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DotA (Defense of the Ancients) is a very popular customized game for Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. There are two teams of five players and each player selects one of over seventy heroes which they will use to try to destroy their opponent’s base, while protecting their own. As players accumulate money, they can use it to buy a large variety of items to enhance the strengths of their hero and provide additional abilities.

The Chronicles of Darchrow - Chapter 1: The Arrival

For the first time in what seemed like centuries, the Scourge was retreating to regroup for a concentrated assault. The battle-weary champions of the Sentinel were exhausted, and Malfurion Stormrage, standing by the center lane's Ancient Protector, gazed into the setting sun's horizon with a smile on his face. This would give them all a much needed rest, and perhaps time to plan.

Still, he was bitter. He was beginning to think this war would never end. "The Legion may be long gone, but the undead monstrosities they left behind seem limitless in comparison" he sighed. The sun, it's rim leaving lines of fire across the billowing clouds, had descended enough for the stars to come out into view. Constellations, filled with dots of light of every color from red to gold, never ceased to bring the Prophet some comfort in a world torn by war. It didn't seem to matter anyway.....

"But wait...what’s this?" he wondered. For, among the cluster his eye had picked out, there seemed to be something coming towards him. A drop of ebony, even blacker than those spaces between the stars, hurtling to the west.

Held in thrall by this spectacle, Furion did nothing as it tore the sky in it's fall, thunderclaps set off in it's wake. The sound brought the attention of the others as well. Jakiro, both heads busy gnawing roots in his cavern beneath Nordrassil's great trunk, hearkened at the sounds of it's violent passage. A few moments later, as silence returned, he went to chewing, growling moodily at the interruption. Rooftrellen, wandering aimlessly through the eastern forests of the Sentinel's domain, purifying the ever-spreading blight of the Scourge, heard the booming cracks as it passed over his head, and then the resulting explosion as it impacted a rocky knoll somewhere far off, shuddered and continued his work as if nothing had happened.


So, in the end, it was Furion who first discovered the Enigma. Teleporting to where he believed it must have come to rest, he focused briefly, and then found himself flying through the Emerald Dream at light speed in a world of glittering visions and ghosts, surrounded by a hazy forest of such phenomenal lush growth that the sky itself was blotted out. Although his spirit felt drawn to these others, these spirits of nature giggling and laughing as they attempted to have him led astray, he tarried not, and a moment later he was in his body again, now standing at the edge of a crater that had once been a the side of a mountain slope.

Smoke fumed throughout the impact site, like a spiral almost, but despite the burning haze that now radiated around him, Furion saw the thing that had done this right in the middle of things. It lay embedded like some sort of arrowhead in the ground itself, bobbing vertically like an egg. Dark violet in color, subtle shades of night speckled across it's teardrop shaped form. It glowed indigo, and the crater itself was blacklit. Furion didn't like it, but despite these thoughts, he found himself walking down the shadowed slope of the bowelled impact site towards it. Dead at this crater's center and twitching, like the slick eye of a monster, it sparkled malefically as Furion drew near.


The Prophet, looking dead as a corpse in the blacklight, now stood at the thing's foot, and he stared at it in rapture, his mind far away and unfocused in the guile of Darchrow's glamour. A bubbling chuckle issued up from the ark, for now the Enigma could come out of the protective shell he had formed around himself as he had entered Azeroth's atmosphere. Every precaution had been taken, for even in the spare month it had taken to follow the upsurge's back trail through the void he had been preparing his body to adapt to a physical environment.

Now came his first victim.

As Furion, eyes as wide as a child's, reached down smiling to stroke the smooth surface of Darchrow's protective vessel, it suddenly evaporated into black mist. Furion, though surprised slightly, did not protest as the clotting darkness that now towered over him began to wrap around him. He did not protest as his chest caved in and his organs ruptured through the intense pressure of the assimilation process. Only at the very end of his life did Malfurion awaken, and in the last seconds of conscious existence screamed soundlessly as his skull burst from within the Enigma's viscous body. Furion, the greatest of Archdruids, was no more, and Darchrow, enjoying the sensation of being full and vitalized after his long journey, then began to analyze in silence the Prophet's many memories and experiences as if he had lived them himself.

A few minutes later, he lifted himself up, ridiculously like some sort of snake, and began to change. His sides thinned and contracted, then burst as two thick arms generated from an elemental body. On each appendage at the wrist, there was an ornate bracer with Night Elven glyphs carved around their circumferences. His flaming violet orbs swiveled in his skull to look at them in surprise. This was unexpected...

No matter, he knew it was time to present himself to the Sentinels. They had called him and, unintentionally as it may have been, had trapped him in this thick ugly vessel. He would earn their trust, and then he would carry out his vengeance.

And so the Enigma floated gently out of the impact site, headed southeast. It was time to meet some new friends.



Interlude: Atropos and the Lich King

Held chained inside his glacier prison, Ner'zul watched with great interest as the thing from the stars rose up and engulfed the Sentinel's greatest champion. The Lich King's mind, infinite (although miniscule in comparison to this tenebrous Eternal whom he observed) and expansive, saw all things beyond the World Tree's boundaries. Nordrassil's aura, stretching out over the encampments of it's protectors, acted like a curtain to the dark lord's Eye, and for that Ner'zul seethed in bitter fury. How he longed to know the wretched Sentinel's plans, despite believing (surely there was no doubt) that his Undead Scourge would claim victory before too long. It was true that he had pulled back his endless legions, but not for the reasons they thought he had.

He had pulled back because of the thing he was now scrying, the most dangerous creature Ner'zul had ever seen. It made the horrors of the Twisting Nether, where he had been tortured by the Nethrezim for so long, seem little more than sheep.

It's coming had not been expected, and as soon as he had touched it's mind (or what passed for one) in curiosity, he had pulled his own mind back in fear. The fear had come because he had felt that his very soul was being drawn into some sort of vortex, pulled into a power that made his own seem insignificant. Although his armor itself was entombed in the Frozen Throne, that didn't stop large cracks, branches of them, from forming over his prison's surface. His soul was being sucked...!!

The effort required to pull his mind away had been excruciating, but he managed it. He had saved himself, but drained a large part of his energy in the process, and for that, if nothing else, he drew back his forces. The less effort he expent in commanding his army until his Throne was repaired and his psychic reservoirs renewed, the better off he would be.

For that, if nothing else, he had hid his consciousness from it's probing will as it entered Azeroth's atmosphere. If he continued his assault, the thing, now landed, might turn it's mind towards him, and that would be potentially disastrous. An unknown variable, a pool of water who's depth he could not sense....all potentially fatal if he did not tread carefully.

These thoughts passed through the Lich King in the space of fifteen seconds, and he then focused back on the scrying as Furion's body, now submerged in the thing's titanic vessel, was pulverized and absorbed. Wishing to see no more, Ner'zul dispelled the images and contemplated his next course of action.

The answer to that, of course, was reconnaissance. He had other things to focus on, and in his weakened state it would be best to rest for the time being.

And, of course, he had the perfect creature in mind to watch this enigma. Fight fear with Fear. Now....

His eyes, two braziers of blue fire seen through his icy opaque shell, situated in a disembodied helmet, swiveled to stare at the nerubian spirit tower on his left outside the Throne itself. From behind it, an ethereal presence floated above the ground; it had come at it's master's call, and would now fulfill his desires.

"Atropos, cutter of Life.....your task is simple....."

The Bane Elemental listened, silently vigil. As the chilling voice of his god spoke to him, Atropos's eldritch visage smiled spitelessly. After so long, he would finally meet his adversary. Mortal enemies were so boring.

Twenty minutes later, the phantom of nightmare moved into the woods, now black and menacing under an ebon sky, and set out to push his master's plan in motion.
10/28/2007 11:10:59 PM Category The Chronicles of Darchrow

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