They left Icecrown Citadel the way they had arrived — without ceremony, without the organized departure that formal military operations employed when the operation had concluded and the forces were returning to their bases.
Simply moving, with the purposeful quality of people who had somewhere to be and who had determined that being there was more important than the specific, ritual quality of marking the departure.
Leylin went first. This was not a decision anyone discussed — it was the natural expression of the group's understanding of who was setting the direction and what following meant in this particular context.
Alleria fell beside him with the fluid transition from standing to moving, the others followed. The descent through the citadel's floors was different from the ascent — not in the physical quality of the staircase or the ambient, cold character of the construction, but in what the descent was moving through versus what the ascent had been moving through.
The floors they had cleared were littered with corpses from the defeated undead. He walked through it and out the main door and back onto Icecrown's Upper Spire with the unremarkable quality of someone walking through a door.
The separation happened at the Upper Spire, where the various paths that the summit's different groups needed to take diverged into their different directions.
Jaina organized it with the efficient quality she brought to all logistical challenges — the immediate, comprehensive assessment of what needed to happen and who needed to do what.
"Kirin Tor first," she said, to Rhonin specifically and to the mage contingent generally. "Full briefing on what we encountered in the summit. Assessment of what Ulduar requires beyond what we currently have assembled. Recruitment."
She looked at Leylin. "Give me the most complete intelligence brief you have on Ulduar's internal architecture. Whatever your monitoring network has on the guardian constructs, the corruption's visible expression, the Old God's observable range of influence. Everything."
"Aminel has it," he said. "She's been building the Ulduar intelligence picture alongside the Northrend picture for three years."
Aminel produced the relay's compiled output. The transfer of the compiled intelligence picture from Aminel to Jaina's coordination channel took the time it took and both women managed the transfer with the professional efficiency of people for whom information transfer was a practiced skill.
Jaina sealed the transfer and looked at Leylin. "Two weeks," she said. "Three at most. What I can assemble in that time is not what I would assemble in three months, but three months is not available and what I can assemble in two weeks is not nothing."
"It is not nothing," he agreed.
She looked at him for a moment with the specific, assessing quality she brought to moments when she was making an evaluation and wanted it to be accurate before she committed it to a statement. "Don't go too far in before we arrive," she said.
He held her gaze. "I am going to assess the situation directly," he said. "I am not going to begin the primary operation without the assembled force. But I am also not going to stand at Ulduar's entrance for two weeks watching the corruption expand because the assessment was inconveniently timed."
Jaina considered this. "That is either reassurance or its exact opposite," she said.
"Probably both," he said, which was the same answer he had given on the summit and which was, both times, the honest one.
Varian had been standing slightly apart from the organizing conversation with the quality of a man working through a decision that had multiple competing inputs and that was not going to be simplified by additional input from outside.
He found Leylin while Jaina was completing the intelligence transfer. "I am not coming to Ulduar," he said.
Not an apology — the statement of a decision that had been made and that he was conveying directly because direct was the quality that the relationship between them had always operated at best.
"Stormwind has been without its king for the duration of the campaign. What the campaign's duration has done to Stormwind in terms of the political situation and the administrative demands and the ongoing complexity of governing a kingdom that has been under pressure since before I returned to it —" He stopped. "I need to go home."
"I know," Leylin said.
Varian looked at him with the quality of someone who has expected to encounter argument and has received understanding instead and is briefly, honestly uncertain what to do with the understanding.
"Muradin will go," he said. "He knows what I would have contributed and he is fully capable of contributing it more effectively than I would after — " He gestured, briefly, at himself and at the summit's general direction. "After all of this."
"Muradin is a good choice," Leylin said.
"He is a better choice than me right now," Varian said, which was the honest quality of a man who understood himself accurately. "The campaign needed a king at the summit because the summit required political authority alongside military capability. Ulduar requires a fighter and a commander and someone who knows the dwarves' relationship to Titan construction better than almost anyone alive." He paused. "That is Muradin. Not me."
Leylin nodded. Varian looked at him for a moment longer — the look of someone completing an assessment they had started earlier and arriving at its conclusion.
"You held the line for five years," Varian said. "Alone. Because it was needed." He paused again. "I have spent the campaign in Stormwind and Northrend making decisions about armies and political relationships and the complex management of an alliance that was barely an alliance at the best of times and that the Wrathgate had made significantly worse than the best of times."
He said it with the flat, honest quality of someone taking their own inventory. "I did not hold the line alone for five years. I did not make the choice you made on the glacier." He extended his hand. Leylin shook it.
"Come home safely," Varian said, with the quality of someone who understood that this instruction was not a command but the most direct available expression of what he was genuinely saying.
"I intend to," Leylin said. Varian turned and began organizing the Alliance contingent's return — the efficient motion of a king who had made his decision and was now implementing it, the deliberative phase complete and the executive phase engaged.
Thrall's situation was resolved differently. He found Saurfang at the Upper Spire's corner— the High Overlord standing with the specific, still quality of someone who was not simply standing but occupying a position that had significance beyond the physical, looking in the direction that the Wrathgate was in.
Not toward it — they were not at an angle that provided a sightline to the Wrathgate's location. Looking in its general direction with the symbolic quality of someone whose gaze was oriented by something other than visual line-of-sight.
Thrall stood beside him. Neither of them said anything for a long moment.
"Dranosh," Saurfang said finally.
"Yes," Thrall said.
"I watched him die twice," Saurfang said. "The first time at the Wrathgate. I did not see it — I received the report. The receiving of the report was its own thing." He paused. "The second time on this summit. I saw the body. I saw what he was in that body." Another pause, longer. "I need time with both of those things."
"I know," Thrall said.
"You are going to Ulduar."
"Yes."
Saurfang was quiet for a moment. "The Horde warriors who survived the summit — their commanding officer needs to be someone who is not me right now. My judgment is not —" He stopped. "I am not reliable for other people's lives right now. I know this about myself. I am telling you before you need to find out in a worse way."
Thrall looked at him — looked at him with the full, present quality of the Warchief's regard for the High Overlord, which was the regard of someone who understood exactly what Varok Saurfang was and who was therefore taking seriously what Varok Saurfang was saying about his own current state.
"The surviving warriors return with you," Thrall said. "Honor the dead. Rest. The Horde will be here when Ulduar is addressed and when you are ready to lead it."
Saurfang held the glacier's cold with the patient quality of someone sitting in something difficult and not trying to move through it faster than moving through it would naturally take.
"Go," he said. "The Lich King is defeated. That is what the Horde came for. What comes next is yours to lead."
Thrall clasped his arm. Saurfang held the clasp for the moment it needed to be held.
Then Thrall turned and found Garrosh, who was being treated by one of the Horde's remaining healers with the resistant quality of someone who had decided that the treatment was taking longer than his patience for treatment extended and who was making this decision known through the quality of how he was sitting.
"Garrosh," Thrall said.
Garrosh looked at him with the focused attention that the Warchief's direct address produced in him.
"You are going home with Saurfang," Thrall said.
Garrosh's expression moved through several things quickly. "I am capable of —"
"You were struck by the Lich King," Thrall said. "You were incapacitated. What the healers are doing right now is managing the internal damage of that strike, which is not the same as fixing it."
He held Garrosh's gaze with the flat, direct quality of a Warchief who was not having a negotiation. "When the healing is complete and when the Horde needs you at full capacity for what comes next, you will be there. Right now, you are not at full capacity and what comes next requires full capacity."
He paused. "The Horde needs Garrosh Hellscream at his best, not at whatever is available after Arthas's fist."
Garrosh held the argument he had been building for a moment longer. Then he let it go. "Then I will recover," he said, with the clipped quality of someone accepting a decision they disagree with because they have assessed the decision's merits and have found them sound even while disagreeing.
"Good," Thrall said. And then, with the warmth that the Warchief expressed through the quality of single, direct statements rather than extended elaboration: "You fought on the summit with everything you had. What you have, when you have all of it, is considerable."
Garrosh said nothing. But the quality of his silence was different from the prior silence.
The journey from Icecrown to the Storm Peaks' outer boundary was not long in the way that long journeys were long — it was the cold, altitude-gaining quality of terrain that covered significant elevation change alongside horizontal distance, the characteristic of Northrend's northern reaches where the continent's geography became something that tested everything that moved through it in ways that tested differently from Icecrown's organized hostility.
Leylin set the pace and the group matched it. Alleria, Sylvanas, Vereesa, Aminel, Tyr'ganal, Liadrin, Thrall — this was what they were now, the assembled quality of the people who had chosen to be here rather than the larger, formal coalition that had entered the citadel.
Not the summit's full force. The people for whom this was the next thing and who were moving toward it with the committed quality of that understanding.
Muradin had joined them later on with the flat, direct statement of a dwarf who has decided and is not revisiting the decision: "Dwarves built things in Storm Peaks. I know the terrain. Where Varian said "you go, I go."
Nobody argued. Arcturis moved ahead, ranging in the spirit bear's ambient way — the outer consciousness of the group, extending awareness into terrain they were still approaching, communicating back through the bond's channel the developing quality of what the Storm Peaks were producing in their direction.
"The elemental distress is increasing," Thrall said, the shamanic channels giving him the real-time read of the Storm Peaks' elemental state that the physical distance had attenuated and that the closing distance was restoring.
"The earth under the Storm Peaks is not —" He searched for the word. "It is not itself. Something has been working on it. Something patient and old and interested in what the elemental connections between things carry."
"It reads the connections," Leylin said. Thrall looked at him.
"Yogg-Saron," Leylin continued. "It doesn't simply corrupt the individual. It works through the connections between things — the relationships and the channels and the invisible connection of how things communicate with each other."
Thrall absorbed this with the visible, immediate discomfort of a shaman understanding what was being described in the personal way of someone whose primary relationship with the world ran through exactly the channels being described.
"I will be careful," he said.
"I know," Leylin said.
They walked. The Storm Peaks' outer boundary grew closer with the gradual, accumulated quality of distance reducing when you were moving through it steadily rather than quickly — the quality of honest, unhurried approach rather than dramatic arrival.
Ulduar was ahead. The monitoring network's coverage of the Storm Peaks had been building its picture since they left the glacier — the complex, layered signature of Titan construction interacting with the Old God's freed influence, the specific, alarming quality of a place that had been organized around containment and that was now organized around the absence of the containment it had been built for.
"It knows we are coming," Aminel said, reading the relay's output with the focused attention she brought to all monitoring data.
"The corruption in the guardian signatures is — it is not random, not the disorganized quality of constructs that have simply malfunctioned. They are oriented. The orientation is toward the outer boundary."
"Toward us," Tyr'ganal said.
"Toward anything approaching," Aminel confirmed. "But yes. Currently, toward us."
Leylin looked at Ulduar's direction on the horizon — not visible yet, but present in the specific, ambient quality of the monitoring network's extended coverage, the Titan complex announcing itself through the massive signature of ancient construction that had been here for longer than the current crisis had given anyone a reason to notice it.
He felt it differently from the citadel's approach. Icecrown had been the cold, organized authority of something built for directed purpose.
What he felt from Ulduar's direction was older than that and stranger — not the cold of organized death but the cold of something that had been waiting in a specific place for so long that the waiting had become part of what the place was, the Old God's presence having soaked into Ulduar's stone the way the Lich King's authority had soaked into Icecrown's.
Except the Lich King's authority had edges. Defined objectives. The comprehensible character of a will that pointed somewhere. What was emanating from Ulduar's direction had no edges he could read.
"Stay close together," he said. "Not combat formation — close. If Yogg-Saron's influence is working through the connections between things, the connection between us is both the vulnerability and the defense. It is a vulnerability because corruption can travel through it. It is a defense because we will notice if the traveling is occurring, provided we are close enough to notice."
"You are saying we protect each other," Liadrin said.
"I am saying we watch each other," he said. "Which is not quite the same thing and is more useful."
She nodded. The Storm Peaks rose ahead of them. The ancient stone of Titan construction was visible now at the limit of ordinary sight — enormous and old and carrying within its specific, architectural character the quality of things built by beings who understood scale differently from anyone currently approaching it.
Ulduar. The first step into the problem. He walked toward it with the patient quality of someone who had been building toward this for long enough that the building was simply done and the arriving was what remained.
The Old God waited with the patience of something that had been waiting for ten thousand years and that understood, in the specific, comprehensive way of things that were ancient and intelligent and wholly organized around the consumption of what was vulnerable, that patience was not a strategy.
It was simply what it was. And what it was had no interest in anything he brought to the confrontation. He intended to change that assessment.
He walked towards Ulduar. The next problem had always been waiting. Now he was walking toward it, that was enough to begin.