— and came to rest in the hand of a tall, broad-shouldered man with white hair and violet robes. A staff in one hand shone with power, and his eyes blazed with far more hidden deep within. A human wizard — and he had literally snatched victory from Ner’zhul's grasp.

Behind the mage stood a man in full armor, carrying a hammer that glowed with a blinding white light. Ner’zhul realized this man was not just a warrior, but akin to a shaman — except that the forces he tapped were somehow on a grander scale than a mere planet's. The elven female who stood beside them had no such magical abilities, but her face showed righteous anger. She had an arrow nocked and aimed directly at him.

Ner'zhul trembled.

How dare they?

How dare they interrupt his moment of absolute glory! Ner’zhul realized he felt no fear, no worry — just absolute outrage.

"The Eye will not serve you when you are dust!" he cried, and let the outrage take him. It blazed through him, pure and hot and deadly. With a cry he lifted his hands. The tortured rock and stone obeyed in agony, cracking beneath the intruders' feet. Barely in time, the Alliance intruders leaped aside, rolling to come up with weapons at the ready. But Ner’zhul was not done. Not yet. He was just getting started.

The rocks that had cracked now rose up and hurled themselves at the Alliance interlopers. Wind and rain whipped around them, snatching them up to hover helplessly in the air before slamming them mercilessly down on the unyielding stone. Ner’zhul took great pleasure in watching them suffer. It was with effort that he turned back to yell, "Through the rift! Now! Glory and fresh worlds await us!"

Obris gaped at him. "Kill the Alliance and let us gather our Horde! You cannot possibly mean that only we few will escape? What about our brothers, who fight even now? Grom and the Warsong arc still in Azeroth. There are females and children scattered all over. We cannot abandon them! To do so would be the most gutless, cowardly—"

Something snapped in Ner’zhul. Something that had been holding him down, he suddenly realized. It was only now — now that he was free of guilt, of shame, of trying to still do good for his people — that he realized what a burden it had truly been. He had once accepted death as part of the cycle; then feared it; then realized he was the bringcr of it, and all the heavy weight that that implied.

No more. He was free.

He didn't even favor Obris with a retort. Ner’zhul extended his hand. Lightning balled in his palm and raced in a crackling arc toward the other orc, slamming into Obris's chest with a thunderclap and hurtling him backward. He crashed into the wall and slid down, a smoking black hole in his chest. He did not rise.

Whirling, Ner’zhul turned to those around him, who stared at him in shock. "The other orcs are lost. They have served their purpose. From this point on, all that we gain will be ours alone. I am the Horde, and I will survive. Choose me, or choose death!"

When they did not move, he growled and lifted the scepter. Now they did move, as if suddenly freed, rush­ing toward the flickering rift. It hovered a few inches above the roof's surface and rose to nearly ten feet. Ner’zhul went last, holding the rift open with his power and his will, then stepped into the rift himself.

He had just enough time to gasp before the rift van­ished behind them.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SlX

Khadgar's head swam, but he felt warm healing energy spreading through his body. He got to his feet, swaying, and swore. The rift was just fading from view, leaving a faint afterimage like a steam trail. And Ner’zhul and his orcs were gone with it.

"… we're too late. It's gone."

"Gone? By the Light, no!" Turalyon was right be­hind Khadgar but apparently hadn't seen the rift. Then again, Khadgar had felt it with his other senses before he'd actually seen it. Although Turalyon too wielded great power, his facility with the Holy Light gave him no particular insight into arcane magic.

"He must have closed the rift behind him," Khadgar guessed as he and Turalyon stepped back onto the roof itself, Alleria right behind them.

"But you got the Eye of Dalaran back," Alleria pointed out. "That's important, isn't it?" Khadgar nod­ded. "Well, what do we do now?" She turned her head to gaze down from the Black Temple. "It looks like we're winning down there, at least."

"Any way you can follow him?" Turalyon asked.

Khadgar shook his head. "I don't know the spell Ner’zhul was using," he admitted, "or how to find whatever world that rift took him to. So even if I could open a new rift here, there's no guarantee it would open onto the same world." His attention was caught by something else, however, and he frowned, stepping forward and walking to the triple circle inlaid in the roof

"What is it?"

"Power," Khadgar said absently. "More power than I've ever felt in any one place save Medivh's tower." He cocked his head to the side. "That's why," he muttered. "I'd wondered why Ner’zhul left Hellfire Citadel to us instead of defending it properly and casting the spell from there. But he couldn't. He had to be here. He needed the magic here to fuel his ritual."

"Does that help us any?" Alleria asked.

"I'm not sure," he replied. "Perhaps." He stepped into the center circle, and his head snapped back, mouth falling open in a silent scream. Such power! It poured through him like wildfire, igniting his veins, sending every sense into overload.

Ner’zhul was a shaman, not a mage. His magics came from the earth and the sky and the water, from the world itself. And that was what this place was, a focal point for the world's power. For Ner’zhul it would have been like tapping full force into something he had already broached repeatedly, but on a lesser scale — he would know how to handle it. For Khadgar, how­ever, it was a completely new experience. And a dangerous one.

But Khadgar was not an archmagc for nothing. He had been a promising student at Dalaran, and had learned much during his brief apprenticeship with Medivh — and far more afterward. He was a master of magic, and while this form was new, it was still magic. And that meant it was still a matter of willpower.

And Khadgar had will.

Slowly he reined in his senses, forcing the new en­ergy down until it was merely a background hum. Then he opened his eyes — and gasped. Standing here now, flooded with the power of a whole world, he could see what he couldn't see previously.

"Oh, no," he breathed.

"What is it?" Turalyon asked.

"The rifts… ," Khadgar breathed, barely able to find the words to encompass the scope of it. "Ner’zhul didn't just open one. He opened many — so many, all over this poor world." They flickered and glittered, looking almost like fireflies on a hot summer evening. "The scope of this … I don't think Draenor can bear it. It can't hold all this. Rifts are tears — and these tears are going to rip this whole damned place apart." And us with it, he thought, but did not say.

Turalyon and Alleria looked at each other. As one, they turned to Khadgar. "What do we do? And how long do we have?"

Even as he formed the words a shudder passed through the temple and the land around it. The vol­cano before it trembled, spewing even more of its nox­ious lava out into the air and creating a billowing green cloud. Then they heard a horrible crack and a deafen­ing rumble from behind them.

Glancing over his shoulder, Khadgar watched as a mountain of rock cascaded down, literally. The Black Temple had been built up against the mountains that overlooked the sea, and those peaks were crumbling away. Most of the debris was falling into the waters, but some of it exploded toward them instead. Think­ing quickly, Khadgar murmured a spell that shielded them from the onslaught, and the three of them stood untouched as rock and gravel and dust flew by on ei­ther side. A second spell protected the area directly below, where the Alliance forces were already mop­ping up the remaining Horde. Many of the orcs had scattered when the battle had turned against them, and the sudden avalanche only hastened their head­long flight.