The green fire in the Lich King's eyes flickered erratically. What had he been doing?
The world around him felt unreal, existing in the liminal state between dreams and reality.
Serivhal watched in confusion as a dragon emperor's impossible nuclear dissolution reversed itself and the miles of scorched earth rebuilt, grain by grain, into the blasted landscape it had been before.
What.
The world flickered, and he was in the midst of casting his final barrier, the one meant to protect the continent from Aurendorax's suicidal detonation. The desperation was still fresh in Serivhal's memory: he had been frantically weaving the last thread into place even as the dragon emperor became a star. Now he was unweaving those same threads, each gesture reversing itself under his disbelieving gaze.
He watched Aurendorax grow smaller again. Watched half a dragon heart reconstitute itself from scattered light and return to the wound in his chest. Watched the wound close.
Oh.
He could guess at the next scene.
Through the eye of Time Stop, he had studied the dragon emperor's expression in perfect stillness: eyes blazing with white-hot fury, the fury of a father and a husband and a sovereign who had nothing left to lose.
The fever dream skipped past the Time Stop entirely. One moment, the dragon emperor had been on the verge of getting his heart ripped out. The next, Serivhal's defensive barriers were shaking as Aurendorax the Sun-Throned flowed through ancient martial forms. In reverse.
Something was wrong. Perhaps this wasn't a dream.
Impossible. I refuse to acknowledge this.
Even as he denied reality, Serivhal filed the disparity away as an important clue.
He watched in clinical silence as the necromantic fire of his legions was slowly sucked from the blackened bark of the World Tree. Watched the branches reform, the golden leaves uncurl from their withered husks, and the green flame along them shrink and die until the World Tree blazed white and brilliant against a clear sky.
The ordered ranks of the Golden Compact spread before him, their armor shining under Yggdrasil's light. This was from the beginning of the siege, when attrition had not yet reduced mankind's best and brightest to withered husks, driven only by pure zeal. Their fighting spirit pressed down on him almost like a physical force.
If only they weren't backstepping in perfect formation.
This was insanity. Time could not flow backward. The dead could not return. Three centuries of causality could not simply be undone.
Serivhal reached for his magic. He attempted to impose his will on reality. To wake up from this fever dream. Anything but acknowledge what was happening.
The world moved on, heedless of his wishes.
Curse you, Liria.
That final memory was still seared into his mind's eye. Mankind's desperate final flame, blazing in the darkness before dawn. All of humanity unified for the first time in one wish. Then the world going white.
He examined its implications, inspecting it from every angle.
Liria could not erase him entirely; he was not made of flesh anymore, not truly, not in the way that could be simply unmade. He was the world's own corruption given will and shape, layered into the bedrock across three hundred years of patient work, woven into the leylines and the death-fields and the ancient burial sites of ten thousand battlefields.
If she tried to unravel him entirely, she would have to unravel the world itself.
So she had done the next best thing. She had rewound time far enough to undo his victories, far enough to restore what he had destroyed, and trusted that whatever remained of him would be a shadow small enough to fight.
Serivhal had lost.
With this admission came a bone-deep exhaustion. Thirty years of standing one step from his goal, thirty years of humiliation, had finally caught up to him.
Dread settled in the pit of his nonexistent stomach. He felt the phantom pain anyway—a relic of his mortal days as Seris, when his sickly body had been easily affected by stress.
How far back? Will I be rewound into nonexistence?
There was no way to stop this. He had no mechanism for it. Reversing time was categorically impossible; it had never been within his power and likely never would be, even after ascension. He was simply being dragged backward through history like a leaf in a current, and when the current finished its work, he would be wherever it decided he should be.
Wherever that was. Whenever that was.
The one disparity between his memories and rewound experiences surfaced to the forefront of his mind. His actions within the Time Stop hadn't been recorded in the rewinding time stream, which meant that a sphere of Time Stop should be outside of its influence.
Serivhal wasn't done yet. He still had a narrow window of opportunity to turn this around. And he would make that elven harlot pay for every humiliation.
The rewind lurched again, and the Fortress of Ashen Eternity received him like a body receiving its soul.
He felt it the moment the rewind deposited him within its walls—the deep cold of bone-paved corridors, the steady green witchfire burning in iron cressets the size of carriage wheels, the hum of the leyline nexus resonating up through the black granite floors. Every surface was engraved with binding seals; he could feel their purpose like a second heartbeat.
The rewind threw him backward through the corridors of the fortress, past his honor guard of death knights standing at parade rest in their black plate, past the war room with its enormous relief map of the continent, past the archives where his bound spirits catalogued the knowledge of a hundred destroyed libraries. Each corridor reversed past him. The death knights backed away, the map shrank, the archive doors closed.
The throne room rose around him. The Divine Throne waited on its dais—twelve feet of articulated World Serpent vertebrae fused into a permanent wave, its arms the Serpent's jawbones worn smooth by necromantic current, every surface a functional circuit drawing from the intersection of seven major leylines beneath it.
The throne was as much a part of his body as his hands, and it was the only reason he was still thinking.
He understood the mechanism of his own preservation, but he could feel the limits of it. The closer the rewind pulled him toward the throne, the more that clarity was costing him. He was fighting reality simply by thinking. When the rewind finally set him down, the effort of continued resistance might be more than he could sustain.
There was one infinitesimally slim chance. The next seconds would decide his fate.
The rewind deposited him on the throne, the cradle of his nascent divinity.
He sat exactly as he had sat a moment before setting out: upright, hands resting on the Serpent's jaw-bones, the crown of jagged spikes settled on his brow.
The deathfire sang around him. Through the leylines, through the nexus beneath him, he could feel the world's corruption, the vast spread of his influence across forests and fields and the ruins of a dozen civilizations. Three centuries of work, still present, still real, not yet undone.
He had perhaps two or three seconds before the rewind found him here and continued its work. Perhaps less.
The Divine Throne's power filled him, forcing a moment of now into existence, and in that stolen sliver of the present, his body could finally move.
He gripped the armrests and drew, pulling every mote of power the nexus had stored over thirty years of quiet accumulation, tore it from the leylines in a single catastrophic drain, and cast Time Stop with a ferocity he had never needed before.
He cast it not as a spell but as a declaration, as an imposition of his will upon the structure of reality itself, and he anchored the effect not to a moment in time but to the throne beneath him, to the nexus, to the bones of the World Serpent and the seven leylines and the three centuries of patient corruption woven through the earth of every continent.
He anchored it to his nascent divinity. To three centuries of conquest. To the divine core of a half-god who half-transcended time and space.
He forced a paradox into existence. A bubble of frozen time locked inside a timestream being reversed. Two impossibilities in direct opposition, each real, each absolutely incompatible with the other.
There was a tearing sensation, as though the seam of the world had been pulled open and he was caught in it, stretched between one age and another.
The rewind clawed at him, demanding he complete his backward journey, finding nothing to grip; the Time Stop held it at arm's length, barely. His consciousness was the only thing threading the needle between them, and the strain of maintaining it was a pressure building behind his eyes, behind his teeth, behind every sigil engraved along the throne's bones.
His soul fractured.
It was not a metaphor. He felt the break, clean and final, the way a bone breaks: a single instant of immense pressure and then a precise parting.
Pain filled his being, fundamental and searing. Then Serivhal knew no more.