The meeting was called without the flourish of trumpets or the stiff formality of a royal summons. There were no sealed letters delivered by breathless runners, no grave official correspondence to signal a shift in the world's axis.
Leylin simply sent word—brief, direct, and stripped of ornament. It was the kind of message that communicated through its very economy: what was being asked was time and absolute attention, and both were required immediately.
He had learned over the years that the manner in which a gathering was convened told those being gathered exactly what awaited them. He had calibrated this one to sit in the tension between alarm and routine.
It was a call to arrive prepared to receive information that would reorganize their reality. They came within the hour.
He had chosen the manor's inner sitting room rather than his study. The study was a fortress of solitary thought, a space for the one-sided architecture of a mind at work.
What was required this evening was a conversation, a distribution of weight. The sitting room featured a broad table at its center that had seen enough of the Windrunner family's private councils over the centuries that the wood itself seemed seasoned by them.
The chairs were mismatched, gathered over generations of use, and the fire in the hearth had moved past the dramatic crackle of new wood into the steady, reliable glow of established embers.
Sylvanas arrived first. It was her way of asserting control—to be the observer of arrivals rather than the observed. She took a chair with her back to the stone wall, the door held in her peripheral vision.
It was a habit of war, a reflex of the soul expressed without conscious thought. She looked at Leylin, a brief, piercing reading of the room's temperature, before settling into that peculiar quality of stillness she carried like a secondary garment.
Vereesa followed shortly after. She arrived with the slightly breathless air of someone who had been in the middle of a physical task and had dropped it the moment the word reached her. She was still in her work clothes—sturdy, practical fabrics suited for the mud and labor of the reconstruction—and she brought a hint of the outside chill with her.
She sat adjacent to Sylvanas with the automatic ease of sisters who had long ago stopped needing to negotiate for personal space.
Aminel and Tyr'ganal arrived together. It was a pattern Leylin had noted of late—not a statement of political allegiance, but the natural gravity of two people carrying the same secret.
Aminel sat with her characteristic spine of iron. Tyr'ganal pulled his chair a fraction closer to the table than the others, his body unconsciously leaning toward the information he craved.
Leylin noted the empty chair where Jaina Proudmoore would have sat. He had sent word, but the response was what he had anticipated.
She was elsewhere, she had been elsewhere for days, moving through the fractured remnants of the Alliance in Lordaeron and the surviving mages of the Kirin Tor with a focused, desperate urgency.
She was doing the invisible work of reassembly. Her absence changed the shape of the room, but it did not diminish the stakes. What was said here would eventually have to find its way to her through the dark.
He looked around the table at the four faces and spoke without preamble. "There are two things I need to tell you. They are connected, and the second follows inevitably from the first."
He paused, letting the silence settle.
"The portal is ready."
He delivered the news with the flat evenness of a man reciting a law of nature. He didn't want an announcement; he wanted a fact.
Announcements invited the kind of emotional static that could drown out the technical reality, and the reality was what they needed to grasp first.
"The communicative connection I established to Draenor was the foundation," Leylin continued. "The system that permits a voice to span that distance is the same geometry, expanded and stabilized, that permits passage. I have spent the weeks since the initial link was formed verifying the expansion. I have completed the final rites of stabilization."
He leaned forward slightly, his shadow stretching across the table. "The portal is bidirectional. Passage from Azeroth to Draenor is possible. Passage from Draenor to Azeroth is equally certain. I hold the mechanism of both."
The room seemed to inhale.
Tyr'ganal was the first to speak. He didn't ask a question; he merely tasted the word, testing its weight. "Bidirectional."
"Bidirectional," Leylin confirmed.
Aminel had gone incredibly still. It wasn't her usual composure; it was the stillness of a landslide held back by a single thread. Her eyes searched Leylin's with a clinical, desperate precision.
"The families," she whispered. "The villagers. The people we sent through to the stasis-fields on the other side…"
"They can come home," Leylin said. "When they choose. When we determine that home is a place capable of receiving them—which remains the harder question. But the mechanism exists. The door is unlocked."
What happened next was not a dramatic outburst. Sylvanas did not jump to her feet; she did not even shift in her chair. But the air around her changed. It was the subtle shift of pressure in a room when a vacuum is suddenly filled.
She looked at the surface of the table, her gaze distant, then she looked at Leylin. In that brief transit, her expression betrayed a flicker of something she rarely permitted the world to see.
It wasn't happiness—that was too simple, too soft a word for Sylvanas. It was a fierce, sharp relief. It was the look of a general who had finally found the path out of a pincer movement.
Vereesa made no such effort at containment. She pressed her hands flat against the table, her knuckles white.
"Alleria," she said. The name was a prayer and a demand all at once.
"Alleria," Leylin agreed. "And everyone else. But yes—Alleria."
Vereesa's breath left her in a long, shuddering exhale. Beside her, Sylvanas did something unexpected. Without looking at her sister, she moved her hand across the table and placed it briefly over Vereesa's. It was a gesture so quiet, so fleeting, that it was almost possible to miss.
In its brevity, it told a story of shared grief and shared hope that years of dialogue could never have matched.
For a moment, the three of them—Leylin and the two sisters—occupied a shared space where the trauma of the past weeks was acknowledged without being named.
Then Sylvanas's mask slid back into place. "You said there were two things."
"The Sons of Lothar," Leylin said.
The name landed with a different weight. It wasn't the warmth of a reunion; it was the cold, complicated reality of a political and military force returning from the dead.
"They have been on Draenor since the end of the Second War," Leylin reminded them.
"The Alliance expedition—Turalyon, Kurdran Wildhammer, Danath Trollbane, Khadgar. They stayed behind to seal the rift and save our world. We have had no reliable word of them for years. We didn't know if they survived the initial closure, or if they had been hunted to extinction in that wasteland."
He paused. "What the connection has allowed me to understand is that survival is the more probable outcome. These are not people who go quietly into the dark. They made their peace with a permanent exile, and in doing so, they likely built a life out of the wreckage."
"They may have found their own way back," Tyr'ganal mused. "If Khadgar is among them, he hasn't stopped looking for a door."
"It's a possibility," Leylin said. "But what I have confirmed is that the door is now open on this side. Whether our efforts have met in the middle or I am the first to break through doesn't change the outcome. They are coming back."
"If they come through," Sylvanas said, her voice like flint, "they will be stepping into a world they do not recognize."
"Yes," Leylin said.
The word hung in the air like a pall. The Sons of Lothar had left at the height of a victory. They had sacrificed themselves for a world where Lordaeron was the jewel of the north, where Quel'Thalas was an untouched sanctuary of magic, where the Alliance was a cohesive, triumphant force.
They had stayed behind to protect a world that no longer existed. They would step through the portal into a landscape of ash.
They would find Lordaeron a necropolis, its king a parricide, its people ghosts. They would find Quel'Thalas broken, its Sunwell gone, its people struggling with a spiritual hunger that bordered on madness.
The world they had died to save had been transformed by a catastrophe they had not witnessed and had no frame of reference to understand.
"They will need to be told," Vereesa said. She wasn't asking permission. She was stating a moral necessity. "They need to be told carefully. And by someone who has lived through what they missed."
"The manner of the telling is as vital as the truth itself," Aminel added.
Her mind was already moving into the logistics of trauma management—the place where she was most at home.
"If they come through in force, the arrival will have its own momentum. Its own chaos. Whatever they see first will define their reaction to everything else."
"Which means the preparation has to happen before they set foot on Azeroth,"
Tyr'ganal said. "Not after."
"The connection allows for more than passage," Leylin said. "It allows for speech. Before the physical gate is thrown wide, I can use the channel to reach them. To prepare them. I cannot soften the blow—that would be a lie, and a dangerous one. But I can give them the truth in stages. I can give them the time to mourn before they are asked to act."
He looked around the table. "A person can absorb an impossible amount of grief if they are not forced to swallow it all at once. The channel gives us the ability to provide that distance."
The fire in the hearth settled further into the ash, its glow steady and warm. Outside, the night had fully claimed the manor grounds.
The village below was a scattering of lit windows, small, defiant flickers of light against the encroaching dark. It was the sight of life conducting itself with stubborn, ordinary persistence.
"How do we tell them about Lordaeron?"
Vereesa asked. It was a question without a gentle answer, but she was the only one brave enough to ask it plainly.
Leylin didn't answer immediately. "With honesty," he finally said. "Anything else eventually compounds the damage. What we control is the sequence. We tell them through the voice-link first. We give them the space between the news and the crossing. And when they step through…"
He paused, his gaze moving to each of them. "We must ensure that what they see isn't just a ruin. They need to see that something is being built inside the wreckage. They need to see a direction. Direction is the difference between a grief that destroys and a grief that can be survived."
The silence that followed was heavy. It was the silence of people navigating a problem that could not be solved, only endured. They were looking at a path that would require more care than anything they had faced in the field of battle.
Sylvanas broke the quiet. "When?"
"Soon," Leylin said. "The threshold is ready. Any further preparation is just another word for delay." He met Sylvanas's gaze. "I intend to reach out to them within the week."
Sylvanas nodded once, a sharp, decisive gesture. She was committing to the course.
Across the table, Vereesa was looking at nothing in particular. She was doing a different kind of arithmetic—measuring the distance between the present and a moment in the near future where a door would open.
She was imagining Alleria Windrunner stepping onto the soil of her home, seeing her sisters, and finding that the world had ended while she was away. It was a terrifying distance.
But for the first time in years, it was a distance that could be crossed. And for now, in the quiet of the manor, that was enough.
The following days were a blur of intense refinement. Leylin barely slept, his mind a whirlwind of arcane geometry and the logistics of the soul. He spent hours in the study, his fingers tracing the runes of the communication device, feeling the hum of Draenor on the other side.
It felt like a heartbeat—distant, alien, but persistent. He found himself thinking often of Khadgar. He remembered the young man—or rather, the man who looked old but was young—and the weight of responsibility he had carried.
If anyone could anchor the Sons of Lothar through the coming shock, it was him. But even Khadgar would be tested by the magnitude of what had happened.
Leylin also spent time in the village, watching the residents. They were his responsibility now, more so than ever. If he brought back the lost, he had to ensure the home they returned to was worthy of the name.
He watched a young elven woman tending to a garden of herbs near the well, her movements careful and deliberate. She was planting for a future she couldn't see.
"Is the soil holding?" he asked her one afternoon.
She looked up, surprised by his presence. "It's stubborn, my lord. But it's beginning to wake up."
"Stubborn is good," Leylin said. "Stubborn is what we need."
As he walked back to the manor, he felt the weight of the bidirectional portal. It was more than a magical feat; it was a bridge over an abyss. He was inviting the past to meet a present that was unrecognizable.
He was inviting the dead—for all intents and purposes—to live again in a world of ghosts.
That evening, he met with Aminel and Tyr'ganal again.
They had been working on the "arrival sequence," planning exactly where the portal would manifest and how the initial contact would be handled.
"We should manifest it in the lower courtyard," Tyr'ganal suggested, pointing to a map of the manor grounds. "It's defensible, but open. It doesn't feel like a trap, but we can control the perimeter."
"And the first face they see?" Aminel asked.
"It should be family," Leylin said. "But it should also be authority. Sylvanas and Vereesa. And myself, as the one who held the door."
"They will be armed," Aminel noted. "They will step through expecting an orcish ambush or a demonic wasteland. They won't be expecting a quiet courtyard in Quel'Thalas."
"We will have the Farstriders stand down,"
Sylvanas said, appearing in the doorway. She had been listening, as she often did. "No drawn bows. No bared steel. We meet them as kin, not as a military force. If we look like we are at war, they will give us one."
"They are coming back to a world at war," Tyr'ganal reminded her softly.
"A different kind of war," Sylvanas countered. "One they haven't learned how to fight yet."
The planning continued late into the night. They mapped out supplies, medical tents, and the immediate needs of an expeditionary force that had been living off the land for years.
They discussed the political implications—how to handle the Council in Silvermoon, how to alert the remnants of the Alliance without causing a panic.
But through all the logistics, the emotional core remained the most volatile element.
Leylin found himself standing on the balcony of his study, looking out toward the sea. The air was salt-tinged and cool.
Somewhere out there, across the dimensions, Alleria was looking at a different sky. He wondered what she was thinking.
Did she dream of the green woods? Or had the red dust of Draenor filled her mind as it had filled her lungs?
He reached into his tunic and touched the communication stone. It was warm.
"Soon," he whispered.
He felt a faint vibration in the stone, a resonance that felt like an answer. It wasn't a word, but a feeling, a sense of anticipation that matched his own.
The week passed in a fever of preparation. The village was alerted, not to the full truth, but to the fact that 'guests' would be arriving.
The residents, used to the strange and sudden nature of Leylin's work, took it in stride. They began to prepare extra food, to clear out guest spaces, to prepare for the return of those they had thought were gone.
The morning of the final day broke clear and cold. The sky was a pale, translucent blue, the kind of sky that seemed to reach forever.
Leylar gathered everyone in the inner sitting room one last time. The atmosphere was electric, the tension a physical weight.
"Today we speak to them," Leylin said. "Today we bridge the gap."
He sat at the table and placed the communication device in the center. He began the incantation, his voice a low, melodic hum that filled the room.
The runes on the stone began to glow, a deep, pulsing violet. The air in the room grew heavy, the scent of ozone and ancient dust filling their lungs.
Then, the connection snapped into place. The static of the void cleared, and for a moment, there was only the sound of breathing—ragged, distant, but undeniably alive.
"Khadgar?" Leylin asked, his voice steady despite the pounding of his heart. There was a long silence. Then, a voice came through—cracked, weary, but holding a familiar sharp intelligence.
"Who is this? Who calls through the dark?"
"It is Leylin. From the Windrunner Manor. I am calling from Azeroth."
A gasp sounded on the other end. Then, a clamor of voices, distant and confused.
"Leylin?" Khadgar's voice was more urgent now. "How is this possible? The portal was closed. We sealed it."
"I have built another way," Leylin said. "A door between worlds. I am calling to tell you that the way home is open."
The silence that followed was longer this time. Leylin could imagine them—the veterans of a thousand battles, standing in a wasteland, hearing the impossible.
"Home," Khadgar whispered.
"Yes," Leylin said. "But before you come, there is much you need to know. The world you left... it is not the world you are returning to."
He began to tell them. He told them of the Scourge, of the fall of Lordaeron, of the death of King Terenas. He told them of the corruption of the Sunwell and the devastation of Quel'Thalas.
He spoke for an hour, his voice never wavering, delivering the grief of a world in measured stages.
On the other side, there were no interruptions. Only the sound of a world being rewritten in their minds. When he finally finished, the silence was absolute.
"Are you still there?" Leylin asked.
"We are here," Khadgar said, his voice sounding older than it had an hour ago. "We are here. And we are coming home. Regardless of the ruin."
"We will be waiting," Leylin said.
He closed the connection. The room was silent, the fire nearly out. Sylvanas and Vereesa were looking at the stone, their expressions unreadable.
"They are coming," Vereesa said. It was a statement of fact, but it sounded like a victory.
"They are," Leylin agreed.
He stood up and walked to the window. The sun was setting, casting long, golden shadows across the courtyard. The portal would be manifest there tomorrow. The past would meet the present, and the future would begin.
It was a terrifying thought. But as he looked at his sisters, he knew they were ready. They had survived the end of the world once.
They could survive its rebirth. The door between worlds was open. And nothing would ever be the same again.