Guenever 's tale Part One

[Guenever]

This tale is not common knowledge, but presented here for interest. She is a member of the Dark Valkyries.

To begin, there is an important fact about Guenever; she was not born a woman. She was born Gwydion Sundîel, the third son of the powerful Magister Elf Arturos Sundîel and Priestess Aileen.

As a child, Gwydion showed a natural talent for magic, mastering several spells well ahead of his siblings and peers. His father, however, strongly advised Gwydion to join up with the Rangers and to avoid magic. Arturos was concerned about the magical addiction of his people, an addiction made more prominent by the campaigns against the invading Horde. Arturos forbade Gwydion to join any magical academy, and Gwydion dutifully began to train as a Ranger. Then, by fortune or misfortune depending on how you see it, both of Gwydion’s parents were slain in the raid through the Dark Portal. When the news hit the House of Sundîel, Gwydion’s eldest sibling, his sister Kalana, immediately lifted the ban on Gwydion. “The House of Sundîel will not be bereft of a great wizard,” she stated. Gwydion was accepted to the Academy with no question, and began to train in the arts of high magic.

Gwydion was in his third year of apprenticeship when Arthas and the Scourge invaded Silvermoon. There had been rumours, naturally, of Arthas’ treachery and the murder of the King, but no Elf ever imagined the horror that was to come. When word came that the Rangers were under assault at the borders, the Magisters mobilized all the Apprentices to begin powering the magical defenses of the Silvermoon nation. All know how that campaign ended; Silvermoon was sacked, the Sunwell was poisoned and defiled, and the High Elf nation as they knew it came to an end. Gwydion and his post were overrun by the Scourge. It was Gwydion’s brief training as a Ranger that saved him, allowing him to fend off the undead with a sword and spell, and he fled into the woods and lost his pursuers. Later on he visited his ancestral home and found the Sundîel family gone, slain as sacrifices to raise Kel-Thezad. The home itself was destroyed, and Gwydion went from the station of a nobleman to next to nothing, an orphan adrift in a world without a even a nation to call home.

He spent the next few years surviving, finding what information he could on magic to continue his training. Gwydion was sure the Scourge would destroy Azeroth, and strove to find some way to empower his people to be stronger warriors against the Scourge. The World Tree was sacked and destroyed, the Scourge turned back, and the day was saved, but the world was changed. The Blood Elves, as they now called themselves, began to gather again in strength, and Gwydion was among those who joined the expedition to retake Silvermoon. It was here that his research went awry. Several broken orbs of power were found by his team, and Gwydion took them for himself, hoping to use the vast stores of magic to effect his transformation into an elf who was a living font of magic. He found a secluded corner of Falconwing Square and set up his workshop. He erected a few basic defenses to keep the Wretched away, and constructed a machine to focus the power of the seven orbs into himself. It took him a few months, and he used the aid of more than a few adventuresome Blood Elves to gather to components.

When he activated the machine, he knew instantly that he had been wrong. He felt the magic in his very soul burning, and realized that the magic would only destroy him. Bitterly he cursed his blind hatred of the Scourge, the hatred that had lead him down such a narrow path to power, and in that moment he thought of his father’s warning against pursuing magic. His last thought was of his mother, the kind and peaceful woman who had promised Gwydion that her spell of protection would shield her son forever.

He awoke in shock, not dead, but not alive. His body was destroyed, and as his spirit lingered there for months he watched in horror as the necrotic energies still infesting the place raised his corpse. It was destroyed soon after by the Blood Knights, and Gwydion felt his hold on the world loosening with the final death of his body. The Blood Knights also discovered his lab, and soon enough a Magister was brought there to study what had been going on in here. After a week of study, she created a circle, and Gwydion felt his energies being pulled into it. With a sudden gasp of pain, he saw hands of flesh touching the ground, and knew he had been brought back to life. His thought was that his hands didn’t look quite right, and then he passed into darkness.

When Gwydion awoke, a Priest was tending over him. He was weak, and could not even speak, and drifted in and out of consciousness. To his surprise the Priest was a Forsaken human. He sat next to the bed, and his kind face bore the faint taint of death, but his milky eyes still held compassion. Gwydion recognized him as Kristoff, a warrior-priest who had known his parents in the original wars against the Horde.

“Kristoff,” Gwydion greeted, frustrated and alarmed by the weakness in his voice.

Kristoff chuckled, and a small flap of skin in his throat produced as much noise when he talked as the sound from his mouth, giving his speech an unnerving sound, as if two people were speaking at once. “It’s a miracle you’re alive at all, considering what you’ve been through, Gwydion,” he replied in the speech of Lordaeron. “You haven’t exactly escaped your foolishness unscathed either.”

Gwydion reached up a hand to grasp the hand of his old friend, and noted how thin and pale his hand appeared. It bothered him immensely, but Kristoff took the hand in his own; the flesh of the man was cold, and Gwydion involuntarily recoiled at the touch of death. Kristoff laughed, the laughter escaping his throat with a shuddering wheeze.

“Yes, Gwydion, we have both changed. I have been ‘gifted’ with everlasting death by the Lady, whereas you, well, you have undergone a puzzling change yourself,” he mused, smiling.

“What change is it you speak of?” Gwydion demanded imperiously, working to sit up. His head swam, and he felt strange, off balance in some fashion. His voice was still wrong in his head and in his ears; it was higher, and held a strange timber to it.

“Now now,” Kristoff chided. “You needn’t be so haughty with me. I knew you briefly as a child, and am as close to family as you have left. Sit back and listen, and focus on me alone until I’ve finished.”

Gwydion sat back, and folded his arms across his chest in, scowling. As he did, he experienced a strange sensation. His arms met his abdomen, but they were rested under something else, a curious weight on his chest he had been noticing but unable to comprehend. He let out a loud gasp, and looking down at himself noticed that he was dressed in fine red robes, and under them a pair of womanly breasts filled out the low cut robe.

“What?!?” Gwydion shrieked, and put his hands over his mouth in alarm at the feminine tone of his voice.

“Shut up and listen!” Kristoff growled, sitting back in his seat. Gwydion looked at his hands and finally understood what had been bothering him; they were thin and fine, pale and frail, the arms and hands of a woman. He looked at Kristoff in confused shock, and the Priest began to relate what had happened.

The Magister, it turned out, knew what the orbs were originally for. They held the essence of long-dead mages of the High Elf people, and were occasionally consulted for help on magical conundrums. They had fallen into disuse over the centuries, however, and had been largely forgotten about. When the Scourge was rolling through Silvermoon an archivist had gathered them up to save, but somewhere in the siege the archivist must have been slain, and the orbs left without explanation or purpose in the ruins. The powerful magics was a remainder of energies of the Sunwell, housed in the spirits of the deceased mages of yore. When Gwydion had tried to use the orbs to empower himself, he had only succeeded in ripping his soul from his body. The Magister, amused by this invention gone wrong, had decided that Gwydion’s folly should not be the end of him and used powerful magics to bring back his essence into a body.

The Magister had explained that she had used her own body as a conduit for the spell, and that this had resulted in Gwydion’s decidedly feminine form. He was now a she, and it was a permanent as if he had been born that way. Kristoff broke this to Gwydion matter-of-factly, and when Gwydion burst into tears at the shock of it all, he slapped her across the face.

“Stupid fool,” he growled, glaring at Gwydion. “Is this how you repay the legacy of your House? You’re the only remaining Sundîel, and you break into tears at something as trivial as the shape of your body?”

Gwydion hung her head in shame, and strove to master her feelings. “You’re right,” she humbly replied, and worked to dry her eyes.

“I have undergone the inversion of my life, become a monster, a Forsaken undead, but I have not given in. You’re left with life, and your beauty is not marred. What have you to truly complain about?” He fixed Gwydion with a level gaze, and she felt humbled. He had grown more grim with the years and his damnation, but Kristoff was still what he was; a Priest of the Light, a sage counsellor and a man of war.

“What ought I do now?” Gwydion wondered aloud, and Kristoff leaned back once more in his seat, letting off of his hot rebuke.

“Well, there’s the other complication to your resurrection, my young friend,” he began. He seemed to chew over what to say next, but just as Gwydion went to open her mouth to urge him on, he continued. “The Magister who brought you back brought you to me specifically. It seems you’ve committed a wrong by the code of your people, though I don’t think you meant to do so.”

“The orbs,” Gwydion mused, clearing her throat to try and cure the lightness of her voice. She sounded like her mother.

“Yes, the orbs,” he acknowledged. “You should have brought those to the Magisters when you found them, but you didn’t. And not only did you deny them the magic for yourself, you’re experiment destroyed most of the orbs. You’ve obliterated a useful trove of lore.”

Gwydion swallowed hard, but her throat was suddenly close. She was dead meat. She had been brought back just to be tried. They would turn her into a pig for sure, maybe even kill her outright for this. A hundred days of her own foolishness passed rapidly through her mind, all the times she had weighed her decision in her head. She had been so sure it would work...

Her thoughts were broken by the deep stereophonic voice of Kristoff. “It is fortunate, therefore, that the Magister in question was not so blind as to not see your intent. She has given you a choice, if you will, a chance to do some good from the foolishness you’ve embarked upon up `till now.”

Gwydion looked up at Kristoff. “Yes?” she plied. “What choice?”


The choice was not an easy one. Kristoff related the words of Magister Meodore, the woman who had brought Gwydion back from nothingness. Her charge was that Gwydion’s desire to aid his people had not been selfish. It had, in fact, been passionate and well-thought, if utterly singular in scope and incorrect in technique. Meodore felt that loosing the talents of such an Elf would be a waste, an indirect victory to the enemies of the Blood Elf people. But the crimes of Gwydion could not be suppressed to the other Magisters, and Meodore would not make any attempts to do so. Gwydion Sundîel was dead by all accounts, and must remain so.

More importantly, the fires of high magic that burned so brightly in Gwydion’s soul had been all but snuffed, and she would find the pursuit of magic impossible. Whether this was something Meodore effected herself or a side-effect of the experiment or resurrection was not clear. What was clear, from Kristoff’s relation, was that Gwydion was forbidden to pursue magic ever again. Finally, she must submit herself to the inquisition of the Magisters and explain herself to them, and how she might serve Silvermoon further having lost her magic, her family and future.

“Or,” Kristoff added seriously, “I could kill you.”

More to come...