Let Darkness Come

[Illidan Stormrage]

Nothing existed, save the chill. It snaked through him, a thousand tendrils digging, spreading the dark, icy void, making it one with his soul. Thoughts struggled for relevance against the will of the black. Hanging without binds, floating without air, it permeated all of him, manipulated his essence, until it joined with the chaos. His spirit, ripped apart and replaced bit by bit, rested. Despite the torturous reconfiguration, the sadistic will rebuilding him in a agonising new image, the spirit found an odd peace. Demonic minds chattered and wailed in his thoughts until he didn't know which were his, yet the madness that engulfed him was not new, not alien.
 
No, as the Twisting Nether spilled into him, his skeleton solidifying, his veins coiling around bone, muscle and flesh stretching over him, as his consciousness rose from the eldritch nightmares that it had been dunked into, he remembered. When first he drank of these black waters, when the surge of evil drowned him, he struggled and thrashed against the deep. This time, as demon fire flooded his body, as his spine arched against the hot kiss, he laughed.
 
The process almost killed him last time. The Twisting Nether sculpted him without mercy, its oily fingers penetrating his mind, tearing at his will, ordering his identity to dissolve. It almost claimed him last time. But it didn't.
 
As the chaotic magicks thrummed within him, as the demons of the void screamed and demanded fealty, Illidan laughed in their faces. He roared in delight, screaming joy at their torment, finding humour in the mental claws that raked over his mind. They did not turn him then, and by the gods, they would not turn him now. He would partake of their unholy power, but never would he bend the knee to the masters of the Twisting Nether.
 
Their presence remained as demonic energy funnelled into him, but with each passing second the night elf forced them back, fending them away from his soul. They resisted, inflicting more wounds on his spirit, scratching at the very concept of his existence, but they could not override his will. He mocked them as they finally fled, furious and frustrated, back to the inky maelstrom of their home.
 
Illidan awoke.
 
The grey sea of clouds was visible above him. Wooden planks stacked in haphazard heaps all around him. A candelabra lay on its side, the small flames snuffed out, smoke twisting from the wicks. The entirety of the cathedral had been blown apart. No sign of Milton, nor Gerald or Marie.
 
Illidan climbed to his feet, still gripping the Skull of Gul'dan. Despite the powers he had wrested from it, a connection to the Twisting Nether still remained, burrowed deep in its core. He cinched it back on his belt. Its worth had not been completely drained.
 
He breathed the stale air of the Pale Moors with new lungs. Huge, bat-like wings protruded from his back. Thick, hardened hooves replaced the purple flesh of his feet and toes. Ebony horns jutted from his forehead, curling above his skull. The emerald tattoos scrawled over his broad chest and arms glimmered faintly with the energy raging inside him.
 
Joy everlasting soaked his mind. Flaring his wings, Illidan laughed maniacally into the dreary sky, muscled arms raised in triumph. How he had forgotten the sweet nectar of the Burning Legion! He had only been parted from it for a short time, but the difference was like night and day. Just standing there in the ruins of the building, he felt more alive than ever before. He couldn't even remember the arguments he made against absorbing the power.
 
Reining in his glee, Illidan looked around. The necromancer could be dead, motionless beneath a stack of splintered wood, but until the night elf demon saw incontrovertible proof of his demise, he wouldn't accept it. After all, he lunged at Illidan while a warglaive was imbedded in his frail excuse of a body.
 
Illidan clopped around, throwing his hands around, releasing waves of telekinetic force. Wood piles exploded, revealing the ground beneath. As he blasted apart another, he spotted a body. It was Milton, glassy eyes staring into the great beyond, warglaive erect in his chest cavity like a flagless pole. The night elf demon knelt by the corpse.
 
"Your power paled in comparison to my true self," Illidan said, spitting on the corpse. "No wonder you tried to steal it from me."
 
Illidan reached for the warglaive. As his hand found the weapon, it flickered like a broken holographic projection. The same malady infected Milton's corpse, and a moment later, they both blinked out of vision.
 
Movement from behind. Illidan's blood chilled as he spun to face the real Milton, mid-leap and descending towards him, crackling yellow energy surrounding his hands.
 
Illidan opened his wings and flapped, hopping backwards as the necromancer landed. A yellow explosion rattled the night elf demon's teeth, its sizzle tingling his skin despite not being caught in the blast.
 
"Close," Milton said, grinning that insane grin. The warglaive still hooked through his chest, dried blood sealing the steel into flesh. "Thought I'd be that easy to kill? Blow up a building and old man Milton dies?" He threw his head back and raucous laughter spilled out into the sky. The type of laughter that belonged to a mentally unhinged psychopath. "I can't believe your mind fell for such an obvious trick. You think I'm so feeble?"
 
Illidan scowled, feeling the hatred boil his blood, giving shape to his power. "Feeble isn't the right word. Decrepit suits you better. A flimsy, brittle skeleton wearing the flesh of a man."
 
Milton found that most enjoyable, as evidenced by his chortling response. "Fantastic! I didn't know a demon could have such a great sense of humour!"
 
"I'm not a -" Illidan cut himself off. Technically, he wasn't; a demon lost their will to the Twisting Nether, but in all other aspects of the definition, it was true. He growled. "I see you've finally gone insane, realising your death is so near."
 
"Oh night elf," Milton said, waggling a gaunt finger. "Even after you drained that artefact, I'm still easily your better."
 
Once, before Illidan stepped foot into this new realm, his spectral sight could detect the potential of individuals. Through magical means unknown to him, he could read skills, strengths, powers and more simply by staring at a person. Whether due to Milton's deliberate suppression or the same cause that ripped the demon from him earlier, he couldn't confirm if the necromancer was bluffing.
 
"Then why hunger for the skull so badly?"
 
Milton giggled, apparently thinking the answer was self evident. "The same reason you did! We all want more power, don't we?" He spread his scrawny arms to the sky. "I just wanted to take that skull before anything happened to it! After all, it would've been less painful for you if I drew the power from a skull than from your soul, right?" More laughter.
 
Illidan balled his fists. Fury flooded him. He fired out telekinetic hooks into the warglaive in Milton's chest and willed the weapon back to him. Milton was ready for it this time, and a magical wall blunted Illidan's attack.
 
"Oh no, this is mine! I can't trust you with these things!"
 
The other one, where was it? Spectral sight fanned out like water, searching under the debris of the chapel, until Illidan located it. With another flex of his will, the warglaive burst forth and straight into his grasp. One blade would be enough.
 
Milton laughed. "Oh, I forgot about the other one!" He shrugged. "Fat lot of good it'll do you though!"
 
Two clasps snapped around Illidan's ankles. Skeletal hands sprouted out of the earth like nightmarish flowers and seized him. He pulled, thrusting his knees upwards, but the grip was ironclad. He looked up in time to see a terrible tide of yellow magic spill toward him. Unable to move, Illidan yelled and hid behind his warglaive like a thin shield.
 
The sickly wave crashed over him, split down the centre. While the warglaive cut the stream in two, the magic still ripped at him on either side. Death and fatigue blew through him like a gale, stealing the strength from his body. Even in his demon form, Illidan could not resist such potent spells.
 
Time fading fast, Illidan beat his wings, hoping for some lift. The bony fingers holding him in place budged, and with one last flap, Illidan shot into the air. The fresh wind slapping against his face reinvigorated him, and using the trajectory of his jump, he angled at Milton, plummeting with warglaive extended.
 
The old necromancer shifted and absorbed the impact of Illidan's strike with his bare hands, pale yellow light enveloping them. The night elf demon pressed down with all his might, expecting the blade to cleave through the paper-thin flesh at any moment.
 
"This is it? This is all you've got?" Milton sneered. "Maybe that skull wasn't worth all this trouble after all!"
 
Impossible! How could this Milton stand before the awesome wrath of Illidan at the zenith of his strength? Where could he find such incredible power? His muscles strained, unholy tattoos glowing hot green, but the necromancer wasn't giving an inch of ground.
 
Milton smiled, the skin so tight on his face that it looked a moment away from tearing. "What do you say we make things more interesting?"
 
A tremor boomed through the ground. Illidan almost fell to a knee, but found the balance to remain upright. "What the hell was that?"
 
The necromancer shrieked with laughter. If holding Illidan off took any degree of focus, it didn't show. "Didn't you notice how my army of undead were missing?"
 
Another quake and an explosion of dirt preceded a monstrous figure, at least twenty feet tall, emerging from the earth. Its hulking body was uneven, surface irregular, hewn roughly from rigid material. Illidan couldn't afford it more attention lest he borrow it from Milton.
 
The necromancer, however, grew bored of their struggle. A painless but forceful concussive blast launched Illidan backwards. "Impressed? Not just any necromancer can build a giant mega-skeleton from the bones of regular ones!"
 
Illidan's jaw clenched as he drew in the mega-skeleton. Supported on legs of meshed bones of all varieties, wound by grey and pink muscles, it thumped its chest built entirely of ribcages with one massive fist. Its other arm lacked the same girth; perhaps Milton ran out of 'supplies' by the time he got to it. The head was forged of broken bones, the seams of the original components clearly visible, until it resembled a horrid, misshapen skull. Dozens of undead eyes sat in the cavernous black sockets like piles of fleshy marbles.
 
Killing that summon seemed like an insurmountable task. Detaching a limb wouldn't stop the skeletal horror if it functioned anything like a regular undead. He had to destroy the head. Doing that with a warglaive seemed ... impractical.
 
The unclean magic binding the monster together flooded from Milton, pallid streams of light linking them together. Maybe if he bit the dust, his pet would collapse into a gory mound? It was his best bet.
 
Illidan raised his arm and hurled the warglaive like a shuriken. It spun end over end, whistling as it cut a line through the air.
 
Milton bent at the waist, feet rooted in spot, and reached out an empty hand to the side. Illidan frowned. Was he ... exercising? Was he that confident in his strength?
 
A gargantuan hand shielded Milton as the warglaive hit home. The hand lifted into the air and the puny hand of the unholy amalgam plucked the weapon from its palm like a splinter. Milton smiled, mimicking the same motion himself.
 
"Won't this be fun?"
 
A fist the size of an elekk fell from the sky. Unarmed and doubting his power, Illidan boosted into the sky. The earth beneath him rumbled, grass and earth sucked into the impact. The smaller hand, though still not small by any means, slapped into Illidan. He rolled like a leaf in the wind, the world spinning around him, until he unfurled his wings and zoomed out of a nosedive.
 
The bigger fist shook the earth as it withdrew and careened for Illidan. Manoeuvring in the air, the night elf demon dodged. That beast might've been taller than a house, but Illidan was far faster and nimbler. The smaller hand jabbed in the space where the big hand wound itself up for another attack, yet with his full attention, he swerved away from every strike.
 
"Annoying little gnat!" Milton shouted, raising his thin arms above his head, the undead behemoth moving in synchronisation.
 
An idea birthed in the night elf demon's mind. That's it, Illidan thought, keep telegraphing your attacks. He dropped to the earth, wings wide and awaiting, bathing in the shadow of the hoisted arms.
 
"That's it?!" Milton screeched. "Giving up so easily?"
 
He wasted no time. Clenching his starved fingers, the necromancer swung them down to the ground, his mega-skeleton following suit. There!
 
Illidan threw out his hands, incanting the spell at breakneck speed. Tendrils of telekinetic magic coiled around Milton's form, finding no barrier. The shock wrote all over the necromancer's face as the night elf demon hauled him forward. Jumping backwards, he avoided the flying Milton, who landed right where he had been               standing. Illidan barely hit the ground before the boulder-like fists crashed into the necromancer and the surrounding earth. A rush of wind slammed into him, batting him backwards like a paper ball.
 
Sinking clawed fingers into the dry earth, Illidan ground himself to a halt. The mega-skeleton's shoulders were the first to detach, the arms splitting into hundreds of original pieces, showering the field with bones and rotted flesh. The skull broke like shattered glass, eyeballs spilling out. Illidan turned heel and sprinted as it continued its rapid deterioration, its fused graveyard of body parts amassing in a wave.
 
Finally the rumbling stopped. Illidan spun, staring at a mound of skeletal remains, Milton's filthy corpse now a part of them. As he suspected, the mega-skeleton only stood while the necromancer did, and his death meant the magical binds would unwind.
 
Still, as much as it grated him, he stood in awe of that bastard's raw power. Even without the Skull of Gul'dan, Milton outshone Illidan in almost every aspect. If he hadn't acted on impulse like he did, the fight may have turned out very differently. And still Milton wanted more!
 
What if there were others like him? Maybe even stronger than him? How could Illidan absolve the land of this curse if one simple necromancer could almost kill him single-handedly? How could he face off against this Count Dracula, intimated to be the pinnacle of the taint?
 
A memory tweaked in his mind. Something Milton had said earlier. "Anyway, I've wanted to join his elite for some time now, and thanks to a new policy, he will grant anyone an audience who brings a severed soldier head and an innocent person. If he finds them worthy, he grants them a portion of his power."
 
Illidan curled his fingers into a fist, gazing at the corruption of his flesh. Vast power he had already received from the Burning Legion, utilised for the sole purpose of crushing it. If even Sargeras's gift wasn't enough, then maybe Count Dracula ... Gerald and Marie were around here somewhere. They would suffice, surely.
 
Illidan snarled. Side with the darkness again? Did he forget what happened the last time? Disfigurement, ten thousand years imprisonment, and banishment! Despite all he did! Despite all the good he did his people! They just turned their back on him!
 
No, that's the wrong thing to focus on. Illidan replayed the torment of losing his amber eyes and having balls of green demon fire substituted in their place. Yet even such a torturous augment had been of greater use than anything Cenarius tried to teach him. He found his sympathy for the old world slipping away again.
 
The ichors of the Burning Legion galvanised him where the night elves left him to rot. Even his own twin brother couldn't understand his sacrifice, what he surrendered to bring down their greatest enemy. To stand there with a forest demigod, believing that nature could defend against the almighty force of the demons was foolish. With such discrepancies in their strength, there was only one logical decision, albeit demanding a cost just short of death.
 
Illidan's imbuement of the demon's power twisted him irrevocably, but his will won out, and he had always utilised that very boon against them. It took dozens of adventurers plus Maiev Shadowsong to finally put him down in the Black Temple. Before that, no one rivalled him, not even Arthas!
 
With Count Dracula's blessing, how much more good could he do! How many undead monstrosities would shatter beneath his heel? The very magic that gave them unlife would be their undoing! Illidan would sacrifice himself further to ensure the world's safety.
 
Yet memories of Sargeras sprung to mind. When he promised himself to the Burning Legion over ten thousand years ago, he lied to infiltrate them, yet the demon master saw through to the truth in a heartbeat. If Count Dracula had similar insight, his journey could end before it began.
 
Illidan set out a magical pulse and moments later located the bodies of the humans. He stomped towards heavy, interlaced planks and hauled them away. Gerald's back bore scratches and splinters that stuck fast in his skin. His unmoving body covered another.
 
He grabbed Gerald's wrist and pulled him onto his back. Eyes closed, mouth ajar, skin clammy and blue, his breaths came in wisps. Purple fingers pressed against his throat, searching for a pulse. He found it, weak and light, but it was there.
 
Crouching, he checked Marie's vitals. Hanging on, but barely, the thread of her life fraying faster than Gerald's.
 
A deadness hung in Illidan's chest. The air around him grew a little colder, a little more bitter. A warglaive burst from the remains of the mega-skeleton and sought out its master, fitting snugly into his hand. The night elf demon knew what he had to do, raising the blade above his horns.
 
"... he will grant anyone an audience who brings a severed soldier head and an innocent person ..."
 
Betray.