Home

"You must go home."

His boots sunk softly into the snow with each step, the whirling blizzard around him offering cover for both his body and the shuffling of his armor.

They told me this was home.

Far in the distance, before his eyes could see through the storm, he sensed them, as if something were pressing at the far reaches of his mind.  An internal compass told him their direction, and roughly judged their distance.

"This is not home.  This is a place of rest.  Rest is for the dead."

The lifting of his mace to his shoulder caused his armor to clank loudly in protest at the weight.  He was dimly aware that the sheer size of the weapon made him uncomfortable, but pushed the thought away.

"The mark of the North rests upon you.  The North is a place of war unending."

He broke through the shroud.  The snow that remained on his armor and cloak left his entire visage pale, and all that revealed him was the glowing of his armor against the backdrop of snow behind him.  Here, the storm was thinner.

I will not remain like this.  I am no use to anyone.

Heads turned, already slack jaws opened at the prospect of flesh, and from above the small raised platform, two Scourge necromancers gazed at him with glassy eyes, muttering their dark commands.

This man is dead.  He must go back to the grave.

Forward came the ghouls, wild howls ripping from their throats, claws extended, bandaged feet laboring madly over the snow to reach their prey.

"It was you who let him live on."

He hefted his weapon.  The strike missed, but it mattered not.  The sheer weight of the mace's shaft colliding with two ghouls sent them barreling backwards into a line of their companions.

"As if you could not be you without him."
As their weak bodies caved beneath the weapon's weight, something woke with a jolt within him.  Frost danced over his fingertips, and around he swung, hurling bolt after bolt of ice into the ranks of the oncoming swarm.

Walking in it now, as he once was... This world has no place for him.

He tore through the army of risen dead, leaving behind only brutalized remains.  Bone shattered beneath each strike, flesh melting.  When few remained, he heard a call, and the ghouls backed away.  They fell, reduced to piles of bone, another sound replacing their howls and gurgles.

Daeyn Skysong is dead.  I will let him rest in peace.

From the risen metal altar dropped three Death Knights, freshly risen.  Runeblades of other, fallen champions held tightly in their hands.  By the look in their eyes, he knew their hunger.  He remembered it.  They lashed out.

"Something must take his place. Amidst the bloodstained snow, have you found yourself?"

Three Initiates.  Three schools of magic.  The first struck out, swinging swiftly.  Ice formed in the air around him, spike upon spike of it flying towards his target's body.  The first, whose mace was decorated around ghoul-flesh, drew the ice in around the weapon's head.  As the Disciple of Ice charged, he rose one weapon to parry the imminent mace strike.

I remember a monster.  I remember a murderer of children and of women.  One who broke the minds of fathers and made their daughters consume their flesh.

The first Disciple's blade broke against the weight of ice and mace, the shards of frost splitting and impaling his face.  He fell to the ground as the second approached.

"You are not that monster.  That monster served another."

The second Disciple came foreward, his blade soaked in rot, his pale, almsot greenish flesh giving enough allusion to his skill.  The death knight lunged foreward, aiming for a knee joint, his putrid breath releasing a cloud of plague.

I remember a man.  A guardian, who protected by spilling blood, but a slave to his absolution.

The man who had hunted this altar turned his back to the plague and stepped inwards, using his mace as a counterweight to his momentum.  His right arm swung up, the mace following through.  The sheer force and strike of one of the mace's scythes sent the Unholy Disciple's arm loose from its socket, and flying in another direction.

"You are not a man.  Men live, men die.  You do not walk in the world of the living, though you may love it."

The aggressor's fingers came up, index and middle striking into one of the festering wounds in the second Disciple's torso.  The Disciple's body wretched, and his visage paled more deeply as his plague turned against him, putryifying wounds boiling over with pus as raging disease ate away at his mind.

I will not atone.  I will not offer recompense.  I will not grieve sins that were not mine, and I will not grieve sins commited in their defense.

The third Disciple, a Tauren wielding a double-headed axe, was not so quick to engage.  Foreward he moved, aiming a mighty downward slash towards his target.  The air sang out as it retreaded from the sharp edge of the blade, which met only snow.

I will defend their lives, but the quality of their lives is to them.

The mace-wielder struck out again.  The cost of his contact was a glancing blow from the axe, and from the wound upon his shoulder, he felt blood flow, mixing with the crimson ribbon left behind by the Disciple of Blood's leg wound.

"Who are you?"

The next strike of the axe, a vertical slash, met with a clang against the shaft of Skyshatter.  The mace's wielder forced the blow away, taking hold of the weapon's shaft with both hands and jamming it upwards, into the Tauren's face.  Before the blood could be used, however, he struck out again, crushing the former Shu'halo's bent left knee.

I am Xynrael...

A final blow.  The Tauren's skull collapsed, split straight down the middle and crushed in by Skyshatter's scythed head.

The Dawnbreaker.

As he mounted the altar, the exhausted necromancers retreated, weakly weaving spells against the approaching Death Knight.

"And where does the Dawnbreaker call home?"
As he drained the feeble remnants of life from the remaining necromancers, sucking their twisted souls into his runemace, he grinned.

The same for all creatures.  Home is where the heart is.  Home...

He turned away, the air before him splitting open in a portal to Acherus.

... Is where the -war- is.