The summit was quieter than anything Icecrown had produced since they entered it. This was the quiet that settled afterward, the quality of a space that had been the center of something enormous and was now simply a space again, the ordinary cold of altitude and old stone reasserting itself in the absence of what had been making it more than that.
Arthas lay on the summit floor. The Helm of Domination was still on his head, which was the immediate complication that the quiet's settling had not resolved — the Frozen Throne's authority running through it at the diminished, disorganized quality of something that had lost its primary channel but had not lost its connection.
The connection was real. The authority it was carrying was real. Without Frostmourne's amplification, whatever the Helm was, it was nothing.
Leylin looked at it. Then he looked at the assembled survivors — at Tirion with the Ashbringer bright in his hand, at Darion standing at the ring's edge with the Ebon Blade's few remaining members organized behind him, at Varian and Muradin and the Alliance's reduced contingent, at Thrall and Saurfang with the Horde's survivors, at Jaina and Rhonin and what remained of the Kirin Tor.
"The Helm," he said. Everyone looked at it.
"You need to decide what to do with it," he continued. "Not me — I made a decision about it five years ago, and the decision produced this."
He looked at the fallen death knight, the broken pieces of Frostmourne, and the summit's transformed character. "What it produces next is yours to determine. There are arguments for destroying it. There are arguments for what I argued five years ago — that what fills the absence matters as much as what the absence removes." He paused. "I'm not going to tell you which argument is correct. I have been wrong about this before in ways that cost everyone here. You decide."
He stepped back. The discussion began immediately with the overlapping quality of people who had been in the same high-stakes situation and who each had something to say about it that they had earned the right to say.
Tirion spoke first, because Tirion was Tirion and because the Ashbringer in his hand and gave his words about the Helm's authority that the others' words, however earned, did not carry in the same way.
Darion countered something Tirion said, and the counter had the quality of someone who understood the Helm's power from the inside rather than from the outside, who knew what the Helm was connected to and what severing those connections produced from the direct experience of having been on one end of the Lich King's organizational authority before choosing to be somewhere else.
Varian listened with the military attention of someone who was more interested in what the decision produced operationally than in the theological and philosophical dimensions that Tirion and Darion were navigating. He said three things, each of them brief, each of them the direct contribution of someone who had been a warrior before he had been a king and who still thought that way when the situation's urgency justified it.
Thrall said something about what the elemental channels were telling him about the Frozen Throne's current state — the shamanic perspective on the authority that the Helm was still connected to, the quality of what that authority was doing now that Frostmourne had been removed from the equation.
What the channels were telling him was not comfortable, and he conveyed it without making it comfortable, because that was how Thrall handled information that was not comfortable.
Leylin did not listen to all of it. He had said what he came to say. The decision was not his to continue occupying.
He found his group. They had gathered near the summit's far edge — the natural gathering of people who had been in the same campaign and who understood, without needing to organize it explicitly, that the immediate aftermath of the summit's conclusion was a moment that belonged to the groups who had come through it together rather than to the broader coalition's deliberations.
Alleria was standing at the edge of the ring's perimeter with the ranger's post-engagement quality — the continuous environmental awareness that did not fully stand down even when the immediate engagement was over.
She looked at him when he approached with the look she had been looking at him with since he came through the ring's edge — the total look of someone who has been watching a person do something significant and who has not yet found the right words for what the watching produced.
She did not find them now. She simply moved to him, and he moved to her, and the distance closed in the direct way of people for whom the distance had been a condition rather than a choice, and neither of them said anything for the moment that the not-saying required.
Vereesa was beside them with the warmer, more immediately expressive quality that had always been her character relative to her sisters — the hug she gave him was brief and genuine and communicated without words what the words would have struggled to carry at the appropriate weight.
Sylvanas stood apart from this by a distance that was not the distance of disengagement but the considered distance of someone who had decided that what the moment required of her was her own processing of it rather than the collective expression.
She looked at him across the distance with the flat, contained quality that she brought to moments that carried more than the flat quality communicated. He met the look.
Something passed between them that did not require elaboration.
Aminel had been resting near the group, slowly recovering from the fatigue. She looked at him with everything they had built together through the channel and through the correspondence and through the collaborative knowledge of two people who had been working on the same problem from different positions and who were now in the same place at the problem's conclusion.
"You could have told us more clearly," she said.
"Yes," he agreed.
"You didn't because you weren't certain what more clearly would have communicated," she said.
"Yes," he agreed again. She nodded. This was, in the compressed language of Aminel's communication, acceptance.
Liadrin was the last to reach him — she had been the furthest from the ring's edge during the fight's final phase, the Light's ongoing restorative work keeping her occupied through the summit's final exchanges.
She came to him now with the paladin's settled quality of someone who has completed a significant working and has found, in the completion's aftermath, the specific kind of quiet that significant Light-work produced.
She looked at the summit's transformed character — at Arthas, at the broken blade, at the Helm still on the fallen head — and looked back at him.
"Ulduar," she said. Not a question. He had written about it in the intelligence summaries, and she had been reading the summaries from the beginning.
"Yes," he said. "I need to talk to all of you about Yogg-Saron."
They found a section of the summit's edge where the broader coalition's discussion was audible but not proximate — close enough to the ongoing deliberation about the Helm to be recalled if the deliberation required input, far enough that the conversation he needed to have could be had without the deliberation's noise occupying the same space.
He sat. This was the honest communication of his current state — sitting rather than standing, the choice of someone who had been expending at full capacity for longer than standing comfortably was practical and who had reached the point where the choice between honesty about that and the appearance of not having reached that point had resolved in favor of honesty. They gathered around him.
"Yogg-Saron though imprisoned deep within Ulduar," he said. "Brann Bronzebeard confirmed it. Ulduar's guardian constructs have been corrupted — the prison has been compromised at the level where it was being maintained rather than at the level where Yogg-Saron was contained, which means the compromise has been happening for a very long time from the inside."
He paused. "What I need all of you to understand before anything else is the difference between this and Arthas." He looked at each of them in turn — at Alleria, at Vereesa, at Sylvanas, at Aminel, at Tyr'ganal, at Liadrin.
"Arthas was powerful. The Lich King was the most organized, most directed, most comprehensively capable threat the Eastern Kingdoms had faced since the Third War's worst moments. But the Lich King was comprehensible. He had a will that pointed in directions for specific reasons. He made decisions you could read, anticipate, prepare for, and ultimately address."
He held Aminel's gaze specifically for a moment. "You built five years of intelligence about him. The intelligence was useful because there was an intelligence to build a picture of."
"And Yogg-Saron is different," Tyr'ganal said. The scholar's analytical engagement with the concept was visible in the quality of his attention — the same engaged assessment he brought to everything, but with something beneath it that was not usually there.
The thing that a scholar's comprehensive engagement with a concept produced when the concept exceeded the frameworks the scholar had been using.
"Yogg-Saron is not directing a force," Leylin said. "It is not building a campaign. It is not making decisions in the way that things with comprehensible agendas make decisions. It is an Old God. What that means in practice is that its primary mode of operation is not conquest or destruction in the direct, military sense. It is corruption."
He let the word sit for a moment. "It works through what is already there. It finds the vulnerable points in minds and in relationships and in histories and in the quiet, unexamined fears that people carry and have never had a reason to address because the fears were just fears and not problems requiring solutions. And then it works on those points with the patient, comprehensive attention of something that has been imprisoned for ten thousand years and has had nothing to do but learn exactly what vulnerabilities look like and exactly how to find them."
The group received this with the quality of people receiving something they had understood theoretically and are now receiving practically.
Sylvanas said, "You are telling us that it will try to corrupt us."
"I am telling you that it is already trying," Leylin said. "The influence extends beyond Ulduar's physical containment. The corruption of the guardian constructs happened from the inside, which means Yogg-Saron was operating at a distance from its full freedom for a very long time. The range of that operation has not been fully mapped. Anyone who enters Ulduar is entering a space that has been organized around the specific purpose of making the things inside it susceptible to exactly this."
"Including you," Alleria said.
"Including me," he confirmed without hesitation. "The advantage I have is the same advantage I had against Arthas — knowing the threat comprehensively before walking toward it. It is not immunity. It is preparation."
He looked at her directly. "I am telling you what the threat is before asking whether you will walk toward it with me, because you deserve to know what you are choosing before you choose it. Arthas was a comprehensible enemy at the end of a comprehensible threat model. Yogg-Saron is something that will try to make you not trust your own mind."
The quiet that followed was the weighted quiet of people sitting with information that deserved the weight it was receiving.
Liadrin spoke after a moment with the considered quality of someone who had processed what they had heard and had found, in the processing, a clarity about their own response that the processing had produced rather than the hearing alone.
"The Light is not immune to corruption," she said. "I know this. Every paladin who has studied the Scarlet Crusade's history knows this. But what I also know is that the active working of the Light in a place of corruption changes what the corruption can do. It does not prevent the corruption. It contests it."
"Yes," Leylin said.
"Then I am with you," she said.
Aminel looked at Tyr'ganal. The look had the wordless quality of their partnership's longest-standing communication — the two of them arriving at the same place through the same independent assessment, the arrival confirmed by the look without requiring the assessment to be verbalized.
"We go to Ulduar," Aminel said. Tyr'ganal nodded. Once. The efficient quality of a scholar for whom a single nod was sufficient confirmation when the confirmation did not require elaboration.
Vereesa said, "The Windrunner sisters do not let the youngest face things alone." She glanced at Sylvanas. "All three of us."
Sylvanas looked at her youngest sister with the flat quality that everything received from her, and beneath the flatness was the thing that had always been beneath it — the contained warmth of someone who had made their peace with what they were and who expressed what they felt through the quality of their choices rather than through the quality of their affect.
"Obviously," Sylvanas said. Alleria had not said anything since her question. She had been looking at Leylin with the sustained, total attention of someone who had been paying this kind of attention.
"We came north," she said. "We went all the way to the top." She looked at Arthas's fallen form and at the broken blade and at the summit's cold, transformed character. "And now there is something else."
"There is always something else," he said.
She looked at him with the quality of someone who has known a person long enough to know when they are being honest without softening and who respects the honesty without necessarily welcoming what it contains.
"Then we address something else," she said.
He looked at the group — at the assembled people who had come to Northrend with him and who had been with him through the campaign and who were now, at the summit's conclusion, looking at the next thing rather than the thing that had just concluded.
"Ulduar," he said.
"Ulduar," they confirmed, in the various, individual qualities of six people arriving at a shared direction from six different starting points.
Behind them, the broader coalition's deliberation about the Helm continued with the ongoing quality of a difficult question being worked through by capable people who understood the difficulty and were not going to pretend it was simpler than it was.
He would return to that when it needed him.
Right now, the next thing was what it was, and the people beside him had chosen it with the full, informed understanding of what it required.
That was enough. That had always been enough to begin with.
He looked north — past the citadel's walls, past Icecrown's expanse, past Dragonblight where his settlement still stood with the Crystal Tree in its sheltered corner and the Blue Drake Egg warm in its nest, toward the Storm Peaks where Ulduar waited with its corrupted guardians and its freed prisoner and the specific, patient malevolence of something that had been working on the world's vulnerabilities since before the current crisis had given anyone a reason to notice.
Yogg-Saron. He thought about what the Old God was and what facing it required and what the honest odds of the facing looked like in the precise, unsparing accounting that his five years of watching had built into how he assessed difficult situations.
Then he thought about the people beside him and what they were and what they had chosen. The odds were better than they had been five years ago when he had stood over the Helm and made a calculation.