Thrall - Christie Golden [60]
Fly away, orc, he mused, his thin lips curling in a smile. Fly, but you cannot flee.
I will find you, and I will slay you. And then I will help destroy your world.
THIRTEEN
Thrall had to admit to himself that he was uneasy about approaching the blue dragonflight in its own lair. Exposure to the great leviathans had in no way lessened their majesty in his eyes. Indeed, the more he learned of dragons, the more impressed he became. Green, bronze, the mighty yet heartbroken Life-Binder, who was arguably the most powerful dragon in all of Azeroth—even the least of them could destroy him with a single tail swipe or crush him beneath a clawed foot.
They had impressed him more than physically as well. Their minds were not those of the “shorter-lived” races, as they termed them. They thought on a larger scale, and no matter how long he lived, Thrall knew he could only grasp the merest fraction of their complexity: Ysera’s dreaminess even as the Awakened, seeing things no other being had or ever could; the weaving of a life in Nozdormu’s scales; the aching pain of one who held the world’s compassion in her heart. …
Now Thrall and Tick were heading directly for the dragonflight that had recently caused so much harm—whose Aspect had been chosen to be the guardian of arcane magic in the world. Malygos had gone mad, and then, fearfully sane, had done worse things than he had ever done in the grasp of his insanity. Thrall had not walked in the Emerald Dream, but he had exchanged jokes with Desharin. He had done his best to help Alexstrasza, huddled and broken. He had been able to enlighten the Timeless One.
But the blues …
No love of the “lesser races” had they, this flight—masters of arcane magic, living in climates as blue and white and cold as they themselves were said to be.
He chuckled ruefully as he anticipated the meeting. “Perhaps I should have just stayed home,” he said to Tick.
“Had you done so,” Tick mused, “then this timeway would have been altered even more, and you would have created yet more work for my brethren.”
It took Thrall a moment to realize that while in a way the bronze was serious, she was also attempting humor. Thrall laughed.
The blue-gray of the frigid ocean beneath them, which was all Thrall had been able to see for much of the journey, gave way to white and gray cliffs. Thrall had seen many impressive sights in his day, but the Nexus came close to topping them all.
Blue, it was all blue, with shades of silver and white here and there. Several flat disks hovered in the air, spaced around the Nexus itself. As Tick flew closer, Thrall could see that these disks were platforms. Their flooring was ornamented with glowing, inlaid sigils, and on a few of them were beautiful crystalline trees, their branches seemingly made of ice and leafed with frost.
The Nexus itself seemed to comprise many levels, each one connected to the one above by magical strands of arcane energy. It was, all in all, one of the most beautiful things Thrall had seen. Several dragons were lazily circling, their bodies in all shades of cerulean, aquamarine, or cobalt.
Thrall and Tick were spotted almost at once, of course, and four blue dragons broke away from their brethren and approached. Their challenge was not issued to the orc but rather to the mighty bronze dragon. Thrall was, for the moment, utterly ignored.
“We greet our bronze sister,” one of them said as they flew in an apparently casual but nonetheless intimidating loose circle around Tick. “But the Nexus is not a timeway for you to explore. Why have you come to our sanctuary? No one invited you here.”
“It is not I who come to you but this orc whom I bear,” Tick said. “Nor is it I who send him this way. He was sent first by Ysera the Awakened, and then by Nozdormu the Timeless One, to this place. His name is Thrall.”
The blues exchanged glances. “For a short-lived being, he comes heralded,” one said.
“Thrall,” another said, as if trying to recall. “The warchief of the Horde.”
“No longer,” Thrall said. “I am but a shaman working with