Blue Drake

Breaking into his father’s study should never have occurred to him in the first place.  He did not belong there and any information or artifacts contained within belonged to his father alone.  Even if his father was dead and his title passed to one of his children—and not the one who had opened the door and quietly shut it behind him.

The door would only allow a very specific height and shape of humanoid form through it, and close only just cut it in the case of the young blue drake.  He had been in once before, though, when his father had told him and several others of his most trusted children that he planned to reclaim Azeroth’s magic and place it within his sanctum.  Two of them had agreed both with his plan and its mode of execution.  One had not agreed with his plan at all and had been sent away the soonest.  The last, who was now taking in the full glory of the study, had agreed with the ideas, but had not agreed with the war to do it.

To that one, he had whispered the key for entry after the others had been dismissed.  “Someone must be here to listen,” he had said cryptically.  “And I would prefer that someone be you.  You know what must be done and you are smart enough to question my methods.”

“Should I die…” the blue drake murmured, rubbing his arms at the chill he only now felt.  The words were his father’s, but somehow he needed to hear them out loud.  “You’ll have to be the one to listen.  Should I die, I want you to travel the world and prove to yourself that magic is worth leaving in the hands of the mortals, who I think will destroy…everything.  I already know my sister will not understand.”

He had asked, then, if his father could not simply talk to his sister and try to explain without simply starting the war.

“Even then, she will not.  She believes in them, that they are essentially good.  Perhaps she is right.  But perhaps even the essentially good ones do not need magic to live.”  So his father had said.  They had been silent, as the young drake was silent now.

He looked around; he had felt called to the study.  Perhaps that meant there was something to listen to, though he still didn’t fully understand what that meant.  But as he looked around, he could see nothing out of the ordinary.  The walls still gleamed with magic and power; the runes still guarded the door.  The books were arranged as his father had always preferred.  Yet the call remained.  So he wandered, hoping perhaps the call would be stronger if he managed to approach whatever was giving it off.

A bright flash of blue caught his eye as he passed the desk, despite blue being the dominant color in the study.  Perhaps it was simply that it flashed, or perhaps it was because he felt the call more strongly when it did flash.  In either case, he approached the desk and stood behind the chair, reluctant to sit down and more reluctant to move anything.

Yet when the flash happened again, he did both.  For the flash originated from a flat disk with an odd rune etched in its surface, one the young drake—for all his studies in the art of runes—did not recognize.  He shifted his arm to that of a dragon and ran his claw over its surface, then nearly dropped the disk in surprise when it issued an image of Norgannon.

He clutched it tighter when the image began to speak.  It was garbled, but he understood the gist of it:  “Pantheon fallen.  Not Sargeras.  Inform—” it was able to say before the image disappeared.

The young drake slumped back into the chair, no longer certain of what to do, except take the disk with him.  If another message came when he was travelling, it was unlikely he’d be able to get to the study in time and still evade detection.  So he needed to take the disk with him, along with anything it might need to run or charge itself.

Anything it might need turned out to be the desk itself.  And so he copied it through magic and placed the original in a pinched-off portion of space which he could easily and immediately access at need.  The disk itself he would tie securely around his belly and charge whenever he found the time to rest.  The desk copy he placed in the position the real one had occupied so that if anyone else broke in, they would see nothing wrong.

He hoped.