User:Joshmaul/Menarian Talashar

"'Death returns again to the high home of the elves. Let us hope we are better prepared than we were last time.'"
 * - Archmage Menarian Talashar

Menarian Talashar was a Magister of Silvermoon who had served as an advisor to the House of Whitehair and trained under the auspices of its patriarch, Lord Kel'theris Whitehair. With House Whitehair (later known as House Ketiron) all but extinct, the only heir to the bloodline having been corrupted by the Void, Talashar was charged with preserving the records of the House in a magical tome, the Historical Libram of the House of Ketiron - known simply as the Ketiron Archives - after the previous archivist, the undead mage Gehn, was executed by the Forsaken for treason against the Dark Lady. Talashar himself was sentenced to death in absentia on the same charge, and disavowed by the Magisters. He fled to Suramar, sheltered by his friend and ally, Lord Randarel Vendross, until his death - ironically, at the hands of a former lover, now a void elf in the service of the Alliance - in Nazjatar.

Biography
The Talashar family of Tranquillien, in what is now the Ghostlands, have been servants of the House of Whitehair since the exodus from Kalimdor, and tend to be Farstriders or bodyguards. A number of exceptions have proven to be talented magi, and Menarian was one such example. At a young age, he was taken in by the head of house, Lord Kel'theris, and trained under his personal auspices as a Magister. He was also sent to Dalaran to study in the halls of the Kirin Tor, and it was there that he developed his taste for frost magic - quite unlike the typical arcane or flame powers favored by the high elves at the time. Menarian had been alongside his lord in Dalaran when he returned with Prince Kael'thas and other elven sorcerers to their homeland, finding it in ruins. With the fall of their land, the high elves now styled themselves "blood elves", and sought vengeance against the Scourge that had destroyed their land and despoiled the Sunwell that had given them power. Kel'theris and Menarian remained in Quel'Thalas under the leadership of Lor'themar Theron, whom Kael'thas had named Regent, while the prince left to fight for the Alliance remnants led by "Grand Marshal" Othmar Garithos.

Menarian stayed alongside Kel'theris and his son Ordevaas as the blood elves - abandoned by the Alliance - were vetted by the Forsaken, the undead who resided in the ruins of Lordaeron, to the Horde. At first, Menarian was wary of both the Forsaken, whom he saw as little more than "Scourge with sharper tongues", and the Horde, who had burned the forests of Quel'Thalas during the Second War. However, he forced himself to look at it from a practical perspective, recognizing that Silvermoon would need allies, no matter how unsavory...and the Alliance had turned its back on them. Thus, Menarian forced himself to work with the Forsaken during the campaign in the Ghostlands, based out of his birthplace of Tranquillien, in order to defeat the Scourge forces led by the foul traitor Dar'Khan Drathir.

It was at this same time that Menarian began to have doubts about the path on which he was following his lord and his House; the blood elves' eyes had turned from sky blue to sickly green due to their exposure to fel crystals, one of the many sources of magic their people had been forced to resort to after the loss of the Sunwell. Also of concern was the distance Kael'thas seemed to have placed between himself and his people back on Azeroth, and no one would know why until they set out for Outland, the broken remnants of the orcish homeworld of Draenor, where Kael'thas had set himself up with the night elf demon hunter Illidan Stormrage. It was known in Silvermoon as a "pilgrimage", travelling across the wastes of Hellfire Peninsula. Menarian accompanied Kel'theris during this "pilgrimage". It was only when Kel'theris and his party reached Shattrath City, the sanctuary city in Terokkar Forest, that they discovered from other blood elves - those belonging to the Scryers, one of the city's two factions - what had truly become of their prince in his exile. He had betrayed Illidan and sided with the Legion, and was using the naaru fortress of Tempest Keep to siphon power not for his own people...but for himself and his plans on behalf of his demon masters. That plan became clear after Kael'thas' death and unholy resurrection, returning with the mana he had siphoned with Tempest Keep's technology to reignite the Sunwell...as a portal to summon Kil'jaeden, the right hand of Sargeras himself, to Azeroth.

Menarian was thoroughly disheartened by these events, and became convinced that his people were cursed...even as the Sunwell was restored as a fountain of Light. Yet despite his disillusionment, Menarian followed House Whitehair's forces, now led by Ordevaas, to Northrend to take the fight to the Scourge in its very lair, and avenge the destruction of Quel'Thalas.

New Awakening
Following the war against the Lich King, Menarian decided to expand his horizons beyond simple magical study when Taeril'hane Ketiron, the former captain of the guard, ascended to House leadership by marrying Ordevaas' daughter Areinnye. It was an unexpected - and at first, unwelcome - visitor that led him to decide on the profession of inscription, the crafting of magical tomes and scrolls. A Forsaken mage named Gehn, who had been born in the Lordaeronian village of Northdale near the Thalassian border, had been accepted as House Ketiron's archivist and would soon convince Menarian, a skeptic about Silvermoon's alliance with the Forsaken, of his sincere desire to serve House Ketiron. Forsaken and blood elf joined forces to try and bring order to the family's voluminous archives, especially after it ended up moving to the fortress of Saavedar in the inhospitable reaches of Frostfire Ridge on Draenor during the war against the Iron Horde. It was Menarian who came upon the idea of preserving the entire archive in a single book, magically able to access any of the House's recorded information, and which could only be altered by master magi like himself and Gehn.

When Saavedar was destroyed by the Modas il Toralar, the secretive order that had once dominated the underworld of the Horde, Ketiron and most of his guard were slain, and Gehn - caring for Ord'taeril, Ketiron's son and heir - disappeared while making his escape with the boy, and the archive was lost with him. Kel'theris, distraught at losing both his granddaughter (Areinnye had been murdered by a psychotic gnome warlock some time earlier) and his closest friend, was determined to keep at least one of them, and brought Ketiron to the Knights of the Ebon Blade, who raised him as a death knight. Though Ketiron would return to fight again, Menarian mourned for Gehn and Ord'taeril, as well as for the lost knowledge that he and the archivist had gathered. It seemed like their efforts had been wasted. He would be proven wrong weeks later, when the archivist and his charge re-emerged. Ord'taeril was a grown man, and Gehn had expanded the archive considerably under the auspices of the Army of the Light, who had sheltered him and his ward over what turned out to be a century wandering the Nether, but far less than that in Azerothian time.



Menarian believed Gehn and Ord'taeril's return, after they had previously been believed dead, to be an omen from the Light. The event awakened a religious fervor within him during the war against the Legion in the Broken Isles; the power of the Sunwell would purge the faint traces of fel energy from his system, turning his eyes from green to burning gold. He unleashed his magics against the demons and their allies, such as the forces of Grand Magistrix Elisande in Suramar, with all the zealotry of a vengeful paladin. That feeling remained as he travelled to Argus with the Armies of Legionfall, joining forces with the Army of the Light to end the Burning Legion once and for all. Returning to Silvermoon after the fall of Argus, Menarian met Lord Randarel Vendross, a Nightborne sorcerer whose people had aligned with their sin'dorei cousins under the banner of the Horde. Despite their tremendous age difference (Randarel was more than ten thousand years old, while Menarian was a "much more spry 320", as he joked), the two men struck up a close bond based on their mutual interests in history and magic. Sealing their bonds of friendship, Menarian gave him a ring enchanted with the ability to comprehend (and be comprehended in) other languages, remarkably only half-jokingly that Orcish was a difficult language for elven vocal cords; in return, Randarel gave him a white diamond pendant, salvaged from the tiara worn by his late wife, Elerina, when she was executed by order of Elisande.

When the Alliance and the Horde - lacking any greater foe to contend with - turned to fight one another again, Menarian joined with Gehn in denouncing the burning of Teldrassil, and believed the fall of the Undercity to be "just retribution" for the sins committed by Warchief Sylvanas Windrunner. It reached a point where Gehn renounced his status as a Forsaken, preferring to be simply known as "undead". This earned him the unwelcome attention of the Deathstalkers, Sylvanas' personal assassins, who caught up to him in his ruined village of Northdale and murdered him. Knowing that he would be a target, Gehn had entrusted the archive to Menarian mere moments before his demise, asking him to ensure that he would not fall for nothing. Menarian would carry the archive with him to Zandalar, where the Horde sought to bring the great Golden Fleet under its banner to fight against the Alliance-aligned fleet of Kul Tiras.

Menarian began to worry that others with similar doubts - like Randarel and others in the Nightborne, and perhaps even the Zandalari - would be similarly targeted and killed for their "treason". His chief fear was that, barring a miracle of some sort, the continued atrocities committed by Sylvanas would result in civil war...even as the Horde contends with an increasingly vengeful Alliance.