Dathadar Halfsoul

Ancient whispers hold that the sky raged with unnatural fury on the night Dathadar Shadowcrest was thrust into this world. His line thought the ungodly wrath of the storm to be a good omen, a sign, a display of the heavenly power infused within the babe, a power worthy only to be wielded by one of House Shadowcrest., a line of grand magisters, archmistresses of magic, advisers to her Illustrious Highness, the Light of Lights herself. In truth, though shrouded by the black skies of the storm, Dathadar’s birth aligned with an exceedingly rare celestial event known as the Time of the Black Moon, an alignment of several heavenly bodies surrounding Azeroth which amplify tidal forces several times over, birthing massive waves and freak storms. Perhaps, on a clear night, the elders of the Shadowcrest line would not have accepted such superstition, though with that they were sure was an omen, and the golden glow of the child’s eyes, they were certain a prodigy had been born.

As years wore on, Dathadar’s parents, and indeed all of the line of Shadowcrest were affirmed in their assumptions. Even as an infant, objects around Dathadar were wont to move about seemingly of their own volition. As the child aged, his untamed fury bristled, otherwise ordinary fits of rage exploded as white-hot torrents of arcane energy.

The elders of House Shadowcrest knew for certain the prodigious nature of the child, as well as they did the gravity of the risk should they not begin the child’s tutelage soon. Dathadar was far younger than the many Highborne younglings sent to study the arcane, though the child’s growing, unchecked potency necessitated it. And so, as all children of Highborne aristocracy, Dathadar was sent to one of the grand academies of magic, and within the city of his birth, the burgeoning capital of Zin-Azshari, he attended the most prestigious.

As a student, Dathadar excelled; perhaps indeed the circumstances of his birth had endowed him with some demonstrable power, regardless, the youngling proved to be supremely gifted in most of the schools of magic, showing proficiency vastly beyond his years in the arts of illusion, divination, and arcane manipulation. Often times however, Dathadar showed a frightening inability to control the vast power suffused within his flesh and blood. The instructors of the academy often struggled to reign in the child’s explosive tendencies, as the inability to control his power led to roiling frustration, which only erupted in episodes of arcane fury. Dathadar often relied on his elder cousin, Tyraela Shadowcrest, to maintain his sense of focus and purpose. She herself was performing independent research at the academy of Zin-Azshari, and ever willing to aid the prodigal son of the family, out of altruism of otherwise.

The two spent many countless hours over many years, working toward the control that Dathadar so desperately lacked. In her presence however, Dathadar felt at ease, for he had a face of kinship amongst the vast gilded halls rife with naught but strange faces twisted with envious contempt. And it was indeed contempt, for among the aristocracy of Highborne society, ability is status, and status, is everything. And so to see a face so much younger than their own, from a house so renown as Shadowcrest, and of such ability as to be a white sun next to the dim flicker of their candle-light. It was true envy what scorned them, and relished did they at any opportunity of degradation and defamation. Often they would try maliciously to incite him into the fits of his fury, believing the instructors would begin to share their conviction that he did not belong. Of course however, the instructors relished in the opportunity to mold such vast potential, and Dathadar still found comfort in the time spent in pensive practice with his cousin.

After several years of private study within the halls of the Zin-Azshari academy, Tyraela set off for Suramar, and the Nar’thalas Academy to continue her research, and while trepidation near stayed her feet for the thought of leaving Dathadar alone, her research could not be halted. And so Dathadar was left alone in the academy, surrounded by the faces of contempt. For years he had been harassed, endlessly tormented and pursued to fits of explosive rage. Even when the instructors turned a blind eye the abuse would continue, and where once he found reprieve in sessions of practice and control with his kin, that tether was now gone. All the control he had worked so hard to achieve, evaporated.

It was incredibly sudden. Over in a flash of heat and blinding light. In that moment, Dathadar knew exactly what he had done, there was no question. Little remained of the target of his frustration, scraps of cloth, piles of singed hair, and several smoldering heaps of bubbling flesh. He had done it without a thought, an impulse of wrath, a cauldron of anger and hate that had bubbled for years, and finally erupted in a flash of fatal fury. Dathadar knew well what he had done, he was impulsive, not a fool. Immediately he cast the remains through a portal, and cast an illusion as to mask the disgustingly sweet smell of burning flesh. After retreating to his dormitory, he made immediate contact with his House, divulging all. At his family’s urging, Dathadar returned home, and the family’s influence had any of Dathadar’s ties to the academy expunged and erased.

While home, Dathadar had seemed to find relative peace. The library of House Shadowcrest provided more than sufficient knowledge to supplement his studies for the time, and he took a particular interest in the subject of mortality, life and death, particularly in its relationship to magic. Indeed his dabbling matched that of his cousin, who while in the academy of Zin-Azshari, confessed to him the nature of her research, alternate means of immortality. Tyraela planned for the future, and sought a safeguard from mortality, from oblivion; Dathadar had always admires his cousin greatly, but he had underestimated her foresight and ambition. Though she was not as ambitious as he, and she skirted around answers that seemed painfully obvious to him. He saw then the triviality of all other pursuits before one.

After several years of living incognito, scarcely leaving the House grounds, Dathadar resolved to continue his studies at academy. He set his sights on Eldre’thalas, ancient home of the Shen’dralar, this time peaking into adulthood and set on a singular purpose, immortality. Not immortality granted by the Well of Eternity, he was hardly interested in immortality of body, Dathadar sought immortality of essence. While sequestered away at House Shadowcrest, Dathadar took a singular interest in the works of an occult Highborne scholar, Arthenam Fa’Aveldrin. Fa’Aveldrin’s works were boasted in full in the library of House Shadowcrest, and Dathadar committed countless volumes to memory, particularly those related to souls as entities, and the existence of a realm existing in mirror to our own the Fa’Aveldrin dubbed the Shadowlands. Fa’Aveldrin postulated that the majority of lost souls ventured into this shadowy, twin reality after death, and that the apparitions what haunt the ancient forests and dark hovels of the world exist between their realm and ours, anchored by magic made manifest in the moments of unimaginable fear and pain just before death.

Fa’Aveldrin however, fell from the grace if the academy of Zin-Azshari, and resigned to venture to Eldre’thalas. Many Highborne refused to acknowledge even the concept of mortality, and so it was no wonder that Fa’Aveldrin’s work was looked upon with ridicule and disgust. Indeed Dathadar’s decision to sojourn to Eldre’thalas was no coincidence, and he sought tutelage under Fa’Aveldrin himself. Upon arriving at Eldre’thalas, Dathadar saw something he’d never seen before, strange faces, though not one twisted with hideous, envious contempt. Few knew anything of Dathadar, save his noble heraldry. Dathadar found likewise that Eldre’thalas was far from what Zin-Azshari was. Eldre’thalas was a true modern bastion of knowledge, progressive theory and reason. Zin-Azshari was a shell of an institution, one made only to groom proper courtiers and hand-maidens, and suffuse them with knowledge enough to conjure their queen a biscuit if she so desired. It shunned knowledge of all but the arcane, espousing only the power of the Well of Eternity. Though Dathadar sought power beyond that of the Well, like Tyraela, he sought assurance, a safeguard against oblivion.

Dathadar made quick work in locating Fa’Aveldrin, and pursued him for tutelage. The old elf at first and for several days resisted, denying the request. Though when Dathadar recited passage by passage of Fa’Aveldrin’s works, the occultist’s curiosity was piqued. He allowed Dathadar a chance, in exchange for utmost discretion and unwavering devotion to the research they would perform, and the course they would take.

For many years Dathadar and Fa’Aveldrin pushed the boundaries of known reality, performing complex rituals of ancient and unknown magics. After countless hours of strenuous research, postulation, and experimentation, the pair found that Fa’Aveldrin’s hypothesized Shadowlands were more than simple mathematical conjecture. Through a stunningly complex ritual, the pair wove their sight into the spirit of a stag just as it lay dying, allowing them sight into the world beyond. What they witnessed was a twisted realm, in half-mirror of our own yet wholly unrecognizable. A land of innumerable wandering souls, drifting and wailing with unknowable agony. He knew then that he would not be resigned to this fate, and sought instead to use the terrible power of the realm for his own benefit.

While wandering the endless halls of Eldre’thalas one sleep forsaken night, Dathadar came across a sight which stopped him dead in his pace. What he saw was a being of peerless beauty, a creature with flawless skin of flaked opal, a mane of glowing, silver-white hair which cascaded down her immaculate form. Twin white stars sat in the hollows of her perfectly almond shaped eyes. She sat on a stone bench, radiating with august glory, and singing a song with a seraphic voice so sweet and tender as to seize Dathadar’s heart. He didn’t have to think about it, in an instant Dathadar found himself making his way toward the angelic being of glistening starlight. Without a shred of trepidation, Dathadar made himself known to her, and for a moment it seemed that her own eyes burned with the same fire as when he had looked on her. That night, Dathadar learned the name of perfection, Ilya Shadebloom. Even so beautiful a name was not half worthy of the otherworldly grace that enveloped her being, and her voice was enough to ensnare Dathadar in both mind and soul.

It didn’t take long for courtship and eventually love to blossom between the pair, and for the first time in his life Dathadar knew happiness. Gone were the fits of rage that had harried him since his birth, gone was the distrust of strangers, and the festering hate of the past. Dathadar found himself wholly devoted to his Ilya, enraptured with love. Truly she was the light of his life, even his Queen Azshara was pale before his Ilya. In time, the pair prepared to mate for life, Dathadar resolving to spend the rest of his immortal life with his love.

Though while Dathadar enjoyed all the splendor of life, Fa’Aveldrin grew impatient. Dathadar had grown scarce in their studies, even while promising full devotion, Fa’Aveldrin needed Dathadar to complete their work, for they rested on the cusp of immortality. The pair of occultists had worked fervently toward a method by which the power of the lost souls of the Shadowlands might be harnessed, and their machination took the form of a black dagger, one which severs soul from body. Its sole purpose, to harvest.

But Ilya had seen to the impossible. She allayed Dathadar’s terrible ambition, he had no will to see the foul work done. Fa’Aveldrin confronted him at this, for Dathadar had broken his pact. Dathadar responded only by claiming that the being who made that pact no longer existed, and he denounced his old mentor along with his teachings as vile and unnatural. Fa’Aveldrin stormed away in rage, resolving that their work would be done, with or without his pupil.

The ceremony of Dathadar and Ilya’s union was a lavish event, both families of great wealth and renown, the festivities were endless in their splendor. It was a moment frozen out of a dream, and as Dathadar pressed his lips to his mate’s, he felt her body succumb to a preternatural coldness of touch. She fell limp in his arms, eyes wide, bloodshot. As she collapsed, he saw it. The black dagger he and his mentor had spent decades crafting, his life mate its first victim. In a moment of blind fury, Dathadar tore the blade from Ilya’s back, and plunged it into Fa’Aveldrin with countless vicious strikes, sobbing and screaming hysterically as the blade tore into the long lifeless corpse. In a final act of desperate hysteria, Dathadar plunged the blade into his own chest. The pain he felt is beyond description, though it felt as though his muscles were being torn apart to a fiber, his bones shattering to splinters in his body, and his lungs burning with a choking agony that kept him even from screaming. Half way the dagger plunged into his chest before shattering into thousands of glistening black shards. He was meant to be with his mate, lest she suffer for eternity alone, but fate would not grant him such grace. The dagger, unfinished, unrefined, burst at the seems at its gorging feast. It had sent both Ilya and Fa’Aveldrin to the Shadowlands, but only half-sundered Dathadar’s soul, a fragment in his body, a fragment lost in unimaginable suffering in the world beyond.

Dathadar looked down on the stunned faces of the ceremony, a frigid wind howled through the terrace, and he felt an indescribable pain in his chest. As he clutched at his breast, he noticed something that twisted his stomach with dread. The wound in his chest had closed, scarred over already, and his skin had turned a sickly pallid gray. He clutched and clawed at his chest but to no avail, the terrible pain in his chest preceded the faint dimming of his heartbeat, his pulse slowly dying away before halting altogether. Yet there he stood, alive. He no longer drew breath, and eyes of glowing amber faded into ghoulishly white irises dotted with pinprick pupils. Once glowing white hair had faded, silver in its hue. The attendees looked on in horror, calls of abomination, wretch, betrayer, called out from both families. With unnatural speed, Dathadar fled, not stopping to look back, only running.

It was then that the sky erupted with green fire, and looking out toward the center of the continent, toward the capital, a massive pillar of unbridled rage and fury shooting into the tainted heavens, balls of verdant fire streaking across the blackened sky. Then the ground opened its fiery maw, mountains crumbled, forests toppled, and the sea devoured the sky. All was chaos, all was fury, then all was black. After an indeterminate period of unconsciousness, Dathadar opened his seraphic white eyes to naught but a tomb of stone. Once free, Dathadar resolved to make sense of what had happened. What he saw was a world he did not know, the sky wept with flaming ash, and an ocean had sprung up from nothing. The entire world felt in a state of terrible upheaval, it had been reborn anew. As had he.

In the millennia after the Sundering, Dathadar, as all his kind, went into hiding. His own kind nigh extinct, the Kaldorei shunning him with hateful disgust, he resigned himself to the dark forests of the reformed world, hoarding dark secrets and ancient magics for eons, gorging himself on lost souls, and pushing the boundaries of his black magics to terrible limits. The wraith now walks the world of the living, unknowable in its new purpose.