User:Joshmaul/Saavedro of Stratholme/Assaulting the Sunwell Isle
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This article is a player character biography page The contents herein are entirely player made and in no way represent official World of Warcraft history or occurrences which are accurate for all realms. The characters and events listed are of an independent nature and applied for roleplaying, fictional, speculative, or opinions from a limited playerbase only. |
As part of a combined Aldor/Scryers army assembled after the defeat of Prince Kael'thas Sunstrider at Tempest Keep, Saavedro of Stratholme made his way back to Azeroth, travelling across the Plaguelands to Quel'Thalas. The path he took eventually took him to a place called the Isle of Quel'Danas - the location of the Sunwell that had powered the people of Quel'Thalas for millennia. It was here that Prince Kael'thas, alive and not-so-well after being "killed" in Tempest Keep, had reignited the destroyed Sunwell and now sought to bring in his new master - the Legionlord, Kil'jaeden.
Arrival on Quel'Danas
Note: These events are as depicted in the PTR. With the exception of the daily quests and the flight from Ironforge - which APPEARS to have been changed from the PTR - everything was repeated when 2.4 went live.
Additional Note: To avoid any potential "WTF?" moments upon seeing the differences in shoulders in later pics: When I went into the PTR, I had [Gladiator's Ornamented Spaulders], which were replaced in the live servers by [Justicar Pauldrons] after a successful run in Gruul's Lair while the PTR was still up.
While in Shattrath - witnessing, with some surprise, Lady Liadrin's pledge to the Sha'tar and the Shattered Sun Offensive - Saavedro received news from Adyen the Lightwarden, a senior Aldor commander, of a crisis on the Isle of Quel'Danas, off the coast of northern Quel'Thalas. It seemed that Kael'thas, after his defeat in Tempest Keep, had fled to Quel'Thalas and had reignited the Sunwell in order to summon Kil'jaeden, who had enthralled Kael'thas with the promise of power beyond reckoning. Realizing that all of their forces were needed and that factional differences no longer mattered, the Lightwarden ordered Saavedro to return to Azeroth and offer his assistance to stop whatever plan Kael'thas was brewing.
Saavedro entered the open mage portal to Ironforge - the closest intact Alliance capital to Quel'Thalas - and took a gryphon high into the air...and suddenly, as if the air had been folded into a single place, he appeared in the skies of the Ghostlands of southern Quel'Thalas, not far from the Scourge outpost of Deatholme. Continuing his flight across Quel'Thalas, flying far enough away from any Horde sentries to avoid being shot down, Saavedro skirted the edges of Eversong Woods and made the crossing of the North Sea, approaching the island's western coast. The gryphon swung around, hugging the edges of the coast, until finally landing at a harbor in the northwestern corner of the island, in an area called Sun's Reach. By the time Saavedro arrived, the Shattered Sun Offensive - a united Aldor/Scryers army sent to end Kael'thas' nefarious operations - had claimed the beachhead and was working towards reclaiming the arcane sanctum. Speaking with Exarch Larethor at the Shattered Sun Staging Area as ordered, Saavedro was tasked with finding the blood elf spy Tyrith inside the Magisters' Terrace, the new sanctum of Prince Kael'thas.
Magisters' Terrace: Dealing with Kael'thas' Treachery - Again!
Riding east from Sun's Reach and up the path onto a crest overlooking the sea, Saavedro entered the Magisters' Terrace with various adventurers (some who came in and disappeared, replaced by others at varying points) and proceeded to destroy the armies of Kael'thas that resided within. Renegade Blood Knights, magisters, warlocks, warriors, demons, ethereals - all fell to the power of the Light. In the Assembly Hall, Saavedro confronted a group of gaunt, wasted elves called the Wretched, feeding off the arcane energies of the fel crystals lining the hall. On the platform above them was a felblood named Selin Fireheart, who - once the Wretched were dead and the party began their attack - began to feed off the crystals himself. But the party shattered every crystal they found, and killed the fel elf where he stood, his boast of invincibility cut off in midswing.
After dealing with Fireheart, they continued on into the Halls of Theory and confronted Vexallus, a huge elemental in a room filled with mana wyrms - all of which were destroyed by carefully timed explosions of fire and ice before engaging the creature - and, like Fireheart, easily dispatched him. But before defeating the creature, as they entered the room, Saavedro found the spy Tyrith dying next to the door. Before his death, the blood elf told Saavedro to use the scrying orb on the balcony not far away, and that they (presumably Kael'thas' forces, or possibly even the Legion he served) were reigniting the Sunwell. Using the orb as instructed, Saavedro could see into the Sunwell Plateau nearby, seeing a dark, void-energy naaru and legions of demons...before coming upon a huge portal in the floor, with an orb containing a human woman floating above it. This, he realized, had to be the Sunwell. On the walls were painted murals similar to those he had seen inside the Terrace, like a shadow that permeated the entire island...the shadow of Kil'jaeden.
Upon discovering the truth, a blue dragon flew in from nearby and transformed into a humanoid form. He identified himself as Kalecgos, an agent of Malygos the Spellweaver. He explained why he was there, and who the human was - Anveena Teague, a peasant girl who was in fact made into the avatar of the Sunwell. Kael'thas planned to summon Kil'jaeden via the Sunwell, and was using Anveena's power to channel his portal. In order to possibly put a stop to this plan, Kalecgos charged Saavedro with permanently killing Kael'thas, and ending his mad bid for power. With his instructions in hand, Saavedro marched further into the Terrace and destroyed the shivarra Priestess Delrissa and her minions, before marching with barely controlled fury into Kael'thas' inner sanctum. "Prince Kael'thas," he said loud enough for all to hear, "I have just come from Shattrath. The Shattered Sun demands your head. I'll be the one who gives it to them."
And with that, Saavedro and his allies charged in. But Kael'thas was a difficult opponent, and proved to be greater than any he had ever faced. Faced time and again with failure, it was in unity with his nemesis, Joshmaul the Warlock, that proved to be the turning point that led to the final victory. The warlock's powers of the shadow and Saavedro's mastery of the Light proved to be more than a match for the fallen Prince of Quel'Thalas, and in the end, Kael'thas lay dead at Saavedro's feet at the conclusion of the battle. Knowing that Kael'thas had been something of a friend to the House of Whitehair, of which Saavedro's old ally Ordevaas Portalseeker was a member, Saavedro returned to Shattrath after delivering Kael's head to Exarch Larethor, to break the news to Ordevaas.
Missions for the Shattered Sun
After destroying the lord of the blood elves once and for all, Saavedro returned to his duties as a soldier of the Shattered Sun Offensive, representing the Aldor in its struggle alongside the Scryers. Though Kael'thas was dead, his plan continued: The Legion still held the Sunwell Plateau and Kael'thas' now-leaderless army still held the Sun's Reach armory and harbor - with reinforcements on their way. Given tasks by the draenei and blood elf commanders of the Offensive at the areas they had claimed, Saavedro began paving the way for the Offensive's ultimate success.
In his early work for the Offensive, Saavedro took arcane cores and placed them into the erratic sentries that wandered the island, giving the Offensive a stronger force to defend the reclaimed arcane sanctum. He also fought the Wretched and took mana remnants from them to power the sanctum's wards against intruders. He took the banner of the Shattered Sun and plunged it into the corpse of an eredar wrathguard emissary and slaughtered the demons who came through the open gate in the Dawning Square. And - most pleasingly to him - Saavedro was given the opportunity to ride one of the famed Quel'Danas dragonhawks in bombing missions along the northern terminus of the Dead Scar, on the outskirts of the Sunwell Plateau itself.
There the Legion forces were commanded by a wingless annihilan pit lord named Brutallus, who was battling the blue dragon Madrigosa - another of Malygos' agents, sent to find Kalecgos and Anveena after the Legion took over the Sunwell Isle. Using the arcane charges given to him, Saavedro destroyed pit lords, eredar sorcerers and wrathguards all through the Dead Scar - those that were not battling the remnants of Arthas' legions that had remained along the Scar since the fall of the Sunwell.
But his missions were not restricted entirely to Quel'Danas. Saavedro was given a captured Legion scroll and sent through the open gate in the Dawning Square - a gate that desposited him into a Legion teleporter on the Throne of Kil'jaeden, a mountain north of Thrallmar in the Hellfire Peninsula of Outland. His mission was to locate the missing Magistrix Seyla, who had been sent earlier. Seyla tasked Saavedro with collecting demonic blood from the wrath heralds - more wrathguards, Saavedro noted - and using a fel siphon to channel out the demonic energies of the felblood initiates on the Throne, leaving them as little more than Wretched. He was also given a Living Flare that would channel the energies of dying fire elementals that wandered the Throne; when it became unstable, Saavedro was to bring it to the teleporter he came through, destroying it.
Travelling to Shattrath, Saavedro received missions from others as well. Lord Torvos, a blood elf, sent him to Netherstorm to obtain attack plans from the Sunfury blood elves in the deactivated manaforges. Exarch Nasuun, overseer of the Shattrath-to-Quel'Danas portal, tasked him with travelling to Bash'ir Landing in the Blade's Edge Mountains to retrieve smuggled mana cells from Tempest Keep, which the ethereals there were transporting for Kael'thas for delivery to Quel'Danas. Harbinger Haronem, formerly an Aldor trainer and now part of the greater Offensive, sent Saavedro with special goggles to Oshu'gun in Nagrand to take multiphasic anomaly readings.
As the resistance to the Offensive began to crumble, Kael'thas' legions had to call in reinforcements. The Dawnblade army sent in three ships - the Sin'loren, the Bloodoath and the Dawnchaser - to the harbor in Sun's Reach (still under their control) in an effort to supply Kael's forces on the ground with fresh troops. Saavedro once again took to the sky on the back of a dragonhawk and set fire to the sails of all three ships, then landed on the bow of the Sin'loren and attacked the Dawnblade reservists on the deck. When the task was done, Saavedro returned to the mainland on the waiting dragonhawk, who seemed to wait patiently for him to finish his task before taking him back. During one battle, Saavedro confronted Lord Efanis Dawnblade, a member of the Convocation of Silvermoon who survived the fall of Quel'Thalas and had declared allegiance to Kael'thas in spite of his treachery.
Saavedro also learned of the ley lines set on the island. Three strategic locations - the portal in the Dawning Square near the sanctum, a bloodcrystal in Dawnstar Village and a shrine to Azshara in the Greengill Coast, on the eastern side of the island - were the major accessable ley lines outside the Sunwell Plateau itself. Using Astromancer Darnarian's scrying crystal, Saavedro scanned the ley lines each day and returned to Darnarian with his findings. In return, Darnarian provided scrolls of translocation that would allow him to return to Shattrath.
Once the armory was claimed, efforts were made to take the harbor - hence the bombing runs against the Dawnblade flotilla - and also to construct the anvil for the armory. To aid that effort, Saavedro and other members of the Offensive raided the Greengill Coast, killing Darkspine myrmidons and retrieving keys to locked chests, which contained iron ore required for the anvil. Once the anvil was complete, Hauthaa sent the Shattered Sun troops, including Saavedro, to the Black Temple in Shadowmoon Valley to retrieve corrupted ata'mal armaments from the Ata'mal Terrace and cleanse the metal for use in a special weapon coating.
Victory on Quel'Danas!
After weeks of battle against the Dawnblade, the harbor finally fell to the Offensive and became a place of rest for the thousands of troops who had flocked to Quel'Danas to end Kael'thas' mad scheme. With Kael'thas dead, Sun's Reach reclaimed and the elite of the Alliance and Horde making their way through the Sunwell Plateau to banish Kil'jaeden back to the hell that spawned him, the Offensive has entered its final stages with the construction of an alchemy lab in the harbor rest area. But the battle was not quite done - the naga that inhabited the Greengill Coast controlled many murloc slaves, and Saavedro - though repulsed at the murlocs' cannibalistic tendencies - offered his aid and freed the Greengill murlocs, who then turned on their serpentine masters.
Saavedro's efforts in the Offensive made him a popular figure among its members, earning him the right to wear their tabard. As the monument to the Aldor and Scryer dead was erected in the courtyard of Sun's Reach, Saavedro donated one thousand gold pieces as a contribution to the families of the deceased. From that day forward, he became known as Saavedro of the Shattered Sun, and will be venerated by its members for the rest of his life.