Last Time on Emberheart Z: What’s Past Is Prologue

🔥Last time on Emberheart Z!🔥

In which Emberheart reminisces about past adventures, does some light time travel, discovers the answers to some long-standing questions, and learns the joys of cursed pottery.

What is past is often prologue, especially when time travel is involved. Gathering in the bowels of the Expedition Vault, Emberheart was determined to unravel the history of the Urn. The primary questions were: What was its relation to the Mogu Witch? How did Vaer Ming enact her rituals with it? How did she come into possession of the artifact? How was the Urn made, and most importantly, how can it be used to rescue Dorant from the Endless Halls?

The plan was simple: Call upon the power of time manipulation from the Bronze and Infinite Dragonflights through the combined efforts of Ioneid and Journa. Instantly, things went awry when events elsewhere required Ioneid’s healing hands, leaving Journa alone to bear the burden of the scrying ritual. Yet the once-dark power, turned to more noble pursuits, was enough to reveal the answers.

Traveling back through the personal time of the Urn, they witnessed known historical events: 1) The shattering during the ambush in the Vault 2) Its containment within the Vault after the Witch's first defeat in Pandaria, and 3) Its reawakening in the Tomb under Halfhill. The first scrying attempt ended with an image of Vaer Ming channeling the Urn's power before her death and banishment. After a mana recharge, Journa tried again. When time shifted, they were greeted by familiar yet new tableaus, featuring the Spirit-Binder in service to Lei Shen, conducting dark rituals, slaughtering Pandaren slaves and Mantid invaders, and bending the knee to the Thunder King. Then came a vision of Vaer Ming retrieving the Urn from the earth, followed by the Urn seemingly falling from the sky from a place of great darkness, likely the Void, confirming it was found, not created.

Pushing forward, the timeline stopped where the Urn began - in darkness, surrounded by a thousand eyes and a thousand maws in crawling, maddening dark. A clawed hand wielded a paintbrush of dark glass and metallic filigree, with an even darker liquid sloshing inside. Shadow ribbons burrowed within the artist's hand fed power into the brush, used to paint the face of a Cloud Serpent on an Urn... the same Urn now broken on the Vault platform.

A Shadowgraft Brush

Confused, the scholars went to work, and Vanrea quickly put the puzzle together. The paintbrush was created with Shadowgraft, a metal infused with Void energy used primarily by the Domanaar, intended, like other creations, to enforce control over others. The tendrils took lifeforce from the wielder, using it as paint to imbue vessels with power. Thus the Devouring Host created the Urn, which somehow slipped their grasp and escaped to Azeroth.

Perhaps the mogu woman was entranced by its dark power, as the Expedition witnessed when Vanrea briefly fell under the Urn's thrall and reached for a shard despite her comrade's attempts to stop her. Compelled to touch the Urn, her outstretched hand erupted in blue-purple flames that clung to her as long as she maintained her grip. When she released it, the flames shifted to a safer, familiar orange, and the room descended into chaos as the scrying ritual was disrupted.

As time began to rapidly accelerate back to the present day, a choice needed to be made, that being of the final scene of the past to witness. Two options presented themselves, either to see how Vaer Ming was interred within the Urn, or to see an example of the ritual used by the Witch to open the way into the Endless Halls. One as a lead to reimprisoning the Spirit-Binder, one as a lead to rescuing Dorant from her clutches. Choosing the one closest in chronological order, Journa wrestled with the strands of fate to view the ritual of opening. The last image seen was Vaer Ming offering a sacrifice of her own blood to the Urn before she and her followers were engulfed in the telltale smoke of the Urn. 

---------------------What awaits the Expedition? Find out next time on Emberheart Z!!------------------