- When
- The Legion’s fall
- Where
- Argus
- Beside him
- Alleria, Arator, the Army of the Light
- Chapter
- 7 of 10
Argus
The son at the end of the war
The Army of the Light and the forces Azeroth sent against the Legion met on Argus. Turalyon had been High Exarch long enough that the title was simply his name in that army. Alleria was with the story again, freed of the prison and further into the Void than he could bless. The war on the Legion’s homeworld is a campaign of its own. For this chronicle the hinge is smaller and worse: their son was on the ship from Azeroth.
He knew Arator was close before he saw him. The account used in the game has him say he would know that presence anywhere, after all the years, and that every day of those years he had rehearsed the sentence he would offer. When the day came, the sentence was gone. Alleria’s answer, in the same scene, is that she had lost her words too, and that seeing the boy would return them. It is the least martial moment in a martial life, and it is the one the later family chapters keep tripping over. They had left an infant with Vereesa. They came back to a paladin.
Argus also holds the break with Xe’ra that players watched. The naaru meant to force the Light onto Illidan Stormrage. Illidan destroyed her. Turalyon’s anger in that moment is part of the public scene, and it fits the man the thousand years had made: the Army’s whole metaphysics had just been shattered by an ally. The Legion still fell. After it fell, he brought what remained of the Army of the Light home to Azeroth and gave its allegiance to the Alliance. Home, for him, was a world that had buried him and then kept his statues polished.
The reunion does not tidy the marriage that never was, or the Void, or the years Arator spent becoming someone without his parents’ instructions. It ends the Legion war. It starts the Azeroth war of a man who has been gone long enough to be holy and strange in his own city. Stormwind is the next room he walks into. He does not walk into it as a retired knight.
Illidan’s killing of Xe’ra deserves a plain sentence beside the family scene, because Turalyon’s public rage there is the other reunion: not with his son, but with the idea that the Light might be refused. He has spent a thousand years inside an army that does not treat refusal as an option. Argus shows him an ally who treats it as the whole point. He does not convert to that view. He also does not get to pretend, afterward, that the Light’s champions are only ever victims of someone else’s darkness. The Darkwell is still years away. The crack that leads to Amani Pass is already in the room.
