Chapter 1
1049words
As Liora Morningstar embedded the final silver moon crystal into the groove of the bronze astrolabe, violet arcane energy flowed from her fingertips, tracing the midnight star paths.
On the stone platform before her, three beams of moonlight refracted through prisms into twelve rays, etching Azeroth's spiritual meridians across the dome. This was the "Ancestral Resonance Ritual" her mentor had left behind—said to enable communication with soul echoes from the Titan era.
"Just a touch more power to inject," Liora murmured, flipping open her leather-bound journal.
On the yellowed pages, her mentor's handwriting suddenly blurred, and the illustrations of Old God sealing symbols seemed to come alive, twisting into countless tiny black holes.
She jerked her head up. The void at the center of the star disk tore open. Where the ancestral phantom should have appeared, a dark mist intertwined with silver threads emerged instead.
This wasn't any shadow energy she recognized. Within the mist, tiny specks of light constantly struggled to escape, only to be dragged back by the inky darkness, emitting shrieks like fingernails scraping against glass.
Liora instinctively raised an ice wall, but watched in horror as the mist instantly penetrated the barrier, clinging to her wizard's robe.
A bone-chilling cold seeped through her skin, as countless overlapping whispers flooded her ears—pleas for help from hundreds, perhaps thousands of souls, mixed with broken words like "rift," "depletion," and "void."
"This isn't a ritual failure." Liora staggered backward, her hand weaving a purifying fire spell. The moment the flames touched the mist, they were devoured, transforming into an even denser darkness.
She glimpsed a new line of writing suddenly appearing on the title page of her notes—her mentor's handwriting but with an eerie distortion: "The Unbound Space is dissolving—the pulse of the Star Souls is weakening."
Meanwhile, at the edge of the Lordaeron ruins outside Silvermoon City, morning dew dampened Kael Darkblade's ranger cloak.
He crouched down, his fingertips brushing over the scorch marks on an undead skull. This graveyard had been purified by the Holy Light just three days ago, yet now dozens of rotting corpses had risen again, with black threads—similar to the mist Liora had encountered—twisting around their joints.
"Captain, their eyes..." the young blood elf ranger Lia gasped.
Kael looked up. The eye sockets of the skeletal soldiers held not the traditional Scourge's ghostly green flames, but rotating vortices of the void, greedily fixed on the shepherds' tents nearby.
A skeletal soldier's bone claws grabbed a sheep. The animal instantly shriveled, its soul extracted into a silver thread that streamed directly into the vortex within the skeleton's eye sockets.
"It's not the plague, nor the Lich King's remnants." Kael drew his longbow. His arrow, imbued with Sunwell energy, pierced the skeleton's chest cavity, only to trigger a ripple of black waves.
Worse still, the holy energy on the arrow was absorbed by those black threads, making the skeleton move even faster.
He spotted an almost invisible crack in the ground behind the skeleton. Black mist seeped along the blades of grass; wherever it passed, even withered thorns began to twist and grow wildly.
In the goblin workshop on Kezan, Zik Blastcore hammered a sparking ore separator with a wrench.
The iron bucket at his feet overflowed with various ores. Suddenly, a fist-sized Kaja crystal emitted a sharp humming sound.
"Damn it!" Zik cursed and kicked the bucket. The crystal leapt up, hovering mid-air before exploding into countless diamond-shaped fragments.
Within the light screen formed by the fragments, scenes from the Shadowlands appeared: the sky above Bastion split open with a massive gap, Kyrian's welcoming chains breaking inch by inch in the void; anima in the Azure Span shriveled like drained grapes, druidic revival spells hitting invisible barriers and rebounding as black lightning; in the deepest part, a blurred figure wearing an iron crown stirred a gray space, countless souls drawn in and transformed into nourishment for the void.
"We're gonna be rich!" Zik's monocle popped out into a magnifying lens as he grabbed his "Portable Energy Analyzer"—actually a contraption cobbled together from a discarded pacemaker—and pointed it at the light screen.
On the display, the energy curve skyrocketed, the red warning light flashed frantically, and the small speaker emitted a distorted sound—half creature's hiss, half mechanical error.
Just then, Liora's astrolabe burst with blinding light, black mist gushed from the rift before Kael, and Zik's Kaja crystal fragment flew northward.
Three anomalous points, thousands of miles apart, reached their energy peaks at the exact same second.
In the Violet Citadel of Dalaran, Archmage Khadgar burst through the observatory door. The magical messenger in his hand burned with purple flames, projecting urgent reports from across the Alliance: "Soul disturbances in the Hall of Ancestors in Ironforge, spirit shamans in Orgrimmar collectively fallen into comas, and... in the goblin mines of the South Seas, miners claim to have seen 'weeping stones.'"
Liora stared at the expanding black areas on the astrolabe, her fingertips ice-cold. "This is no ordinary soul anomaly, Master Khadgar. The whispers in that mist mentioned the 'Unbound Space'—according to my mentor's notes, that's the buffer zone souls pass through before entering the Shadowlands."
By the Sunwell in Silvermoon City, Kael handed the black threads collected from the rift to Archmage Rommath. The threads sizzled under the Sunwell's radiance, yet never dissipated. "It's absorbing the light energy," Kael said, his voice heavy with concern. "And those undead aren't targeting flesh, but souls. They're like... hungry parasites."
Amidst the dust of Kezan, Zik jumped onto his modified motorcycle and stuffed the energy analyzer into his backpack.
He looked toward where the Kaja'mite crystal fragments had flown—toward the center of Azeroth, in the direction of Ulduar.
"Whatever this damn thing is," he licked his lips and kicked the engine to life, "it'll fetch a good price... provided I live to sell it."
As the pigeons of the Violet Messengers soared across Azeroth's skies, no one realized that this simultaneously erupting anomaly was merely the first wound about to tear open the world—a rift cutting through life and death.
On Liora's notes, the twisted symbols slowly formed an unfamiliar word, glimmering with ominous ink under the moonlight: "Void Reaper."
