The Order's arrival into Netherstorm was a peaceful passage, at least considering the violent nature of the land that they stepped on - if, at all, it could be called land. The crumbling wastes, beneath the vast expanse of the Great Dark Beyond, criss-crossed with the myriad torrents of arcane colours, were unlike any wasteland they had laid eyes upon before. Even Shadowmoon, fel-scorched and blackened, was remotely familiar; this place, where sun and moon were not just obscured by ashen clouds but failed to exist at all, was otherworldly, on a primordial level above that of the elemental planes themselves.
At the Stormspire, they crossed paths with the esoteric creatures known as the Ethereals, representing 'the Consortium'. They soon learned that these traders were fraught with secrets ans schemes, and, moreover, plagued with problems. Most of all, they did not have capacity to withstand the might of the Hand of Kharduum, who they now discovered had been biding their time on Netherstorm's northern edge.
After gaining the favour of the Consortium, restoring power to their gateways, and awaiting the arrival of the forces of both the Sha'tari Skyguard and the Cenarion Expedition, the time to finally face Lord Gorridon had come. The night before the battle, John the Bruce and the demon hunter Terenrith partook in the process to reforge the Illidari's old demonslaying blade, that which he had quested far and wide for when the Dark Portal had re-opened the first time. All that remained was to plunge the blade into the heart of a powerful demon.
While the Skyguard, the Cenarion forces and the Consortium's shocktroopers did battle upon the hills that bordered the Great Dark, the Order and its followers stormed aboard the Hand of Kharduum's moored flagship. Gorridon awaited them therein, alongside his honour guard, and the battle that ensued was a brutal as could be expected from a fiend so hellish and so violent as an annihilan. Amidst the battle, the pit commander drew upon the souls of his slain elite, and with them brought the ritual that had taken weeks to prepare to fruition. As his cabalists had done weeks prior on their homeworld of Kharduum, Gorridon sought to bring forth the primordial essence of sound, the entity known as Murmur, from the distant reaches of the cosmos.
The calamitous sound of its impending birth into the material world, amidst the abundant torrents of arcane power in Netherstorm, was a symphony of terror upon the mortal ears below. It ripped and tore at them, quaking deep in their bones and vibrated at every sinew, every fibre of their being like plucking a string. The grim walls of the demonic vessel, inlaid with a hundred-thousand screaming faces and their trapped, wailing souls, flexed and bent beneath the ever-echoing soundscape, and so powerful was the noise that poured forth from the rift overhead that the crests of the sound waves compressed and expanded the air alternately, giving birth to lightning and cloud.
Ultimately, Murmur was not destined to return to Outland that night. The Order felt an iota of it's power as they did battle, yet Gorridon's demise came first, and with it the ritual ceased to be. Speaking his true name, the Marshal commanded the demon to stand, to fight, to die by their blades, and by chance it was the reforged demonbane blade that pierced the enraged pit lord's heart. The death throes of Lord Gorridon threatened to take John Librus thereafter, if not for the selfless acts of Sir Uriel, and of Salenne, the Kul Tiran apostate who took the brunt of the fiery blast.
There was little time to rejoice, however; the aborted ritual tore the Hand of Kharduum's flagship apart, and with Murmur's arrival denied the Order quickly returned to the precipice from which they had infiltrated the ship. There they found Terenrith, whose guidance had brought about the blade which not only struck the killing blow, but forever obliterated the pit commander's fel soul.
Mortally wounded, Terenrith asked one last thing of John the Bruce, who he named demonslayer: to take the petrified sprig of dreamfoil that had reminded him of what he fought for to the lone and sorrowful mate that awaited him on the shores of Ferelas. His favour obliged, the demon hunter asked for a merciful end to his suffering - not just from the wounds that he had sustained in denying Lord Gorridon any reinforcements during the battle, but from the shame and grief of abandoning his Goddess in years past, of lacking the faith and the resolve that these men and women had shown him in the last weeks of his life. He asked for mercy, not just of the paladins that stood over his dying and wilting body, who had every reason to despise him, but from the Mother Moon that he had abandoned.
With heavy heart and steely conviction, they said a silent farewell, one demonslayer to another. Terenrith was no more.
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