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Dota AllstarsDotA (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 - Welcome To The Macroverse
Prologue: Welcome To The Macroverse
Azeroth.
If one stared out from some suspended position in the darkness of the universe, he might think of the world of Azeroth as the shining jewel of heaven. Covered almost entirely by ocean with the exception of the occasional continent, it reflects the light of the sun like a mirror made of sapphire, for all the sprawl of existence to gaze upon in wonder. The living creatures of this world have no idea just how special their world is in a near eternity of blackness, but they knew that it was beautiful, and that was all that mattered to them in the beginning.
Consequently, the world of Azeroth became the focus of many alien intelligences, hungering for the life and energy that permeates the very fabric of it's air and water. The flow and persistence of magic, spread across the planet after the Great Sundering of Kalimdor, saturates every inch of space on this living, breathing world, perhaps the last of it's kind in all the macroverse. For Draenor, the Orcish homeworld, is lifeless and shattered, and the Burning Legion, made up of billions of screaming twisted demons who only seek to burn, destroyed the others long before then.
Yet, despite all their efforts, the fallen one Sargeras and his monstrous band failed to consume Azeroth's life force in their crusade. The lesser demons were exorcised, cast out of the world itself, and their regents purged and broken. Archimonde himself imploded at the World Tree's threshold, breaking the Legion's foothold in a physical existence.
And so the beginning of the war between the Sentinel and the Undead Scourge began.....
However, there were others who watched this shining planet as well. Nameless, squirming, and indifferent, they watched it all with clotted, ruined eyes. For between the land we know and the one we all suspect, there are things beyond our comprehension, monsters perchance, glimpsed in nightmare, more terrible than the most mad of fathoming of the inmates who may dwell in the deepest depths of Hell. They thrive and twitch; they eat, and make the demons of the Twisting Nether seem like sweet dreams.
In the words of a writer now long forgotten: "Let there be God, let there be morning, let there be smiling ministers in shining white surplices, but let there not be these dark and draggling horrors on the nightside of the universe."
There came a moment, however, sudden in it's monumental execution, that caused eternity itself to hold it's breath. The World Tree, the very root of the magic that once filled the deepest of Wells, sent out the greatest discharge of magic seen since the Sundering into the ebony shadows that fill forever. In the hour of the Sentinel's greatest need, the World Tree called the stars themselves for aid.
It heard the call, but not before it changed. For the first time in forever, something new had happened. Something that drew the attention of those that squirm in the spaces between the stars. As the upheaval of magic, a wind whiter than a supernova, struck Darchrow, the greatest of them all, he awoke, and the others became afraid.
Darchrow himself, or perhaps itself, was before this, a wheel. Blacker than the space around it, rolling across the universe perpetually in motion, worlds and atmospheres, the firmaments of countless burning suns, were crushed and assimilated into his endless turning form. An infinitude of light-years long in all directions, this spoke-less, timeless construct of terrible sentience had never stopped in all it's strange long time. Yet the unthinkable had finally happened. Darchrow, the Wheel of Oblivion, was stopped!
Yes, a whiteness that was now sucking in the wheel, gorging itself like a pig on a coin of ebony that, until now, had rolled forever along the ballroom floor of the macroverse. The white sucked and drew, and gradually, incredibly, Darchrow's infinite form was growing smaller.
Time passed, how much of it exactly is beyond my storyteller's eye. However, the end result was small; seven feet small, to be exact. It bobbed like some sort of grotesque, bloated cobra. For the first time in it's eternity, Darchrow opened his eyes. Like tanks of propane ignited, they seemed to burst from the top of this blob-like mass, purple and flaming in this sunless hell.
He turned what was now his face, infinity enclosed within this boneless elemental frame and staring out into the howling dark with burning orbs of violet. The World Tree's upsurge had left it's trail clearly for his bombardier's mind to follow, a straight path to the world of Azeroth. Being called there, pulled almost. It was irresistible, and the feeling almost hurt in it's unfamiliar intensity.
It was time to begin his exodus. Propelled by his imperious volition, he shot himself like a living bullet along the magic tide's dim trail.
This was his age, his time and place, and all others would soon be swept away.
10/28/2007 11:09:00 PM
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The Chronicles of Darchrow
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