Months passed like drifting leaves carried on a gentle wind. Life in Quel'Thalas slowly returned to a rhythm that felt almost unreal after everything Leylin had witnessed, wars that tore worlds apart, dragons clashing in the sky, and powers that threatened existence itself.
The golden forests of Eversong remained serene, blissfully ignorant of how close reality had come to unraveling. Leylin immersed himself in his studies.
The libraries of Silvermoon and the private archives of his mentors became his sanctuaries once more. Ancient tomes lay open beside crystalline mana foci, scrolls etched with long-forgotten sigils floating gently in the air as he studied.
He refined the knowledge he had brought back from Suramar:spatial harmonics, layered barriers, mana-flow recursion, concepts that pushed even high elven arcane theory to its limits. Where others sought power, Leylin sought understanding.
He practiced alone most days, often deep within secluded glades or sealed chambers warded against magical backlash. The earth responded readily to him now, its pulse familiar beneath his feet. Mana flowed more smoothly, obeying subtle intent rather than force. Even the air seemed to listen.
Yet despite the calm, a part of him was always… waiting. Not anxiously, just aware.
Every morning and every night, without fail, Leylin would check the faint, ever-present thread of mana tied to the necklace he had given Alleria. It was distant, impossibly far, stretched across worlds and realities, but it was there.
A steady, quiet pulse. Proof that she lived. Proof that she still walked beneath the same stars, even if they were seen through a broken sky. That thread was his anchor.
Elsewhere, Vereesa trained relentlessly. Under Sylvanas' sharp gaze, she honed her skills as a ranger, arrow after arrow striking true, her movements growing faster, more precise. Sylvanas was as demanding as ever, offering praise only when it was earned, criticism when it was deserved. Yet beneath the stern discipline, there was pride. Vereesa noticed it.
Leylin often watched from a distance, pretending to read while quietly observing the sisters' train. He admired Vereesa's focus, the way she moved with purpose now, no longer the uncertain youngest sister chasing shadows of legends. She had become something solid, something strong.
Sometimes, when training ended, Vereesa would join him, sitting beside him beneath the trees, leaning against his shoulder, content in silence. Those moments grounded him more than any meditation ever could.
It was during one such quiet afternoon that everything changed. Leylin was mid-inscription, carefully guiding mana into a floating sigil when a sharp absence struck him.
Not pain. Not danger but absence. His hand froze.
The mana around him wavered, the sigil collapsing harmlessly into motes of light as his focus shattered. Leylin's eyes widened, pupils contracting as his perception expanded instinctively outward.
The thread—It was gone. No fraying. No rupture. Just… gone. As if someone had gently, deliberately severed it.
Leylin rose slowly to his feet, his heart pounding not in panic, but in sudden, cold clarity. He reached inward again, retracing the familiar path through space, across the twisted layers of reality that connected Azeroth to Draenor.
There was nothing. No echo. No residual mana. No coordinates. The necklace had not been destroyed violently. It had been cut off.
Leylin exhaled slowly. "So that's it…" he murmured.
There was only one explanation. Khadgar. Turalyon. Alleria. They had made the choice. The Dark Portal had been destroyed, from the Draenor side.
A spell of that magnitude would have shattered planar anchors, erased spatial reference points entirely. The necklace's secondary function, tracking and portal synchronization, could not survive the collapse of the rift that defined the connection between worlds.
Which meant… Leylin closed his eyes. They had succeeded. And they had paid the price. No mana backlash had reached him. No death cry echoed through the bond. That alone told him everything he needed to know, Alleria had not died in violence or chaos.
She had stood her ground. Fought. Chosen. And remained behind when the portal fell.
The wind stirred around him, rustling the leaves of Eversong's trees. Sunlight filtered through golden canopies, warm and gentle, completely indifferent to the sacrifice that had just taken place beyond the stars.
Leylin clenched his fist. He felt pride. And grief. And a quiet, aching respect that settled deep in his chest.
"She kept moving forward," he said softly, to no one at all.
Behind him, he sensed movement.
Vereesa had noticed the shift, not the magic, but him. She approached slowly, her expression searching as she saw his stillness, the tension in his shoulders.
"Leylin?" she asked gently. "What's wrong?"
He opened his eyes and turned to her.
"The expedition," he said. "They've done it."
Vereesa's breath caught.
"…Alleria?"
Leylin nodded once. "The portal's gone. The connection ended cleanly."
She closed her eyes, relief and sorrow washing over her face in equal measure. For a moment, she said nothing, then she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around him. They stood there together, holding on as the weight of history settled around them.
Far away, on a broken world dying under the strain of stolen magic, heroes had made their stand. And here, beneath the eternal trees of Quel'Thalas, Leylin felt the quiet truth of it settle into his bones: The world had survived. But it had changed forever.
After the day the thread went silent, peace became something Leylin could no longer truly touch. Outwardly, nothing had changed.
Quel'Thalas still shimmered beneath its eternal sun. The spires of Silvermoon gleamed with arcane brilliance, the forests of Eversong whispered with life, and the kingdom, untouched by the horrors of Draenor continued on in quiet confidence.
But for Leylin, the world had shifted. The destruction of the Dark Portal was not merely the end of an invasion, it was a wall. A final, brutal severing between worlds. And on the other side of that wall were people he cared for. People who had chosen sacrifice over survival.
Alleria. Khadgar. Turalyon. They were not dead, not in the way death usually claimed its victims but they were unreachable. Trapped on a dying world, stranded beyond conventional space and time. Leylin refused to accept that.
From that day onward, his life fell into a relentless rhythm of study, experimentation, and quiet obsession. He searched for a way to open a gateway to Draenor, not the crude, unstable monstrosity Medivh had once created, nor the reckless portals Ner'zhul tore open in his greed.
No. Leylin sought something different. A controlled gate.
A portal bound by will rather than chaos. One that answered to a single anchor—him. A doorway that could be opened and closed at his discretion, denying invasion, denying misuse, denying catastrophe.
A forbidden thing. Which meant it had to be done properly.
The books from Suramar were his foundation. Leylin had brought back more than knowledge of Nightborne magic, he had brought back perspective. The ancient Highborne had once bent space as easily as mana, layering reality upon itself to protect Suramar for ten thousand years. Their spatial matrices were elegant, recursive, self-correcting.
Leylin pored over those texts relentlessly. Arcwine-stained pages, etched with living runes that shifted as one read them.
Theories of folded space. Mana harmonics that stabilized reality instead of tearing it apart. Leylin spent hours reconstructing incomplete formulae, translating ancient kaldorei arcane into modern high elven notation.
But Suramar alone was not enough. So he went deeper. Grand Magister Belo'vir granted him access to restricted vaults, places even senior magisters rarely entered. Crystalline shelves filled with tomes bound in dragonhide, titansteel clasps sealing knowledge deemed too dangerous for casual study.
Magister Nallorath, ever the pragmatist, contributed his own private collection: scrolls recovered from ruins, fragmented theories scribbled by mad arcanists, even failed portal schematics dating back to the Troll Wars. Leylin read them all. He barely slept.
Days blurred into nights, nights into dawns. Candles burned down to stubs, replaced by arcane orbs that hovered silently over his work. His chambers became cluttered with diagrams, floating sigils of space-time lattices rotating slowly in the air, some collapsing after hours of refinement, others persisting just long enough to offer insight before dissolving.
Again and again, he reached the same impasse. Portals required two stable anchors.
The Dark Portal had been unique because it used Draenor itself as a fixed point, a wound in reality reinforced by the Skull of Gul'dan, the Book of Medivh, and the power of a Guardian.
Without that rift, Draenor drifted. Its spatial coordinates were no longer absolute. The world was falling, not just physically, but metaphysically, sliding along fractured timelines and unstable planes.
To open a gate now was to risk tearing Azeroth open along with it. Leylin refused that cost. So he began searching for alternatives. Not portals. Gateways.
Aminel and Tyr'ganal noticed the change quickly. Where Leylin had once studied out of curiosity or ambition, he now worked with a quiet intensity that unsettled even them. Aminel, ever observant, began quietly gathering texts before Leylin even asked, treatises on spatial inversion, elven records of early Sunwell experiments, even speculative works dismissed as "theoretical nonsense" by the Kirin Tor.
Tyr'ganal took a different approach. He traveled. Calling in favors, exchanging old debts, Tyr'ganal acquired fragments of knowledge from across Quel'Thalas and beyond, dwarven rune-schematics from Ironforge, half-burned scrolls smuggled out of Dalaran, even crude orcish spatial rituals that hinted at brute-force solutions Leylin immediately rejected… but still studied.
"Bad ideas are still ideas," Tyr'ganal said with a grin as he dropped a stack of scrolls onto Leylin's table.
Leylin barely looked up. "And some ideas exist only to show us what not to do."
Aminel watched them both, arms folded, concern etched subtly into her expression.
"You're not just studying anymore," she said one night, when the three of them sat amid floating glyphs and half-finished diagrams. "You're planning."
Leylin did not deny it. "I am," he said quietly. "Because if I don't… no one else can."
Aminel hesitated. "And if you succeed?"
Leylin's fingers tightened around a stylus of condensed mana. "Then I decide who walks between worlds," he answered. "And who doesn't."
That answer chilled the room. Not because it was cruel—but because it was true.
As the weeks passed, Leylin began refining a new concept. Instead of anchoring a portal to a world, he would anchor it to himself. A living spatial key.
His body, soul, and mana signature acting as the sole stabilizing constant. The gateway would not exist unless he willed it. It would collapse the moment he withdrew control. No armies could march through it. No artifacts could hijack it.
It would be exhausting. Dangerous. Possibly lethal. But it would be safe. Relatively.
Late one night, surrounded by glowing equations and silent tomes, Leylin leaned back and closed his eyes.
"Alleria," he murmured.
The bond was gone. The thread severed beyond repair. But memories remained. And memory, he had learned, was sometimes stronger than magic.
He opened his eyes, his resolve hardening like tempered steel.
"Wait for me," he said softly. "I'm not done yet."
And somewhere, beyond shattered skies and dying stars, a world continued to fall, unaware that a mortal was attempting to reach it without tearing reality apart. The gate that must not exist was slowly taking shape.