The victory was supposed to taste of ash and eternal certainty. It tasted, instead, of nothing.
Lord Kael'thas Vorn, the Immortal Emperor of Ash, tilted his skull. The gesture, habitual now after millennia, was less one of contemplation and more one of checking for dust. Nothing dared settle in his domain. That, perhaps, was the problem.
He sat on the Obsidian Throne, a monstrous piece of architecture forged from the petrified screams of the first thousand angels he had bound to his will. Below him, the Shadowfell stretched out—a landscape of endless, silent bone legions, rivers of liquid shadow, and towers that kissed an unseen, dead moon. It was perfection. It was power without peer. It was, he realized, the most aggressively boring spectacle in all of creation.
"Another thousand years," he thought, his internal voice a dry, echoing silence only comprehensible to the soul he had painstakingly preserved within his phylactery. "Another thousand years of managing the logistics of the undead supply chain, another thousand years of auditing the eternal torture pits for efficiency, another thousand years of… this."
He remembered the conflict: the final, desperate charge of the Celestial Host. Their champion, a blinding idiot of righteous fury, had shouted something about the sanctity of life before Kael'thas had simply pulled the soul from his chest like a loose thread. The ensuing collapse of the heavenly army had been predictable, messy, and utterly without challenge. He hadn't felt alive since the Bronze Age. He had simply been executing a long, inevitable equation.
His skeletal fingers, wrapped in plates of necromantic alloy, drifted across the armrest. He could, right now, with a momentary flicker of will, unmake the entire cosmos. He could bind the gods of light, extinguish the stars, and replace reality with an infinite, dark void of his own making. He had accomplished every goal set by every dark prophecy ever written about him. He was finished.
The boredom wasn't a temporary state; it was a fundamental, existential flaw in his victory. Power, limitless and unchallenged, was a cage whose bars were forged from apathy. He needed an antithesis, a counter-curse to the eternal sameness.
"A project," he concluded, standing up. The movement was slow, measured, and created no sound, yet the entire realm seemed to hold its breath. "A profound, monumentally stupid project."
He spent a century on the calculation alone, refining the constraints. The avatar had to be fragile. It had to be weak. It had to be utterly dependent on a system outside of his control—a system of rules and arbitrary authority. The goal wasn't to play a hero; it was to immerse himself in the soul-crushing minutiae of a life where a single, poorly filled out form could derail an entire afternoon. It had to be the antithesis of the Shadowfell's flawless, efficient despotism.
He wove the human form with exquisite, painstaking detail. Alistar Thorne, a name derived from an old, forgotten incantation for summoning minor financial audit spirits. His appearance was aggressively unmemorable—brown hair, average height, perpetually tired eyes, the kind of person one forgot existed ten seconds after meeting. He poured only the barest sliver of his power into the form, enough to sustain the illusion, but not enough to accidentally disintegrate a filing cabinet.
With a final, cynical sigh that did not require lungs, Kael'thas stepped out of the Shadowfell and discarded the Lich armor. It clattered silently onto the obsidian floor, an obsolete shell of a conquered life.
The transition was violent and jarring, a cold plunge from infinite dark to stifling midday sun. One moment, the cold, dry silence of undeath. The next, the noise of a cobblestone street, the stench of stale ale and human sweat, and the dizzying, exhausting sensation of a functioning heart.
He stood there, a newly minted human named Alistar Thorne, blinking in the glare. Across the street, hanging on a weathered wooden post, was the sign of his chosen new prison.
THE OAKHAVEN D-RANK ADVENTURER GUILD.
He straightened his back, adjusting the cheaply crafted leather shoulder-guard. The scent of a nearby bakery was an utterly foreign assault on his non-existent sinuses. He felt an intense, irrational urge to catalog the caloric intake of all passersby.
"This," he muttered under his breath, feeling the faint, terrifying pull of adrenaline and mortal worry for the first time in millennia. "This is going to be hell."