The elements didn't whisper in the Black Temple. They screamed.
Mei Lin felt it before they even crossed the threshold. A wrongness in the air that made her fur stand on end and her totems hum with something between fury and fear. This place had been broken open by forces that didn't ask permission. Fel energy soaked the stone like old blood. The spirits here weren't sleeping. They were trapped.
"Well," she said, staring up at the entrance that looked like it had been carved by something that hated the sky. "This is cheerful."
"Right," Maxiona said, already three steps ahead because gnomish legs moved faster than anyone gave them credit for. "Keep up, don't stand in fire, and if my Observer stares at you, it's not judging. It's aiming."
Small. Gnomish. And yet the air around her bent slightly, as if the magic itself was standing at attention. The guild master moved with the energy of someone who had a list and intended to finish it. This was Mei Lin's first time fighting beside the gnome who had recruited her off a bench in Stormwind, and she'd half expected someone brooding. Someone dark and mysterious. Instead, Maxiona was warm, decisive, and entirely too cheerful for someone with a giant floating eyeball hovering over her shoulder.
Her Observer drifted above, trailing green-gold light, its gaze sweeping the corridors ahead. It was, in fact, judging.
Callisaw fell into step on Mei Lin's other side. Fists wrapped. Feet bare against the stone. Moving with a coiled quickness, like something about to strike at any moment. Mei Lin had sat with Callisaw before, over bad tea and slow staff forms. She had watched him practice the spaces between the strikes at dawn, which was its own kind of knowing. This was their first time fighting side by side, but she already knew the way he moved wasn't performance. It was promise. He was always there. Between you and the thing trying to hurt you. Every time. Without being asked.
"You ever been inside?" Mei Lin asked.
Callisaw shook his head. Smiled anyway. "First time for everything."
"Famous last words."
"Your famous last words were 'who wants to live forever' and you survived that."
"Fair point."
Three of them. Walking into a place where an army had once fallen.
The Black Temple was enormous. Not in the way that impressed. In the way that oppressed. Corridors stretched into shadow so deep the darkness felt solid. Chambers echoed with old violence, something soaked into stone that never fully drains. Statues of things that should never have been carved watched them pass with empty eyes that somehow still managed to judge.
Mei Lin planted totems at the first junction. Not for combat. Just to let the spirits breathe again in a place where breathing had been forgotten. The totem flickered. The spirits inside it recoiled. Whatever had lived here, the echoes of it still scared them.
"That bad?" Callisaw asked, watching the totem tremble.
"The spirits are doing the equivalent of hiding behind my legs," Mei Lin said. "Which is hard because they don't have legs."
"Do totems have legs?"
"Only when nobody's looking. I'm pretty sure they move when I turn around."
"Are you two done?" Maxiona called back, hands on hips, Observer hovering behind her like an impatient teacher. "The ancient evil isn't going to defeat itself. Well. It might. But I'd rather we got the credit."
Then the fighting started.
The first wave hit like a wall. Naga in the sewers beneath the temple, serpentine bodies coiling through waist-deep water that burned with fel corruption. Mei Lin sent chain lightning into the water and white arcs split the surface, leaping from body to body. The naga screamed in a language older than any she'd heard. The water boiled green.
Callisaw dropped into the middle of them. Fast. Brutally fast. A rapid-fire barrage of fists into a naga's chest, then a spinning kick that whipped through three more and sent the officer crashing into the wall. He fought like a whirlwind with knuckles, every strike landing before the last one finished echoing, never still long enough to be a target.
"Left side, both of you!" Maxiona shouted from the rear, hands up and glowing. "I'm going to light up the right and I don't want to explain to the guild why I set our shaman on fire!"
Her hands moved and the fire did the rest. Bolts of chaotic flame that streaked across the chamber and punched through naga like burning fists. Her Observer fired a searing beam from above that carved a line through a cluster of them. Columns of fire rained from the ceiling, immolating everything beneath.
"Was that all of them?" Mei Lin asked.
"No," Maxiona said brightly. "There's more. There's always more. That's the fun part."
She was genuinely enjoying this. Mei Lin decided that was either reassuring or deeply concerning.
"Is she always this terrifying?" Mei Lin asked Callisaw between lightning bolts.
"She's being gentle," Callisaw said, catching a naga's blade between his palms and snapping it.
"That's gentle?"
"You should see her in a bad mood."
Higher. Corridors bled fel-green from cracks in the walls. The air tasted like old blood and burned hair.
Supremus came first. A fist the size of a house swung past Callisaw's ear and Mei Lin's lightning found the cracks Maxiona's fire had opened. The whole thing came apart like a building remembering it was rubble.
The Shade of Akama was worse. Not because it hit hard. Because it didn't want to. A spirit chained to a service it had forgotten how to leave. Mei Lin set her totems and finished it fast, because some things you don't do for loot. You do them because the screaming has to stop.
Teron Gorefiend met them in a corridor where the shadows moved against the light. Curses crawled across the floor like something looking for feet. "Oh, a death knight," Maxiona said, cracking her knuckles. "I love death knights. They think they're scary."
She stood in the center of his necrotic field and grinned.
Between volleys, Maxiona caught Mei Lin's eye. "You're doing great, new girl. For the record." Winked. Then went right back to incinerating the dead.
It shouldn't have mattered. A throwaway line in the middle of a fight. But Mei Lin's hands had been shaking for the last two corridors and she hadn't told anyone, and somehow Maxiona had seen it anyway. The shaking stopped.
Gurtogg Bloodboil hit so hard that Callisaw caught a blow meant for Mei Lin and went skidding across the floor. He was back on his feet before the dust settled. Grinning. "I've had worse," he said.
"You've had worse?"
"I train with monks. We punch each other for fun."
"Your people are insane."
"Says the shaman who shocks people back to life."
Higher still. The air grew thick with fel energy and old anger. The Reliquary of Souls was a coffin of trapped ghosts, hundreds of them, each one halfway through a last word they'd never finished. Mei Lin's totems screamed so loud she had to muffle them with her hands.
Mother Shahraz turned the next chamber into a lattice of shadow and fire beams, crossing and recrossing the room in slow, patient arcs that carved the dark into squares. Callisaw led them through it one careful step at a time, reading the beams the way he read staff forms at dawn, while the light tried to find them and kept missing by a hand's-breadth.
And then the summit opened before them.
Mei Lin planted totems at the entrance. Her hands were shaking again. Not from fear. From the elements. They were loud in here. Louder than she'd ever felt them. The storm wanted this place clean. The water wanted to wash the corruption away. The earth wanted to bury what had been done here. And the fire, the fire wanted to burn it all.
"Ready?" Callisaw asked. Fists up. Feet set. That same steady smile.
Maxiona cracked her neck. "I've been wanting to meet this one. Ten thousand years of brooding? He needs a hobby."
Mei Lin thought about the Obsidian Sanctum. About the last time she'd stood at a threshold and asked herself if she was ready.
"So..." she said, because she couldn't help herself. "Who wants to live forever?"
Callisaw laughed.
Maxiona walked through the door.
They found Illidan Stormrage at the summit.
The Betrayer. The one who had consumed the Skull of Gul'dan and let it reshape him into something that wasn't quite elf, wasn't quite demon, wasn't quite anything the world knew how to name. He stood in the ruins of his own ambition, wings spread, blades drawn, radiating millennia of compressed fury.
"YOU ARE NOT PREPARED," he said.
Mei Lin looked at Callisaw. Looked at Maxiona. Looked back at Illidan.
"I've heard that before," she said. "Last dragon who said something similar didn't make it."
"Not prepared?" Maxiona laughed. Actually laughed. "Honey, I brought my own fire." Her Observer surged upward, its eye blazing, firing beams of searing light down onto Illidan's wings. Green-gold bolts of chaotic fire streaked from her hands, each one detonating against the Betrayer with a sound like breaking glass and burning air.
Callisaw closed the distance before Illidan finished speaking. Fast, impossibly fast, fists and feet a blur between the twin blades. A rising kick caught him under the chin. A barrage of punches hammered into his ribs before he could recover. Then he was spinning through the space around Illidan, feet whipping in a wide arc. Monks don't fight strength. They overwhelm it.
Mei Lin drove her fire totem into the stone and roared for Heroism.
Not like the Obsidian Sanctum. Not a prayer. Not a plea.
This was a war cry.
The world went red.
Power erupted through all three of them like a dam breaking. Callisaw roared, fists and feet blurring into something beyond speed, every strike thundering through Illidan's guard. Maxiona screamed with laughter, fel fire pouring from both hands in a torrent that turned the air to glass. And Mei Lin felt the storm rip through her like it had been caged and someone had finally kicked the door open.
Everything. All at once. Every element she could reach, every spirit that would answer, every ounce of fury the world had been holding back since the Betrayer first took this place.
Illidan fought like something that had forgotten how to be tired. Blade after blade, wing beats that cracked the air, fel fire erupting from his hands in waves that scorched the stone black. He moved between them, trying to separate them, trying to break the rhythm they'd found.
He couldn't.
Callisaw caught a blade on his forearms, redirected it into the floor, and drove his knee into Illidan's chest hard enough to stagger a ten-thousand-year-old half-demon backwards. Maxiona's chaotic bolts tore through his guard, chaotic fire unraveling the fel energy that held him together. And Mei Lin sent chain lightning through the open sky above the summit, white-blue voltage splitting the corrupt air, arcing from totem to totem until the rooftop blazed.
Illidan rose into the air. Wings spread. Fel fire pouring from his eyes. The air itself caught fire.
And that was when he turned on Maxiona.
A wave of fel flame, concentrated and vicious, aimed straight at the gnome who'd been burning holes in him for the last three minutes. Maxiona was mid-cast, fire building in both hands, too committed to dodge.
Callisaw was there.
Not because anyone called for him. Not because he saw it coming and calculated the angle. He was there because that's where Callisaw always was. Between danger and his friends. He planted himself in front of Maxiona, arms crossed, feet braced, and took the full blast of a Betrayer's wrath across his shoulders. The fel fire broke around him like water around a stone. His fur singed. His wraps caught flame. He didn't move.
Maxiona finished her cast. The bolt that left her hands was the biggest one yet, and it hit Illidan square in the chest.
Mei Lin saw Callisaw stagger. Saw the fel burns spreading up his arms, green-black corruption eating into fur and muscle. She reached for the water spirits but the air in the Black Temple was wrong, tainted, every drop of moisture soaked in ages of fel. No clean water to call. No pure source to draw from.
So she made one.
She pulled water from the stone itself, from the cracks in the floor, from the corrupted puddles pooling in the corners. Fel-tainted, all of it. And between her palms and Callisaw's burning shoulders, she did what grandmother had taught her the water could do. It finds the wound. It fills the crack. She forced the corruption out of the water mid-flight, purifying it through sheer will, and sent a riptide surging across his burns.
Not a gentle riptide. Not grandmother's careful stream that lingered and mended. This was a flood, raw and fast and furious, water that had been made clean by a shaman too stubborn to accept that the temple's corruption applied to her as well. The riptide clung to his shoulders, his arms, his hands, washing the fel burns clean and staying, mending what it had cleaned.
Callisaw straightened. Rolled his shoulders. Turned back to the fight.
Illidan came down. Hard. Blades first. The floor cracked beneath the impact and Callisaw rolled clear, came up swinging, caught him across the jaw with a kick that would have killed anything mortal. Maxiona's Observer locked its gaze on Illidan and fired a sustained beam into the space between his wings. And Mei Lin hit him with everything she had left. Lava burst. Lightning bolt. A stoneskin totem she slammed into the cracked floor beneath his hooves and let the earth answer for itself. Every element, raw and furious and done waiting.
The Betrayer fell.
Not gracefully. Not with a speech. He just... stopped. The fel fire guttered out. The wings folded. And Illidan Stormrage knelt in the ruins of the Black Temple and for the first time since his fall, he was still.
Maxiona clapped her hands together once. Dusted them off. "Right. That's done." She turned to her Observer, which was still hovering overhead with its eye fixed on Illidan's slumped form. "You can stop staring, he's finished."
The Observer did not stop staring.
"Well. That's one less demon lord." Then, brighter: "Who's hungry? Because I could eat an entire roasted talbuk and I know a place in Shattrath that does them on a spit with this Aldor spice rub that'll change your life."
Mei Lin stared at her. They had just toppled a ten-thousand-year-old demon lord and the guild master was thinking about dinner.
It made perfect sense, actually.
Callisaw walked over and put a hand on Mei Lin's shoulder. His wraps were still scorched from the fel blast. He didn't seem to notice. "That thing you did with the water," he said. "I felt that. Like getting hit with the cleanest rainstorm in the world."
"You were on fire. I panicked."
"Best panic I've ever been on the receiving end of."
Mei Lin looked at the burns still visible on his arms. "You jumped in front of that for her."
"Course I did." He said it like she'd pointed out the sky was up. Like the idea of doing anything else hadn't occurred to him.
That. That was why she trusted him. Not the speed. Not the fists. The fact that it never even crossed his mind to step aside.
Mei Lin planted one last totem in the stone before they left. Not for combat. Not for healing. Just to let the spirits know that someone had come. Someone had listened. Someone had cleaned out the thing that had been hurting them.
The totem hummed. Softly this time. Not scared anymore.
"Come on, Mist," Maxiona called from the doorway, Observer bobbing impatiently above her. "Talbuk's not going to eat itself. And I'm buying. Guild master privilege."
Callisaw grinned. "She always buys."
"She's bribing us," Mei Lin said.
"Is it working?"
Mei Lin looked back at the Black Temple one last time. Dark and still and finally, finally quiet. Then she turned and followed her friends down the mountain, toward warm food and good company and the sound of Maxiona already arguing with her Observer about which route was fastest.
— Mist
Achievement Unlocked
The Black Temple