The dramatic shift in the Frozen Throne's ambient signature — the overwhelming quality of something that had been maintaining a level of output and had decided to stop maintaining it.
He had approximately two seconds. He spent both of them building the largest, broadest shield working he had ever attempted in a single, continuous expression.
The earthbending and the fire and the air and the water all organized simultaneously, in the fraction of the available time, into a single, encompassing shield that covered the arc of the summit from his position outward toward the people behind him — Rhonin and Aminel and Tyr'ganal and Jaina, Alleria and Sylvanas and Vereesa and the rangers, Liadrin — covering them with the full, gathered weight of everything available organized around the single priority of absorbing what was coming rather than directing it at a specific target.
He had never done this before. He did it now because the alternative was not doing it, and not doing it was not an available choice.
"Enough." Arthas said the word with the flat, total quality of someone who had been making a decision for a period and had completed the making of it.
The word was not anger — there was no anger in it, no frustration, none of the emotional escalation that the word's context might have suggested to someone reading it from the outside. It was the cold word of something that had assessed the summit's engagement with comprehensive accuracy and had arrived at the conclusion that the engagement required a different mode.
Frostmourne rose, the Frozen Throne's power descended through the Helm through Arthas through the blade in the total way of a source expressing itself at full volume rather than at the managed, operational level that the prior engagement had been using.
Not the engagement's fire-and-ice exchanges, not the Shambling Horrors and Val'kyr as instruments of attrition. The Lich King's direct, unmediated expression of what the Frozen Throne was at its most fundamental.
The blast was not cold. It was cold and everything else simultaneously — the compound expression of death itself in its most organized, most directed form, channeled through the Helm's organizing authority and Frostmourne's consuming capacity and the death knight's form as its physical medium, arriving at the summit.
The sound came first. Then the pressure. Then what the pressure produced. The sound was not the sound of an explosion in the conventional sense — not the sharp, percussive quality of force meeting resistance at the resistance's boundary.
It was deeper, more total, the resonance of something organized at the level of the chamber's fundamental physical structure rather than at the level of its surface.
The pressure arrived as an expanding wall of everything the blast was — frost and death-energy and the organized, concentrated will of the Frozen Throne expressed as force, moving outward from the point of Frostmourne's discharge at a speed that the two seconds of warning had not provided enough time to fully prepare for.
Leylin's shield took the first impact. The shield took it in the catastrophic way of something that had been built to absorb what it could absorb rather than to survive what it was absorbing — it held through the first fraction of the impact's duration, held through the second, held through enough of the total that the people behind it received the remainder rather than the whole.
Then it broke. The remainder was still enough to fill the summit. The Horde's warriors went down in a wave — not the targeted fall of individual fighters reaching their limit but the simultaneous, overwhelming expression of force exceeding what the force's targets had available to resist it.
The Warsong warriors who had survived three halls and a Horror fight and the Val'kyr engagement and the prior exchange's attrition found, in the blast's remainder, the threshold that the prior attrition had been building toward.
Garrosh had been moving when the blast hit. Moving was what saved him from what killed others — the kinetic quality of a body in motion rather than standing position changing how the blast's force distributed through the form receiving it.
It did not save him from the impact itself. The blast hit him with the specific, enormous force of the remainder interacting with the Warsong commander's motion and the result was Garrosh lifted from his feet and driven into the wall at a speed and with a force that the wall registered and that the Warsong commander did not, in the immediate aftermath, appear to be registering at all.
Thrall reached him first. The Warchief moved through the blast's aftermath with the shamanic channels providing the stabilizing connection to the elemental floor that prevented the ground from betraying him the way it was betraying everything else — the earth beneath the saronite still responding to his shamanic reach in the attenuated, distorted way it had been responding since they entered the Upper Spire, but responding.
He reached Garrosh and read the Warsong commander's state with the immediate, comprehensive assessment of someone who had been in enough battle-aftermath situations to know what he was looking at.
"He's breathing," Thrall said, which was the most immediately relevant piece of information available. Then he straightened, and his expression had the quality of someone who has received the most important piece of information and is now organizing around it rather than around any of the other information the situation was simultaneously providing.
The Horde's fighting force stood at two. Thrall and Saurfang. Everyone else either down or pulling the down away from the engagement's immediate vicinity with the urgent, careful quality of people who understood that the summit was not a place where the wounded could safely remain conscious and unattended.
The Alliance contingent's toll was different in its specifics and identical in its direction. Varian had been standing between Muradin and the blast's primary expression when the shield's breaking sent the remainder through.
He had taken it — had managed it with the trained quality of an champion warrior. He was standing.
The elite unit behind him was not, in the same numbers it had been before the blast. Half of them were down. Not all of them dead.
Some were incapacitated in the way of combat casualties that covered everything from fatal to recoverable to temporarily overwhelmed.
The Alliance soldiers who remained on their feet were organizing themselves with the immediate professionalism of soldiers who had been trained to respond to sudden, massive casualty events with the forward motion of continuing the mission rather than the natural, human impulse of attending to what had just happened.
Muradin was bleeding from several places and did not appear to have counted them.
"I've had worse," Muradin said. Varian looked at him.
"Don't," Muradin said, preempting whatever was coming with the flat, dwarven quality of someone who had known the person they were talking to long enough to know when the look meant something that did not need to be said aloud.
Jaina came through the blast's aftermath from the position that Leylin's shield had partially covered — the Archmage of Theramore carrying the composed quality of someone who was managing more than she was expressing, the ward structure she had built before the ascent having absorbed what the shield's protection had not entirely deflected.
She looked at the surroundings. She looked at what the blast had produced. She breathed.
The Argent Crusade had taken the worst of it on the unshielded side. Tirion had been at the edge of the shield's coverage when the blast expressed — close enough that the protection's edge had reduced what reached him, not close enough that the reduction had been comprehensive.
He had taken the force that the reduction had left and had remained standing through the specific, implacable quality of a man who had taken significant blows from significant things throughout a very long career of doing exactly this and who had found, in all of that career, no moment where remaining standing had been less important than what had caused the need for it.
The Ashbringer was still in his hand. Around him: fewer. The tragic accounting of an Argent Crusade deployment that had committed its finest and had found, in the summit's final expression of the Lich King's power, the limit that the finest could sustain.
Some had been carried out by the survivors before the blast. Some were being carried now. Some were not being carried anywhere.
Darion Mograine had gone down to one knee. The death knight's physical state was not the death knight's limiting factor. What had put Darion on one knee was not the blast's physical impact but its death-energy component interacting with the Frostmourne's own death-adjacent nature in the particular, complicated way that very large death-energy expressions interacted with things that were not fully separated from death themselves.
He rose. Not immediately. With the effortful quality of someone for whom rising required more than the decision to rise. But he rose, and the sword was in his hand, and the Knights of the Ebon Blade's few remaining members organized around him with the compressed, essential coherence of a unit that had been reduced to the point where coherence was the thing they had left.
Leylin's shield had failed. He was still standing. This was not because the shield's failure had not cost him — it had, the enormous expenditure of everything the shield had required. He was still standing.
Rhonin was behind him, and the Archmage's state communicated, in the quality of how he was standing and how he was breathing, that the shield's coverage of the mage group's position had saved them from what the unshielded positions had received at the cost of what the shield's construction had cost Leylin.
Rhonin was wounded. Aminel and Tyr'ganal were wounded. Julia and Seyla and Elna were wounded in the graduated ways of people who had been at the edge of very significant blast coverage and who would need time they did not have to address what the blast had done.
They were still functional. This was the honest summary of the mage group's status — functional, reduced, and aware of both.
The ranger group: Alleria had taken the blast's edge through the shield's rear coverage and had managed it with the specific quality of Alleria Windrunner managing anything that came at her — completely, without visible drama, the impact acknowledged and processed and converted into the forward motion that was the only available response.
Sylvanas and Vereesa had been in adjacent positions and had taken adjacent damage — Vereesa's left arm was being held in the careful way of an arm that had sustained an injury she was not addressing yet.
Sylvanas's expression was the flat, contained quality she always wore when she was managing something significant and had decided that the managing was more important than the acknowledgment.
Liadrin was on her knees. The Light was moving through her with the healing expression of someone who had been hit by something that targeted what she was most fundamentally and who was responding to the targeting through the most direct available channel — not outward, not at the enemy, but inward, the Light's healing expression stabilizing what the blast had destabilized before the destabilization could progress to something that the healing could not subsequently address.
She would be back. She would be back. Not immediately. In time.
Arthas stood at the summit's center with the blast's aftermath organized around him in the specific, total quality of something that had expressed itself at full magnitude and was in the specific, momentary stillness of a working that has completed and is being assessed.
The flat gaze moved across what remained.
Not with satisfaction, with the cold, comprehensive assessment of something reading the results of an action it had taken to understand what the results told it about the next action.
What the results told it was that the summit's force had been halved. Reduced from a significant, multi-faction coalition to what remained — Thrall and Saurfang from the Horde, Varian and Muradin from the Alliance core, Jaina and the reduced mage group, Tirion and his few remaining Crusaders, Darion and the Ebon Blade's survivors, the ranger group with their injuries, Liadrin recovering.
And Leylin. Who was still standing. Who had been standing since before the blast and was standing after it.
"You shielded them," Arthas said. Not an accusation. An observation. The flat, accurate description of what had occurred.
"Yes," Leylin said.
"It cost you."
"Yes." The flat gaze held him with the complete attention of something that had assessed this exchange and had determined that it communicated something worth the time it had taken to communicate it.
"And still you stand," the Lich King said, and in the saying of it was the first, quality in the summit engagement that was not completely affectless — something that sat in the boundary between the flat, cold register that characterized everything Arthas produced.
He looked at what remained behind him. Saurfang, meeting his gaze with the flat, resolved quality of someone who had not left the field when lesser reasons were available to leave.
Thrall, the elemental channels sustaining the stabilizing connection that was keeping him functional. Varian, bleeding and present and looking at the Lich King with the direct quality of a king who had not survived everything he had survived to be ended in the summit.
Muradin, standing beside Varian with the dwarven economy of motion of someone conserving what they had. Jaina, reading the summit's magical state with the continuous, professional attention that she had not suspended since they entered the citadel.
Tirion, the Ashbringer in his hand and his eyes on the Lich King with the hardened, clarity of a man who had struck Arthas's heart and had not stopped moving since.
Darion, risen from the knee, the Knights of the Ebon Blade's flag still planted through what had tried to take it.
Behind them, the injured. The people who had come to the summit of Icecrown Citadel and had given what they had given and were now in the specific, honest state of having given it.
He looked at all of it. Then he looked at Arthas. "They are still here," he said.
The Lich King had no answer for this. Neither did the throne behind him, whose cold light pressed down on everything in the chamber with the ancient, total indifference that it had always maintained.
Leylin raised his hands. The fire had been diminished by the shield's construction. What remained of it was real and was concentrated in the focused way of something that understood it did not have the luxury of anything less than everything that remained.
He released it. The fight was not over. The people behind him were not done. That was enough to continue with.