Nobody moved for a long time after Bolvar sat on the Frozen Throne. This was understandable.
What had just occurred on the summit deserved the honest weight of a moment that was being given its weight rather than being immediately organized into the next operational requirement.
The Lich King had fallen. The Helm had found its jailer. The Scourge had a new organizing principle and that principle was something the world could work with rather than something the world needed to survive.
These were not small things, and the people who had come to this summit and had paid what they had paid to reach its conclusion deserved the specific, brief interval of simply being in the conclusion before the conclusion was asked to become a beginning.
Leylin gave them a moment to think. He waited until a few minutes had served its purpose. Then he spoke. "Yogg-Saron."
He said it simply, without the framing he might have applied to a more formal briefing — not the organized, hierarchical presentation of intelligence assembled for people who had not been tracking the situation.
Most of the people in this room had been in the Violet Citadel when Brann Bronzebeard had delivered his report. The name was not new.
"You heard Brann's report in Dalaran," he said. "Most of you were in the room. The decision that came out of that room was that the Scourge was the immediate priority and Yogg-Saron was the deferred problem." He paused. "The Scourge is no longer the immediate priority. Yogg-Saron is no longer deferred."
The room had the attentive quality of people receiving information they had been holding at arm's length and were now being asked to hold directly.
"What Brann found in Ulduar is a major threat," Leylin continued. "The Old God, though contained from its prison. The guardian constructs that the Titans built to maintain that prison have been corrupted from the inside — which means the corruption has been active for a very long time, working systematically through the defenses that were supposed to prevent exactly this, and which are now the delivery mechanism for what the Old God is sending outward rather than the barrier against it."
He looked across the assembled faces. Tirion, who was processing the full weight of what the watching had produced.
Darion, whose death knight's comprehensive awareness of corrupting forces gave him a particular, direct access to what the Old God's corruption meant in practice.
Varian, who was wounded from the summit fight and who was managing the bleeding with the practiced quality of someone who had been managing physical damage in the middle of important conversations for his entire adult life.
Thrall, who was overseeing the horde's casualties and helping both Saurfang and Grommash from their injuries.
Jaina, who had been carrying the Ulduar concern alongside the Scourge campaign since Brann's report and who was now receiving the explicit confirmation that the carrying had been appropriate.
Muradin, who had not looked away from Leylin since he started speaking.
"I am going to Ulduar," Leylin said. "What I need you to understand before I ask anything of anyone is what that means and why the timeline is not negotiable."
He had been thinking about how to say this since the Dragonblight settlement — since the first comprehensive assessment he had made of the Storm Peaks anomaly had produced the uncomfortable conclusion that the anomaly's direction was not static.
He knew the Yogg-Saron situation developed alongside the Scourge campaign with the dual-track attention of someone who understands that the world does not organize its crises conveniently.
"Yogg-Saron is adept at corruption," he said. "Not destruction — corruption. The distinction matters because destruction is something you can see and measure and respond to. Corruption works through what is already there. It finds the existing vulnerabilities in the things it wants to compromise and it works on those vulnerabilities with the patience of something that has been imprisoned for ten thousand years and has had nothing but time to develop the understanding of what vulnerabilities look like and how to find them."
He paused. "The corrupted Titan constructs in Ulduar are not simply enemies that need to be cleared. They are evidence of what Yogg-Saron can do to things that were specifically designed to resist it. The Titans built those constructs with the purpose of containing an Old God. They were not poorly made. They were not under-resourced. They were the best available counter to exactly this threat, built by beings of significantly greater capability than anyone in this room, and they have been systematically compromised from the inside over an extended period without anyone on the outside being aware that the compromising was occurring." The room received this.
"If it can do that to Titan constructs," Darion said, and did not finish the sentence. The Ebon Blade's Highlord had made the calculation that the sentence was reaching toward and had determined that finishing it was unnecessary.
"Yes," Leylin said.
"How much time do we have?" Jaina asked.
This was the operational question that everything else resolved around, and the fact that Jaina was the one to ask it rather than someone else communicated something about the assembled group's current configuration.
"I don't know precisely," Leylin said, with direct honesty that had characterized everything he had communicated since Dragonblight. "What I know is that the influence the Old God was extending while imprisoned was already reaching beyond Ulduar's physical boundaries — I have been also been observing the Storm Peaks anomaly for three years in my monitoring network, and what the anomaly was telling me was not the static progress of something contained but the progressive quality of something that was working against its containment and making incremental progress."
He held Jaina's gaze. "The anomaly changed significantly before Brann confirmed in Ulduar. What changed after that confirmation is not something my monitoring network has been able to fully characterize because the change is happening faster than the external readings can track it."
"Which means we don't have the luxury of waiting until everyone has recovered," Rhonin said. He said it not as a complaint — as a statement of the operational reality that the summit needed to understand before any decisions about Ulduar were made.
The Archmage's voice had the measured quality it always had when he was conveying something that was uncomfortable and that the discomfort of did not change.
"No," Leylin agreed. "We don't."
Varian moved. Not toward anything specific — needed to move while thinking, whose body and mind had always worked together because standing still was the least productive available configuration.
He moved and looked out at Icecrown's expanse and looked at the sky above it and was quiet for a moment with the quality of someone conducting an internal conversation that had a lot of competing parties.
Then he turned. "My forces need time," he said. The words were direct and were not an excuse — the King of Stormwind stating a fact with the honest quality of a commander who understood the difference between what his forces needed and what the situation was offering and who was going to acknowledge both rather than pretending the gap between them did not exist.
"The campaign took —" He stopped. Started again. "What the campaign took cannot be replaced by a few hours of rest at a citadel that was, until very recently, organized around killing us."
"I know," Leylin said.
"But you are going anyway," Varian said. Not an accusation. The accurate statement of what was being communicated.
"I am going anyway," he confirmed. "I am not asking everyone to go with me immediately. I am asking everyone to understand what is at stake and to determine, based on that understanding, what they can offer and when they can offer it."
He looked across the assembled faces again. "Some of you are going to need time before Ulduar is possible. Some of you have capabilities that Ulduar specifically requires and that the recovery time cannot be allowed to consume entirely because the thing we are going to face will not wait for the recovery."
He paused. "What I am asking is not for everyone to go now. I am asking for everyone to understand what comes next so that whatever decisions are made are made with the full picture rather than without it."
Thrall was the first to speak after the pause.
"The elements near Storm Peaks have been distressed since before Brann's report," he said. "I have been feeling it through the shamanic connection since we entered Northrend — the quality of earth and water that is being worked against, that has something pressing on it from a direction that the elements were not built to resist."
He looked at his hands in the way that shamans sometimes looked at their hands when what the channels were communicating was arriving through them with unusual directness. "What the elements are telling me is not the quality of a threat that becomes more manageable with time. The distress is increasing."
"Then the Warchief is going," Garrosh said, with the flat, blunt quality that Garrosh brought to decisions he had already made. He was still injured from the summit fight — the evidence of the strike that had taken him out visible in how he was holding his left side — and none of the injury was in his voice.
Thrall looked at him. "Not immediately," Thrall said. "The Horde warriors who are still standing need to be accounted for. The dead —" He stopped. The pause had the quality of a Warchief acknowledging what needed to be acknowledged before he continued accounting for anything else. "The dead need to be honored as the Horde honors its dead. Then we discuss Ulduar."
"The Argent Crusade will commit forces," Tirion said. "What the Crusade has available after the summit is not what we brought into it. But what the Crusade has available is what Northrend's campaign has made it — experienced, specifically, in exactly the categories of threat that an Old God's corruption produces. We did not fight the Scarlet Crusade and Zul'Drak and everything else in this campaign by accident."
His jaw set. "We committed to destroying the Lich King. The Lich King is destroyed. What the commitment requires of us next is what it requires."
Darion said nothing. He looked at Tirion and then he looked at Leylin and the look communicated that the Knights of the Ebon Blade's position was the same as the Argent Crusade's and did not require further verbalization.
Jaina found him while the others were organizing the immediate aftermath — the necessary work of assessing who was able to move and what needed to be addressed before anyone went anywhere.
She stood beside him and looked at the same view he was looking at — Icecrown's expanse, the cold of the air above the citadel's highest point, the grey sky that had always been the grey sky and that remained the grey sky without the Lich King's authority in it to make it more than that.
"You knew about this before we came to the summit," she said.
"Yes."
"You didn't say anything."
"I said everything about Ulduar that needed to be said before coming here. To Aminel and Tyr'ganal and the others." He looked at the Storm Peaks' direction on the horizon — not visible from here, but present in the specific, ambient way of something he had been tracking for three years. "The summit needed to be the summit's own thing. I didn't want Ulduar in the room while Arthas was still standing."
Jaina considered this. "That is either very disciplined or very arrogant," she said.
"Probably both," he said.
She almost smiled — the quality of almost-smiling that Jaina produced when something had landed exactly where it was aimed. Then the almost-smile did the thing that things that were almost something did when the something was too heavy for the almost.
"Azeroth is not going to give us a pause," she said. "Between Ulduar and Deathwing and whatever else is building in the corners we haven't looked at yet — the disasters are not going to organize themselves into a convenient sequence."
"No," he agreed.
"You have seen it coming. The upcoming disasters that plagued Azeroth."
"Since before Northrend," he said. "The world has a lot of things building at once. The timeline is not comfortable and it is not going to become comfortable." He looked at her directly. "What I am asking for is not everyone at full capacity immediately. I am asking for everyone's honest assessment of what they can offer and when, so that what goes into Ulduar is what Ulduar requires rather than what is simply available."
"And you?" she asked. "What can you offer?"
He thought about this with the honest answer that the question deserved — the full inventory of what the citadel and the summit fight had cost, what the shield had taken, what five years of Northrend had built into what remained, what Ulduar was likely to require from the person who went into it.
"Enough," he said. "Not comfortable. Enough."
Jaina looked at him with the expression she wore when she had processed something completely and was existing in what the processing produced.
"Then I am coming," she said. "Not immediately — I need to send communications south and organize what the coalition's aftermath requires someone to organize and make certain that the people who cannot go to Ulduar are not simply left at without a plan for how they return to somewhere safer." She paused. "But after that. I am coming."
He gathered the full group one more time before they began the descent. Not a speech — he had never been a person for speeches. Simply the direct summary of what was going to happen and what it required.
"Ulduar," he said. "The Storm Peaks. Yogg-Saron. What it can do and why it cannot be left to do it." He looked at the assembled faces — the reduced, present, still-here faces of people and who were being asked to look at what came after it.
"I am not asking for decisions now. I am asking for honest assessments. What you can give and when. What Ulduar requires and whether you are able to provide it." He paused. "Some of you have people who need to go home. Some of you have commitments that the summit was supposed to resolve and that its resolution has been redirected rather than completed. Some of you are standing here with injuries that need more than a few hours."
He looked at each of them. "All of that is real and I am not asking you to pretend it isn't. The only thing I am asking is that the assessment be honest, because honest assessments produce plans that work and dishonest ones produce plans that don't."
"What is the honest assessment of the timeline?" Saurfang asked.
"Weeks," Leylin said. "Not months. The Old God's influence is expanding. Every week that Ulduar is not addressed is a week that the expansion has continued without resistance, and the expansion's effects on the surrounding territory — on the elementals, on the living things in Storm Peaks' vicinity, on whatever else the influence reaches in the expanding radius — are effects that compound rather than simply accumulate."
Weeks. The word landed with the quiet weight of a timeline that was neither generous nor catastrophic — not the immediate urgency that would have prevented any recovery at all, not the comfortable extension that would have allowed everyone to return to full capacity before the next engagement demanded them.
"Then we have weeks," Tirion said, with the organizing quality of someone converting a timeline into an operational reality. "We use them."
It was, in the honest accounting of what had left the coalition to work with, the most practical available response. He looked at the Storm Peaks' direction one more time.
Yogg-Saron was there. Waiting with the patience of something that had been imprisoned for ten thousand years and that understood, in the comprehensive way of something ancient and patient and intelligent, that patience was its most reliable available resource.
He did not intend to give it more of what it was waiting for. "Weeks," he said. "We use them."
He turned toward the descent. Behind him, the summit of Icecrown Citadel held — the new Lich King on his throne, the coalition's survivors beginning the organized work of the aftermath, and the cold that had always been there and that was simply cold now.