plague of locusts. Lordaeron is a smoking crater. Quel'Thalas is bleeding out. Stormwind is barely holding its own borders. The mortal kingdoms will drown in blood within six months."
Arthas listened in absolute, motionless silence.
"I am not giving you this crown out of mercy, Arthas," Leylin continued, stepping closer until the freezing aura of the Helm brushed against the fallen prince's chest. "I am giving it to you because you are a bounded variable. You are an ambitious, arrogant, but inherently organized threat. I defeated you today with a localized strike team. If you break your leash tomorrow, I will assemble another team and put a bullet through your forehead. But I cannot shoot a million brainless ghouls scattering to the four winds."
A dark, bitter smile tugged at the corner of Arthas's pale lips. "You are gambling that you can kill a god twice."
"It isn't a gamble if the math holds," Leylin said flatly. "Take the weight, Prince of Lordaeron. Be the warden of your own monstrous creation."
Arthas reached out. His gloved fingers closed around the saronite brow of the Helm. The instant the crown touched his hands, the atmospheric pressure on the glacier plummeted.
A deafening, howling gale tore across the peak, driving sharp needles of ice through the air. Leylin braced his stance, digging his boots into the stone as the sky above Icecrown turned from pale grey to a violent, swirling vortex of deep soul-azure.
Arthas lifted the Helm of Domination and set it upon his head. The transformation was absolute and horrifying.
A blinding pillar of necrotic force erupted from the crown, driving straight into the clouds. The shattered runes along Arthas's plate armor ignited with blinding, arctic fire.
His stooped posture straightened with sickening, supernatural precision as the sheer, suffocating presence of the Lich King poured back into his physical vessel.
When Arthas lowered his head to look at Leylin, his eyes were no longer embers. They were twin stars of absolute, blinding freezing light—cold, infinite, and devoid of mortality.
"The jailer takes his seat," the Lich King's voice echoed—a dual resonance of Arthas's sharp tenor and Ner'zhul's ancient, booming bass.
Leylin did not flinch. He unslung the lead cylinder from his chest and tossed it into the snow at Arthas's feet. The heavy metal container split open, revealing the jagged, runic length of Frostmourne.
"You take the blade, too," Leylin said over the howling wind. "A jailer without a weapon is just an inmate waiting to be murdered. Hold the Scourge in Northrend. Settle your legions. If a single ghoul steps foot on a southern transport without my permission, I will return to this peak and crush you once more."
Arthas reached down and picked up Frostmourne. The blade screamed as it reconnected with its master, dark energy coiling up his arm like striking serpents. He sheath the blade at his hip, his glowing eyes fixed on the magus.
"I will remember this bargain, Leylin," the Lich King reverberated, stepping back toward the dark archway of the spire. "Pray your mortal kingdoms rebuild quickly. For the cold never truly sleeps."
"I don't pray," Leylin said quietly. "I prepare."
Without another word, the Lich King turned and vanished into the shadows of Icecrown, his heavy saronite steps echoing into the vast, freezing dark.
Leylin found his strike team two miles down the ridge, consolidated in a defensible, ice-carved ravine created by his earlier earth-shaping magic.
Illidan was gone—Vashj and her naga had already evacuated the unconscious demon hunter toward their coastal vessels under the cover of the mist. The rest of the unit remained on high alert, their weapons drawn and spells primed as the strange, violent shift in the northern sky slowly settled into a heavy, ominous stillness.
Sylvanas Windrunner stood at the edge of the perimeter. The moment Leylin rounded the glacial crag, her crimson eyes locked onto his hands. She saw that they were empty.
"Where is it?" she demanded, stepping forward, her hand tightening around the grip of her sun-strung bow. Her voice was taut, vibrating with a terrifying, hysterical edge.
"Where is the Helm? Where is the blade?"
The rest of the team—Alleria, Liadrin, and the others gathered around them in a tight, silent circle.
Leylin stopped before her. He looked at Sylvanas—at the pale, undead skin, the tear-stained dark tracks on her cheeks, the sheer, agonizing trauma of a woman who had spent every waking second of her existence hungering for the absolute destruction of the monster who stole her soul.
He did not lie to her. He did not offer soft, comforting platitudes.
"I gave the Helm back to Arthas," Leylin said plainly. "I gave him Frostmourne as well."
The silence that followed was suffocating.
Sylvanas's breath hitched. For two agonizing seconds, she simply stared at him, as if her mind refused to process the words.
Then, a raw, primal screech tore from her throat. She drew her bow in a fraction of a second, the glowing tip of an arrow pressed directly against the center of Leylin's forehead.
"You what?!" she screamed, her hand trembling violently with rage. "You restored him?! You gave the monster his crown back?!"
"Sylvanas, hold!" Alleria shouted, stepping forward with her own bow half-drawn, her face pale with shock as she looked between Leylin and her sister.
"Stay back, Alleria!" Sylvanas snarled, never breaking eye contact with Leylin. Tears leaked from her eyes, freezing instantly on her cheeks. "He betrayed us! He saved the Lich King!"
Leylin did not move. He did not raise a shield. He looked down the length of the golden arrow into her burning, devastated eyes.
"If I had destroyed the crown, the Scourge would have shattered into a million uncontrolled beasts," Leylin said, his voice flat, steady, and entirely devoid of heat.
"They would have overrun Silvermoon before your rangers could even march home. They would have wiped out what remains of the Ironforge, Lordaeron, and Stormwind. You would have had your vengeance for five minutes, Sylvanas, and then your entire race would have been erased from history."
"I don't care about the world!" she shrieked, her finger straining on the bowstring. "You know what he did! You know how many died during their siege at Silvermoon!"
"I know he did," Leylin said softly. "And that is why you are thinking with your wounds instead of your head. Look at me, Sylvanas. Is Arthas free? Is he conquering? No. He is trapped on that throne, bound by the Helm to hold his own nightmare in check. He is a prisoner of his own empire."
Sylvanas's chest heaved. The bowstring vibrated, humming with lethal arcana just inches from his skull.
"I made a cold, terrible calculation," Leylin continued, stepping forward slightly, pressing his forehead directly against the arrowhead. "I chose a controlled threat over absolute annihilation. If you want to kill me for making that call, pull the string. But know that if I die, there will be no one left to step onto this ice when Arthas eventually tries to break his chains."
For ten terrifying seconds, nobody breathed. The wind howled through the ravine, snapping the banners of the Sin'dorei.
Slowly, agonizingly, the tip of Sylvanas's arrow lowered. She did not unstring her bow. She backed away from him, her body shaking with a violent, toxic mixture of hatred, grief, and bitter understanding.
She knew the math. She was a Ranger-General; she understood strategic sacrifice better than anyone. But that understanding did not stop the bitter poison from burning in her throat.
"I hate you," she whispered, her voice dropping into a raspy, lethal promise. "I hate that you are right."
"I know," Leylin said. Halduron stepped between them, placing a steady hand on Sylvanas's shoulder before looking at Leylin.
"What happens now, Leylin? The campaign is over. The dreadlords are dead, the Scourge is contained, and the Alliance is waiting for news."
"You take the strike team south," Leylin instructed, turning his gaze toward the dark, jagged silhouette of the Frozen Throne.
"Return to Silvermoon. Tell Khadgar and Jaina that the Lich King is contained, but the North is sealed. Rebuild your walls. Train your arcanists. The peaceful interval we just bought was paid for in absolute blood, and it will not last forever."
Alleria frowned, her sharp eyes scanning his exhausted, battered form. "And you? You're not coming with us?"
Leylin reached into his robes, pulling out a small, runic compass tuned to the specific magic signature of the northern ley-lines.
"Someone needs to stay," Leylin said, turning his back on the group and looking up at the frozen wastes. "A gamble requires monitoring. I will establish a observation post in the Storm Peaks. I will watch the throne. The moment Arthas twitches, I will know."
"You're going to stay in this hellscape alone?" Liadrin asked, horror creeping into her tone.
"I am never alone," Leylin replied, his hand resting on the lead-lined cylinder at his hip where ten thousand stolen souls hummed softly in the dark. "Go. The future is coming, and none of you are ready for it."
He didn't wait for their farewells. Leylin stepped out of the ravine, his heavy boots cutting fresh tracks into the undisturbed snow.
He walked alone into the vast, white silence of Northrend, carrying the weight of a decision that would haunt the world for generations—unflinching, unrepentant, and entirely prepared for the dark that was yet to come.