The Last Guardian (2002)

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Product Description In the mist-shrouded haze of the past, long before the beginning of recorded time, there stood the world of Azeroth. Every kind of magical being strode the countryside among the tribes of man, and all was at peace -- until the arrival of the demons and horrors of the Burning Legion and their baneful Lord Sargeras, dark god of chaotic magic. Now Dragons, Dwarves, Elves, Goblins, Humans, and Orcs all vie for supremacy across the scattered kingdoms -- part of a grand, malevolent scheme that will determine the fate of the world of The Guardians of Tirisfal: a line of champions imbued with godlike powers, each one through the ages charged with fighting a lonely secret war against the Burning Legion. Medivh was fated from birth to become the greatest and most powerful of this noble order. But from the beginning a darkness tainted his soul, corrupting his innocence and turning to evil the powers that should have fought for good. Torn by two destinies, Medivh's struggle against the malice within him became one with the fate of Azeroth itself...and changed the world forever. THE LAST GUARDIAN An original tale of magic, warfare, and heroism based on the bestselling, award-winning electronic game from Blizzard Entertainment. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Prologue: The Lonely Tower The larger of the two moons had risen first this evening, and now hung pregnant and silver-white against a clear, star-dappled sky. Beneath the lambent moon the peaks of the Redridge Mountains strained for the sky. In the daylight the sun picked out hues of magenta and rust among the great granite peaks, but in the moonlight they were reduced to tall, proud ghosts. To the west lay the Forest of Elwynn, its heavy canopy of greatoaks and satinwoods running from the foothills to the sea. To the east, the bleak swamp of the Black Morass spread out, a land of marshes and low hills, bayous and backwaters, failed settlements and lurking danger. A shadow passed briefly across the moon, a raven-sized shadow, bearing for a hole in the heart of the mountain. Here a chunk had been pulled from the fastness of the Redridge Range, leaving behind a circular vale. Once it might have been the site of some primeval celestial impact or the memory of an earth-shaking explosion, but the aeons had worn the bowl-shaped crater into a series of steep-edged, rounded hillocks which were now cradled by the steeped mountains surrounding them. None of the ancient trees of Elwynn could reach its altitude, and the interior of the ringed hills was barren save for weeds and tangled vines. At the center of the ringed hills lay a bare tor, as bald as the pate of a Kul Tiras merchant lord. Indeed the very way the hillock rose steeply, than gentled to a near-level slope at its apex, was similar in shape to a human skull. Many had noted it over the years, though only a few had been sufficiently brave, or powerful, or tactless to mention it to the property's owner. At the flattened peak of the tor rose an ancient tower, a thick, massive protrusion of white stone and dark mortar, a man-made eruption that shot effortlessly into the sky, scaling higher than the surrounding hills, lit like a beacon by the moonlight. There was a low wall at the base of the tower surrounding a bailey, and within those walls the tumbledown remains of a stable and a smithy, but the tower itself dominated all within the ringed hills. Once this place was called Karazhan. Once it was home of the last of the mysterious and secretive Guardians of Tirisfal. Once it was a living place. Now it was simply abandoned and timelost. There was silence upon the tower but not a stillness. In the night's embrace quiet shapes flitted from window to window, and phantoms danced along the balconies and parapets. Less than ghosts, but more than memories, these were nothing less than pieces of the past that had become unstuck from the flow of time. These shadows of the past had been pried loose by the