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It begins earlier than the attempt to assassinate Darion Mograine, much earlier. Once the pieces of that are put together, it becomes apparent that several lower-ranking officers must have met their fates by the same person.
The disappearance of Captain Shao Boneblade happened in the far ends of Outland, so no one had had the resources to look too closely. He'd been known for his contemplative sojourns in Nagrand, among the ruins of a planet that had had its heart torn from it and yet still grew sweet grass and clean air, still held something good. Surely the Titan of Draenor was dead. Surely she was. What life was found, there, then, was unlife, and yet was beautiful.
Anyone who knew him would have said there was no reason for him to have jumped off of the edge. A Death Knight wouldn't be killed by the lack of oxygen, or the cold, just drift forever, still aware. In theory. There was no one to spare for an expedition into the Dark Beyond to find out.
Danov of the Festering Axe had been taken in by outright lying. His battalion indicated that they'd believed to have made contact with a Vrykul defector, one who resented bitterly that her people were being sacrificed like dogs to the maw of a false Death God, that the true Death God was Yogg-Saron, and that the sooner the false Arthas and his poisonous angels were dead the better for the survival of her people. Her intelligence had seemed genuine enough, actionable enough, that Danov had taken a retinue to hold an in-person meeting. Six Death Knights traveling together were a formidable force, and the trail of their dying was long, staggered, and dotted out over miles of the Storm Peaks. Three had fled, once it became clear what was happening; they told of what seemed like silent crossbow bolts, striking death knights through the eye holes in their helms, fired from a vantage point that must have been so high up the mountainside that it was invisible from the ground. Every shot had punctured the brain-stem, and the knights were unraisable. There was no way of striking back at an opponent they couldn't find, and every attempt to come out to try to locate them had resulted in another knight falling.
There were no bolts found in the bodies. It looked as if the wounds had been made by nothing at all.
Acherus, of course, had a method of autopsy; there was scarcely a realm of science or magic involving things one could do to, with, or on a corpse that the Knights of the Ebon Blade had not been designed to excel in. Half of necromancy itself was knowing how a body could be killed and how it could be un-killed afterwards.
"There!" the necromancer-coroner had chirped excitedly, pointing her stubby digit towards the remains of the body on the stone altar. Death Knights aren't an excited bunch, as a rule, but for gnomes, some things transcend even death. Deep in the basement-levels of Acherus' less lavishly-gothic laboratories, the shell of Lord Danov had been laid out, stripped of its armor, taken apart with the muscle memory of assembling and disassembling hundreds of gearcraft machines.
"Sense the magic in them? Just there! It's hard to detect, since this place is saturated in the same stuff. I had to move the body down away from the part of the ceiling where we'd have the forges directly overhead to even smell it. The weapon that made this wound was a runeblade!"
❕ [80] Live By The Runeblade...
After that, a few defeats that must have been simple bad luck. Death Knights pierced neatly through the head from a range that no living archer could hold a bow steady through, that no engineer could build a rifle to aim true over. Shots taken through the roofs of tents, or among caravans of adventurer expeditions, or, once, in full daylight in an Alliance-held town, in the queue for the post office. A Death Knight is immortal, until they aren't. A Death Knight is an unstoppable force in combat, until you are more than thirty yards away. A Death Knight can't strike at an opponent they can't see.
"It's a knife," the undead gnome chirps, once she has a second corpse to compare Danov to.
"Most definitely a short knife! With a ring at the base, as a rogue would use. You can tell by the entry scrapes, here and here. Something thin, and flat, pointed, with no arrowshaft, or hilt. A throwing-knife! I didn't even know you could runeforge a piece of metal this small. Who has the patience? All that tiny etching, just to end up with a weapon that can't break through any kind of armor. Maybe he's compensating for something? Hm, no, that joke only works on large swords, doesn't it...
Ehm - you can see- ... well, you can't see, but trust me... there aren't any exit marks! The weapon goes in but never comes out. It disappears!
Well, I know it's impossible. That's just what the evidence is telling me. You're the big adventurer. You figure it out!"
❕ [80] ...Die By The Runeblade
The assassination attempt begins like this:
A lower-ranking death knight Gates in, covered in her own black ichor, a slim throwing-knife through her throat already. Her eyes are bulging as she clasps at it.
A Death Knight doesn't need air to speak. A Death Knight doesn't fear loss of blood. She is trying to pull the knife out. Her arm is straining with the effort. She can't.
"Help - help me. It's not the only one. It's not - "
The blood makes her grip on the knife slippery, and she loses hold of it. It becomes apparent why she'd been hanging onto it so desperately. Once she can't pull any longer, she can't hold it still. The blade turns in the wound at ninety-degree angle and drives itself upwards through the roof of her mouth, as if shoved by a brutal, invisible hand.
Darion is, understandably, wrung out with worry on hearing the news, staggered with guilt. It all comes out as cold fury.
"This has gone far enough," the Highlord snaps, striding towards the autopsy bay. The gnome cowers, skittering double-time at his side to keep up with his longer legs. "A knight has fallen in the very heart of Acherus. Our kind has no place, no safe haven from either the living or the Scourge, save here. If this is one of our own, we must know now. Show her to me. This knight used the last of her energy to come to us, although she knew she did not have much longer to live. She had hope we would be able to save her.
We cannot, but we will not let her sacrifice be in vain. We will honor her by pushing forward, as we honor all of our fallen. Forward, always. There will not be another death by this method while I can raise a blade.
Come with me, Death Knight. Perhaps you can drag something more useful from what remains."
What Darion wants, he gets. Unfortunately, his proximity to the most recent victim reveals why the assassin had broken their pattern of targeting officers. The most recent victim had been an unremarkable foot-soldier, and she had been a carrier, the way abominations carry Plague, the way a cup carries poison. The minute that Darion is standing over the corpse, staring down at it, things go from bad to worse.
It's not the only one.
An understatement, as it turns out.
When the most recent victim had staggered through the gate, she had had half a dozen knives in her, each moving as if possessed of their own will, burrowing like bloodworms and digging like ghouls. They'd migrated down to hide in the rotten tissue of her chest and stomach, protected from detection by the walls of her ribcage. Out of the shell of her armor, her flesh is pulped with them, one even tunneled down as far as her thigh. Each blade is black, runed, humming, covered in ichor and bile and blood, and none the duller for it. Each is a short blade with a ring at the end. Each has the distinctive magical shimmer of not just a runeblade, but of something summoned.
"Dancing Rune Weapon!" the gnome gasps. She's speaking out of turn, and Darion turns his helmet to look at her, but doesn't interrupt.
"How do you know?" the Highlord asks.
"It has to be. That's why they disappear! That's why there's no one wielding them! But - but I've never seen anyone cast it like this before! Putting your own runeblade, your own soul, into something that's so far away from you, and for so long - only a lich can do something like that! And, and! The only active lich that knows anything about runeforging is Amanda Wi-"
A knife jumps like a fish. It bursts, wet, out of the flesh of the corpse. It tosses itself casually, and it pierces the gnome through the eye.
Before she hits the ground, she's dead. Before she hits the ground, the other five knives are already alive, darting through the air, swarming the Highlord.
The disappearance of Captain Shao Boneblade happened in the far ends of Outland, so no one had had the resources to look too closely. He'd been known for his contemplative sojourns in Nagrand, among the ruins of a planet that had had its heart torn from it and yet still grew sweet grass and clean air, still held something good. Surely the Titan of Draenor was dead. Surely she was. What life was found, there, then, was unlife, and yet was beautiful.
Anyone who knew him would have said there was no reason for him to have jumped off of the edge. A Death Knight wouldn't be killed by the lack of oxygen, or the cold, just drift forever, still aware. In theory. There was no one to spare for an expedition into the Dark Beyond to find out.
Danov of the Festering Axe had been taken in by outright lying. His battalion indicated that they'd believed to have made contact with a Vrykul defector, one who resented bitterly that her people were being sacrificed like dogs to the maw of a false Death God, that the true Death God was Yogg-Saron, and that the sooner the false Arthas and his poisonous angels were dead the better for the survival of her people. Her intelligence had seemed genuine enough, actionable enough, that Danov had taken a retinue to hold an in-person meeting. Six Death Knights traveling together were a formidable force, and the trail of their dying was long, staggered, and dotted out over miles of the Storm Peaks. Three had fled, once it became clear what was happening; they told of what seemed like silent crossbow bolts, striking death knights through the eye holes in their helms, fired from a vantage point that must have been so high up the mountainside that it was invisible from the ground. Every shot had punctured the brain-stem, and the knights were unraisable. There was no way of striking back at an opponent they couldn't find, and every attempt to come out to try to locate them had resulted in another knight falling.
There were no bolts found in the bodies. It looked as if the wounds had been made by nothing at all.
Acherus, of course, had a method of autopsy; there was scarcely a realm of science or magic involving things one could do to, with, or on a corpse that the Knights of the Ebon Blade had not been designed to excel in. Half of necromancy itself was knowing how a body could be killed and how it could be un-killed afterwards.
"There!" the necromancer-coroner had chirped excitedly, pointing her stubby digit towards the remains of the body on the stone altar. Death Knights aren't an excited bunch, as a rule, but for gnomes, some things transcend even death. Deep in the basement-levels of Acherus' less lavishly-gothic laboratories, the shell of Lord Danov had been laid out, stripped of its armor, taken apart with the muscle memory of assembling and disassembling hundreds of gearcraft machines.
"Sense the magic in them? Just there! It's hard to detect, since this place is saturated in the same stuff. I had to move the body down away from the part of the ceiling where we'd have the forges directly overhead to even smell it. The weapon that made this wound was a runeblade!"
❕ [80] Live By The Runeblade...
After that, a few defeats that must have been simple bad luck. Death Knights pierced neatly through the head from a range that no living archer could hold a bow steady through, that no engineer could build a rifle to aim true over. Shots taken through the roofs of tents, or among caravans of adventurer expeditions, or, once, in full daylight in an Alliance-held town, in the queue for the post office. A Death Knight is immortal, until they aren't. A Death Knight is an unstoppable force in combat, until you are more than thirty yards away. A Death Knight can't strike at an opponent they can't see.
"It's a knife," the undead gnome chirps, once she has a second corpse to compare Danov to.
"Most definitely a short knife! With a ring at the base, as a rogue would use. You can tell by the entry scrapes, here and here. Something thin, and flat, pointed, with no arrowshaft, or hilt. A throwing-knife! I didn't even know you could runeforge a piece of metal this small. Who has the patience? All that tiny etching, just to end up with a weapon that can't break through any kind of armor. Maybe he's compensating for something? Hm, no, that joke only works on large swords, doesn't it...
Ehm - you can see- ... well, you can't see, but trust me... there aren't any exit marks! The weapon goes in but never comes out. It disappears!
Well, I know it's impossible. That's just what the evidence is telling me. You're the big adventurer. You figure it out!"
❕ [80] ...Die By The Runeblade
The assassination attempt begins like this:
A lower-ranking death knight Gates in, covered in her own black ichor, a slim throwing-knife through her throat already. Her eyes are bulging as she clasps at it.
A Death Knight doesn't need air to speak. A Death Knight doesn't fear loss of blood. She is trying to pull the knife out. Her arm is straining with the effort. She can't.
"Help - help me. It's not the only one. It's not - "
The blood makes her grip on the knife slippery, and she loses hold of it. It becomes apparent why she'd been hanging onto it so desperately. Once she can't pull any longer, she can't hold it still. The blade turns in the wound at ninety-degree angle and drives itself upwards through the roof of her mouth, as if shoved by a brutal, invisible hand.
Darion is, understandably, wrung out with worry on hearing the news, staggered with guilt. It all comes out as cold fury.
"This has gone far enough," the Highlord snaps, striding towards the autopsy bay. The gnome cowers, skittering double-time at his side to keep up with his longer legs. "A knight has fallen in the very heart of Acherus. Our kind has no place, no safe haven from either the living or the Scourge, save here. If this is one of our own, we must know now. Show her to me. This knight used the last of her energy to come to us, although she knew she did not have much longer to live. She had hope we would be able to save her.
We cannot, but we will not let her sacrifice be in vain. We will honor her by pushing forward, as we honor all of our fallen. Forward, always. There will not be another death by this method while I can raise a blade.
Come with me, Death Knight. Perhaps you can drag something more useful from what remains."
What Darion wants, he gets. Unfortunately, his proximity to the most recent victim reveals why the assassin had broken their pattern of targeting officers. The most recent victim had been an unremarkable foot-soldier, and she had been a carrier, the way abominations carry Plague, the way a cup carries poison. The minute that Darion is standing over the corpse, staring down at it, things go from bad to worse.
It's not the only one.
An understatement, as it turns out.
When the most recent victim had staggered through the gate, she had had half a dozen knives in her, each moving as if possessed of their own will, burrowing like bloodworms and digging like ghouls. They'd migrated down to hide in the rotten tissue of her chest and stomach, protected from detection by the walls of her ribcage. Out of the shell of her armor, her flesh is pulped with them, one even tunneled down as far as her thigh. Each blade is black, runed, humming, covered in ichor and bile and blood, and none the duller for it. Each is a short blade with a ring at the end. Each has the distinctive magical shimmer of not just a runeblade, but of something summoned.
"Dancing Rune Weapon!" the gnome gasps. She's speaking out of turn, and Darion turns his helmet to look at her, but doesn't interrupt.
"How do you know?" the Highlord asks.
"It has to be. That's why they disappear! That's why there's no one wielding them! But - but I've never seen anyone cast it like this before! Putting your own runeblade, your own soul, into something that's so far away from you, and for so long - only a lich can do something like that! And, and! The only active lich that knows anything about runeforging is Amanda Wi-"
A knife jumps like a fish. It bursts, wet, out of the flesh of the corpse. It tosses itself casually, and it pierces the gnome through the eye.
Before she hits the ground, she's dead. Before she hits the ground, the other five knives are already alive, darting through the air, swarming the Highlord.
