The order from Eldest Lyraen had been explicit, yet laced with an uncharacteristic disquiet: "Observe the sky-fallen, Theron. Kaelen is his guide, but his storm is a wild thing, and the path ahead is fraught. Be her shadow, and his. The Weirdwood must be protected, from without, and perhaps, from within."
A charge I accepted with my customary stoicism, though a flicker of resentment was difficult to suppress. Kaelen was a capable Warden, one of our most attuned to the subtler currents of the Weave, but this… sky-fallen… Alex Maxwell, as he named himself, was an anomaly that stretched the bounds of our understanding. His power, this "Speed Force," was a raw, discordant shriek against the symphony of the Weave, a jagged tear in the ancient tapestry of our world. My instincts, honed by centuries of guarding the Northern Marches against the barbarity of the Ice Lords and the insidious whispers of the Void-touched, screamed that he was a danger. A beautiful, perhaps even unintentional, cataclysm waiting to happen.
My unit of Shadow-Walkers, the keenest eyes and swiftest feet in my command, had trailed Kaelen and the human for several cycles as they ventured from the sanctuary of Tel'Syth towards the blighted fringes of the West. We moved as ghosts in the high canopy, our presence a whisper on the wind, unseen, unheard. I observed the sky-fallen's training, Kaelen's patient instruction. I saw his clumsy attempts to master the Silvanesti fighting forms, his speed often a hindrance, a wild stallion fighting the reins. I felt the raw, ozone-laced power he exuded, so different from the life-giving pulse of the Weave. It was… unsettling. Like holding a lightning bolt in a silk glove.
Then came the… revelations. The phasing. The human's mind, Kaelen had reported, was a chaotic torrent of "stories" from his lost world, tales of beings who wielded powers akin to his own. Fictions, Kaelen had called them, yet the sky-fallen was making them terrifyingly real. He passed through solid Ironwood as if it were morning mist. The implications were staggering. Such an ability, in the hands of an enemy… or an unstable ally…
The journey into the Blasted Wastes had been a descent into a palpable miasma of despair. Even from our concealed positions, we felt the oppressive weight of the soul-blight, the sickening silence of a land where the Weave was dying. Kaelen and the sky-fallen had chosen a precarious perch on an obsidian outcrop, a vantage point overlooking the desolation. We had established our own watch nearby, hidden within a cluster of petrified sentinels, close enough to intervene if necessary, yet distant enough to remain unseen.
The first sign of true calamity was not the Technocrat flyer, but the distant, unholy bloom of fire and corrupted energy far to the south-west. My blood ran cold. It was the signature of Malakor's vilest sorceries, the Crimson Bloom of Despair, a weapon spoken of only in hushed, fearful whispers. Fortress Kyanos. Lyraen's fears had been realized. The Iron Hordes had unleashed a plague upon the land.
Before we could fully process this horror, the Technocrat flyer appeared, a dark, predatory shape descending upon Kaelen and the sky-fallen. An ambush. Calculated. Precise. My hand instinctively went to the longbow slung across my back, my Shadow-Walkers tensing, ready to unleash a volley. But events unfolded with a speed that outpaced even our elven reflexes.
The energy beam. Kaelen's cry, cut short. Her fall into the darkness.
A cold fury, something I had not felt since the Battle of the Frozen Tears centuries ago, gripped my heart. Kaelen was more than just a fellow Warden; she was a light in the Weirdwood, a spirit of unwavering courage and compassion. To see her struck down so brutally…
And then, the sky-fallen erupted.
The power that burst from him was unlike anything I had ever witnessed, anything I could have conceived. It was not the controlled, almost hesitant force he had displayed in his training. This was a cataclysm. Blue-white lightning, raw and untamed, tore the air apart. The very rock of the outcrop cracked and smoked. He became a living storm, a being of pure, incandescent rage. His ascent to meet the flyer was not a feat of agility; it was a violation of natural law, a streak of vengeful lightning that defied gravity itself.
We watched, my hardened Shadow-Walkers and I, in stunned, horrified silence as he dismantled the Technocrat war-machine. Not with skill, not with strategy, but with a terrifying, primal fury. He tore through its armored hull as if it were parchment, his hands wreathed in that impossible blue fire. The flyer, a symbol of the Lowlanders' arrogant artifice, was reduced to a plummeting wreck in heartbeats.
But the storm was not sated.
The arrival of Iron Horde reinforcements, followed by more Technocrat skimmers, only seemed to fuel his rage. His distorted, thunderous roar, "YOU TOOK HER!" echoed across the blighted valley, a sound that promised utter annihilation. And annihilation was what he delivered. He moved among them like a vengeful god, a whirlwind of blue lightning and impossible speed. He phased through their attacks, his vibrating hands turned into weapons of terrifying potency, disrupting matter, shattering armor and bone. He created vortexes of wind that flung armored warriors into the abyss. He was everywhere at once, a dozen phantom images of himself, each one a harbinger of death.
The Iron Horde general, a brute whose cruelty was infamous even among his own kind, a warrior who had likely never known true fear, was reduced to a quivering wreck before the sky-fallen's onslaught. I saw the human pause, his vibrating hand hovering inches from the general's throat. For a moment, I thought he would… unmake him. But then, something shifted. The killing intent faltered. He struck the general down, unconscious but alive. A flicker of… mercy? Or merely a momentary stay of execution? I could not tell.
The remaining Lowlanders, their ranks decimated, their courage shattered, fled into the desolation, their retreat a panicked, disorganized rout. The sky-fallen stood amidst the carnage, the blue lightning slowly dimming, his form shaking with the aftershocks of his immense power expenditure. He looked… broken. A conduit that had channeled a storm too vast for its mortal frame.
And then, the grief, the terrible, raw grief, returned. He found Kaelen's still form at the base of the cliff. The despair that rolled off him in waves was a palpable thing, a chilling echo of the soul-blight he had just fought against. He cradled her, his cries of anguish tearing at the oppressive silence of the valley.
It was then that the second miracle occurred, a thing so far beyond our understanding, so contrary to the laws of life and death as we knew them, that even now, my mind struggles to comprehend it.
As he held Kaelen, as his love and despair reached an unbearable crescendo, his strange blue energy, the Speed Force, flared again. But this time, it was different. It was not destructive. It was… generative. It enveloped Kaelen, a soft, pulsating cocoon of light. We watched, my Shadow-Walkers and I, from our hidden perch, our elven senses, so attuned to the flow of the Weave, reeling from the sheer alienness of the energy we were witnessing.
And Kaelen… Kaelen breathed.
The horrific wound on her chest, a mark of certain death, began to close, to heal at an impossible rate. The bioluminescent patterns on her skin, which had been extinguished, flickered back to life, a soft, hesitant glow. Her amber eyes, which I had seen glazed with the stillness of the void, opened.
She was alive. The sky-fallen, with his storm of grief and love, had snatched her back from the very jaws of oblivion.
The implications were… terrifying. A power that could defy death itself. A power that operated entirely outside the Weave. What was this human? What was this force he commanded? Lyraen had called him a bridge. But a bridge to where? To what?
Then, as Kaelen's consciousness returned, as her faint mental voice reached out to him, the sky-fallen collapsed. The immense power he had wielded, the emotional cataclysm he had endured, had finally overwhelmed him. He lay still beside Kaelen, his own life force a guttering flame.
"Now," I commanded my unit, my own voice tight with a mixture of awe and a deep, unsettling apprehension. "Lyris, with me. The rest, secure the perimeter. We take them to the Heartwood. Both of them."
Reaching them was a grim task. The devastation wrought by the sky-fallen was absolute. The lingering scent of ozone and death was a testament to his terrible power. Kaelen was weak, her life thread fragile despite the impossible healing. The human, Alex Maxwell, was deeply unconscious, his breathing shallow, his skin cold to the touch despite the residual heat of his power. His spirit, I sensed, was frayed, stretched to the breaking point.
Lyris, our most skilled healer, tended to Kaelen first, her hands glowing with the gentle green light of the Weave. The wound was still grievous, but the sky-fallen's energy had done the impossible, arresting the fatal damage, even beginning the process of regeneration in a way that defied all our healing arts. "His energy… it is like raw life force, unshaped by the Weave, yet potent beyond measure," Lyris whispered, her voice filled with disbelief. "It has… jump-started her own healing. But the shock to her system, to her spirit… it is immense."
We fashioned litters, and began the perilous journey back to the Weirdwood. The sky-fallen was a dead weight, his body radiating a strange, fluctuating energy that made the Weave-sensitive among us uneasy. I found myself constantly observing him, this enigma from another world. He had the face of a youth, yet his eyes, even in unconsciousness, seemed to hold the weight of experiences no mortal should endure. He was a paradox – a bringer of unimaginable destruction, and a conduit for impossible life.
The journey was fraught. The Blasted Wastes were stirring, the soul-blight creeping ever closer. We encountered more Iron Horde patrols, drawn by the earlier conflagration, and dispatched them with the grim efficiency born of centuries of conflict. But our primary concern was our precious cargo. Kaelen drifted in and out of consciousness, her strength slowly returning under Lyris's constant ministrations. The sky-fallen remained lost in his coma, his life thread a fragile, flickering thing.
As we finally crossed back into the healthier, more vibrant regions of the Weirdwood, I felt the forest itself seem to sigh in relief. The oppressive gloom of the blighted lands receded, replaced by the familiar, luminous twilight of our home. And I sensed a subtle shift in the energy around the sky-fallen. The Weave, which had recoiled from his raw power before, now seemed to… reach for him, to gently probe the alien storm that lay dormant within him. It was as if the forest itself recognized him, not as a threat, but as something… other. Something vital.
We reached the Heartwood as the twin moons began to pale before the first hints of the Unheavens' strange dawn. Eldest Lyraen was waiting, her ancient eyes filled with a wisdom that encompassed all our fears, all our hopes. She looked at Kaelen, a flicker of profound relief in her gaze. Then, her eyes rested on the unconscious form of Alex Maxwell.
"The storm has raged," Lyraen's voice was a soft whisper, yet it resonated through the hearts of all present. "And in its wake… a new song begins."
I did not understand the Eldest's words then. I saw only a grievously wounded Warden, a human hovering on the brink of oblivion, and a future more uncertain and perilous than any the Silvanesti had faced in millennia. The sky-fallen was a cataclysm, yes. But whether he was a cataclysm of destruction, or of a new, terrifying creation, remained to be seen. And I, Theron, Warden of the North, could only watch, and wait, and prepare for the inevitable tempests to come. The Unheavens had been shaken. And the echoes of that shaking were only just beginning.