The Draconic Wizard Workshop

Venn Diagrams and Binary Star Systems: The Referential Overlap of Being Medivh

by Medivh Aran Chromatath

Originally written November 11, 2025.

I'm not like other people.

It's a ridiculous thing to say, I know. It's frequently used to make one seem special or unique, separate under the notion that no one else experiences anything like you or understands. I'm sure many people do; in fact, I can think of someone very much like myself that does, in addition to Khadgar, who is bound up in my very being (as I am bound up in aers) and understands me implicitely whether ae wants to or not.

But most people can describe it, at least to some extent. They don't chew on it for a third of a year before coming to the abrupt clarity that the metaphor they need is that of a binary star system and all that orbits it. I am a deeply referential being, one that overlaps and partially becomes the things around me that shaped my life. Yes, such is human nature: you are changed by the things that affected you, and you take little pieces of the things and people you love and integrate them into you.

Not like this, though. I do it wrong.

Bear with me; I've never had to put this to words before.

I was born with a demon inside of me. Worse, he'd been there longer than I had, sleeping within my mother until he found a way to manipulate her into having me, entirely for his own schemes. He and I shared my body, my mind, and in the end, he won out in nearly all ways. He forced me to do a great number of evil things, many of which I was not entirely aware of at the time and only discovered them in a slow, dawning horror as the pieces all fell together—long past the point where I could have done anything. I was stuck in the clockwork of the universe, bound up in my position as Guardian (which I will discuss, fear not) and the whims of this demon—Sargeras, the Dark Titan, the leader of the Burning Legion, the demons that sought to scour all life from the universe.

There was no Medivh without Sargeras for a long time. It was impossible to separate myself from him cleanly. How much of my—our—angry, impassioned rant in our final minutes, our villain monologue before we were finally stopped, was him, and how much was me? How much of that anger towards fate and the role of the Guardian was mine? How much fury at being trapped and seeking a way out was his? Vice versa? It's impossible to say. I was there, and I can't tell you, because I do not know.

That is where it began, I think. Even before I was aware of Sargeras, my entire being revolved around him. He exerted gravity on me, and me on him. Binary stars, circling each other, caught in each other's pull. We are inexorable—one is difficult to discuss without the other, but myself more than him, as he had lived eons before I came along, and I have only had a decade or so without him, in the aftermath of the near-destruction of my world that he brought.

With my hands, he opened the Dark Portal to Draenor, letting the demon-crazed orcs through. Thousands died. More thousands have died from the knock-on effects of the wars that followed. My name is synonymous with evil. I'd like to tell you I would never have done that on my own—but that is wishful thinking. I do not know. I have no idea who I would be without Sargeras, who I would have become on my own. That Medivh was never to be, never existed, never will exist. I am overlapped with Sargeras, even now that he has been knocked from my gravity. (My dear Khadgar had to kill me to stop us both; Anduin Lothar, my childhood friend, saw to it that Sargeras was banished in the immediate aftermath. What he's up to now, who's to say. Canon has its opinions, but I am deeply divergent past a certain point and the only predictable thing about Sargeras is that he will be back, but there is no telling when. Much like myself, I suppose: death had little hold on me.) Who I am is forever tied to Sargeras, and I suspect that I affected him, in turn, but I could not even begin to hazard how.

I hope he hates it. I hope the parts of me that live in him make him as uncomfortable as the parts of him that live in me. What he did to me is unimaginable and unforgivable.

But he was not thrown from my metaphorical solar system (get used to it; I am a space-loving bitch and it works) without great effort or replacement. I had essentially given up by the time Khadgar entered my life—what other choice did I have, I thought. I was doing these horrible things. The best I could do was lock myself in my room and pace and stare in the mirror and want to tear the world asunder while stilling my hands, and even then, in fits of rage or insanity, I would black out and come to with another mage murdered at my feet, burned by felfire that still rose from my fingertips. Near the end, I felt nothing. It was happening, it was inevitable, and all I could do was thrash ineffectively. What did it matter?

Then, there was Khadgar. Bright, brilliant, hopeful Khadgar. He came to me full of hope and youth and curiosity, sent by the Kirin Tor to get rid of him. Either he would die (as all of my prospective apprentices had died; I wonder who was responsible for that) or he would become their spy and feed information about me back to them.

He wiggled his way into my heart. I saw in him a reason to live, or at least to try. I saw in him a reason to die, to take Sargeras out with me and prevent more atrocities. I saw a reason to fight, and I did. I fought with all my might, my strength renewed, thrashing and snarling and digging my heels in. I sabotaged us as best I could, gave Khadgar what few pieces of the puzzle I could.

It wasn't enough. It was exactly enough.

We were found out, but by that time, it was too late. People died. In the end, the kingdom fell. But not before Khadgar managed to stop us, even though Sargeras ripped the youth and much of the life from him, even as he set Anduin ablaze—the two of them stopped us. I died and Sargeras fled. He would not reform on Azeroth to take bloody vengeance against the world that had repeatedly rebuffed him.

You try not making someone part of you after they do that. After they save you by driving a blade through your heart, tears streaming down their face, because the piss-poor excuse for kindness you showed them was the greatest they'd ever gotten. Because they were kind to you in turn. Because they looked at you like you were the greatest thing to ever happen to them, like you were just… yourself, and that was enough. After I'd have to be the Guardian, Sargeras' puppet, a lord, a wizard, a fucking errand boy for the Tirisfalen, the older echo of my childhood friends' lost friend, awakening from my coma sixteen years too late to make our friendship really mean something without Sargeras driving a wedge in it—for the first time in my adult life, to someone, I was just Medivh, and that was enough.

I loved him. I don't know how. It doesn't matter. There are infinite ways to love someone and this was something new. He knocked Sargeras from my orbit and put himself in that place. I became inexorably bound to him, and could not mind it any less. In the years between my death and resurrection, he became powerful, wise, heroic—a leader, a scholar, an archmage. And he stayed kind. By the Light, he stayed kind. The lines on his face indicate someone who smiles and laughs more than he frowns. Even in his darkest days, he has never lost what woke me from my stupor and made me fight.

And then, miracles upon miracles, he came back. I came back. We encountered each other again, twenty-something years after we had last seen each other, at last alive and on equal footing. We fell into each other, holding each other tight, in love, and swearing to never let go. What we have runs deeper than anything I could hope to explain; we are nearly as much each other as we are ourselves. There is no one without the other, not really, not without the lone raven being cursed with solitude and separation from its fellows until reuinited with its pair. Everything that I am about to talk about that revolves around and overlaps me revolves around Khadgar, too, if only due to his proximity to me. He overlaps things only because I do, through the lens of me—without me, he is much more akin to how people are usually affected by things.

It's difficult to explain. I am not Khadgar, but Khadgar is such a big part of me that I cannot be myself without the context of Khadgar. It is impossible. I am not myself without him. In turn, he cannot be Khadgar without Medivh. He must be who he is, with the context of me being a part of him, to be a part of me, which is a part of him, on and on infinitely.

Binary stars, orbiting one another. Scientists would give our solar system one name, and affix -A and -B to the end of it to differentiate us. There is no telling what we would have become without the other—I have guesses for myself, dust and ash upon the wind at best, but Khadgar is unimaginable, because I intervened in his life at the very beginning of adulthood. Everything would be different, and it is not worth lingering on.

We are each other. We are not. There is no word for this that I know of. I don't need one. We simply are.

Other things overlap me, too, but less so. They are not a star alongside me, and we do not orbit each other—but in terms of my identity, they are other bodies in the solar system, orbiting the gravity of myself and once-Sargeras-now-Khadgar. (This isn't to say that I believe the things and people devote their lives to orbiting around me; it's a metaphor for how they affect me, the push and pull of gravity, equal and opposite, and how they are intrinsic to me and yet separate. It's a metaphor, a model—it's not perfect.)

One of the more difficult orbiting bodies to explain is my mother, Aegwynn. My mother…

I find it difficult to talk about my mother. I will excise most of my feelings about her from this essay in the interest of keeping it academic. (After I just spent eight hundred words trying to explain the insane way I love Khadgar, I'm worried about things being academic.) Sargeras lived in her before he lived in me, a link between us beyond mother and son, and he manipulated her into having me in the first place, into passing both him and the power of the Guardian on. She then left me to be raised by my father with only a handful of visits throughout my childhood before my coma—for complicated reasons that make me ache but I do understand, and I find difficult to hold against her. In her shoes, disoriented and frightened, I might have done much the same thing.

She was the Guardian before me, and passed it onto me, a gilded cage, a responsibility from birth.

The Guardian…

It was a role devised by people who did not see the obvious flaw. The Order of Tirisfal was an order of mages formed in order to protect Azeroth from demons, and they channeled an immense amount of power into one of their order, who would become the Guardian. The person holding this role would be almsot entirely responsible for fighting back demonic incursions with their overwhelming arcane might, and would hold the role for quite some time (often centuries) until they found a suitable mage to pass it on to.

A single Guardian. A single point of failure. A single cog that could be corrupted. How did no one see the weakness in this? How did no one realize what could happen? It was a ticking time bomb, set in motion thousands of years before my birth, but I was the one left holding the bag when it all fell apart, doomed before my conception, the Last Guardian forever known as the one who ruined everything.

The Guardians were volunteers. Adults who had trained and fought for it. Competed to be the best, to be chosen. My mother made that decision for me. She had me to be the Guardian—and she was manipulated by Sargeras. It wasn't her fault. I am almost certain she never would have done such a thing without him—but it is hard to say, as we don't talk about it much, and he is a difficult bastard to understand.

Regardless, I was born locked in a cage of responsibility, a cog in the machine, a gear in the clockwork mechanism of the universe, bound in fate to protect the world until I destroyed it. Again, it is hard to say how much of my bitterness came from myself, Sargeras, or both—but to this day, I am bitter and angry. It was a stupid thing to create. It was a stupid thing to allow to peel off of the Council once it had become corrupted (my mother withdrew from everyone once Sargeras hid within her; I wonder how this could have been prevented!). It was a stupid thing to pass on to an infant.

My mother. My jailer. My creator. The one who inadvertantly cursed me into being what I am, damaged and bitter and made over all of the layers of people and things that overlap some small core that is "me." My savior, who nearly died (and was willing to die) to bring me back to life years after Khadgar saved me from Sargeras. She wanted me to have a second chance at life—no, a first chance, for I had never been able to be me, with Sargeras taking up most of the real estate of my mind. What is me is small and underdeveloped, and she wanted that thing to have a chance to become something real.

I don't know if I succeeded at that; but I have given it my best try, and she seems content.

Another orbiting factor is my father, Nielas Aran. He is blessedly easy to explain: he raised me, but had little interest in children. He was a deeply unwell man, a powerful mage, and someone who, for once in his life, thought someone liked him. Aegwynn, manipulated by Sargeras, tricked him into thinking that she liked him so that he would sleep with her and give her the heir Sargeras wanted to use in his schemes—me. And then she dropped me off at his doorstep.

I probably would have lost my mind, so he gets points for actually attempting to raise me and help me become the best mage I could.

He was… trying. He pushed too hard. He had high expectations. He hated weakness in all of its forms. He was not meant to be a parent and he knew it, least of all a single parent, but his oddities had meant that no one wanted to befriend him when he was young, which made him an unpleasant adult, which meant he had no real adult friends, either. He did what he could, even if, in the end, he pushed me too hard, and the powers of both the Guardian and Sargeras erupted, killing him and sending me into a sixteen-year coma when I was fourteen.

Your parents always affect who you are. I can never escape his gravity, nor can he escape mine, even in death. Around and around he goes.

Equally close in orbit is Karazhan. How to describe her for those that do not know her? She (although most call her "it") is the tower my mother made on the largest intersection of ley lines on Azeroth, in what is now Deadwind Pass. That much magic in a place makes it strange, Karazhan even more so. I would hesitate to call her a person, but she is very much aware and perhaps even alive, in a way that we do not necessarily understand as "life" in most cases. She is adrift in time and able to fool the senses—sometimes to mess with people, yes, and she has quite the sense of humor and bite to her, but to show true images of the past, present, and future, as well. She does so in order to help—many a time she guided Khadgar towards understanding what was going on with me, and other times, he cast spells to either induce or allow her to do so. (I am unclear on what her limits are, or if she has them.)

Karazhan is my home. She is my constant companion, since I woke after my coma and found her left to me by my mother. Facetiously, I call her my sister, but it's not far off. We are empty without one another, and without Khadgar—really, were she any more present, any more opinionated than she already is, any more verbal or active or prone to doing things, I would think of her in trinary with us, but she seems content to be one step back, watching and wrapping around us and protecting. She doesn't prefer to be in the spotlight—she likes to be the room, the floor on which the person in the spotlight stands, and perhaps she likes to be the spotlight, too, pointing it where she feels it is best for it to go.

I have infinite thoughts and feelings on Karazhan. They would be misplaced here, and are nearly impossible to put into words. Rest assured I spend many hours in-game walking her halls, even though she is not as I remember, just to get a semblance of being home.

Nearly as close in orbit as Karazhan is Atiesh. Es oruhm Atiesh. Words that mean something about it that I cannot quite place, and cannot confidently even tell you the language of. Thalassian, perhaps, but I do not know. Es oruhm Atiesh.

Atiesh is my staff. What a mundane way to put it! Atiesh, Greatstaff of the Guardian, has been the staff of Guardians throughout the ages. It has been passed from one to another, and rested at last in my hands. It acted as a symbol of my cage. It acted as a symbol of my will. It was mine, and it was a great comfort to me. How to describe Atiesh? It is a familiar item that was with me through it all, its wooden surface made smooth by the hands of countless Guardians, most of all my mother and myself. Es oruhm Atiesh. It is vitally important to how I understand myself. If I am not holding it, it should be in the scene, up against the wall, or in Khadgar's hands. Atiesh is mine, and I am distressed by its absence, as much as I am distressed by the absence of Karazhan.

That it is unobtainable in my source, but was obtainable nearly twenty years ago, is a sharp blow that makes me feel like I could breathe smoke. It's ridiculous—I am upset to a foundational level about not being able to get my hands on a handful of pixels in a video game, that is so old as to be useless in the modern day even if I did have it. But it is Atiesh. I want it. I want it, and I cannot have it, even though it is mine.

Perhaps that is the crux of these overlapping things that make me who I am—I am possessive, and I know this. The things that are close to me are me, are mine, and the idea of them being taken away from me is unbearable because so much of my identity is wrapped up in what is mine. I have had so little time to just be myself—I am defined in broad strokes by that which surrounds me. My gravity pulls them in, and they pull back, and the idea of them then leaving makes me spitting mad. I could claw bloody furrows in the universe just to keep someone close. I have and will again. You cannot keep myself from me: one way or another, I will beat the odds again and again to bring them back to me.

…Even if it through writing fiction, different ways things could have gone. I cannot change that my childhood friends, Llane Wrynn and Anduin Lothar, are dead. They are gone. They were a more distant orbit, but they were there, still. That mattered. It has to have mattered. Anduin helped save me; Llane trusted me until the very end, long past when he should have realized that there was something wrong. It doomed him, in the end, but how could I ever hold that against him? He trusted me. He trusted me, and it killed him. Anduin died, too, to the very orcs I let through to Azeroth. My only friends died because of me, and my only recourse is to write them, again and again and again, watching events play out differently, until I get it right.

It's a feeble sort of clawing, to keep them close, but it is all I have, and I will not give it up until I am content.

Also in this solar system metaphor are those I have met and collected since reuniting with Khadgar—our children (Prima, Wrathion, Goriona), our friends, his sister. Some strange moon is Moroes, my castellan, and even further, dear dead Cook, his partner in crime and victim of Sargeras' rage. Dozens and dozens of celestial bodies, others that are not worth mentioning for their lesser pull on me. You understand by now. We affect each other, but I take it far more personally, I suppose—I make it all mine, myself, and wrap it all up in a cloak and call it Medivh then go out to live my life like I'm not a different entity than everything else around me.

It's sort of plural, in a way, even before I joined this system. Something to think about, perhaps.

My family is mine, and I am theirs. So too am I Karazhan's, and she is mine. Atiesh is mine, and I am unsure if it has any kind of awareness, but I am less its and more it belongs to me, an actual ownership that I lack with anything sentient because, despite my possessiveness, one does not own people. (I protest to saying that I own Karazhan, as well, although legally I believe that is still true, as she is a tower. It's just that she is also, in some ways, my sister, so here we are.) This isn't to say I am without conflict with any of these people. My relationship with my parents is rocky at best. Karazhan and I have had our disagreements, and as much as she tried to help and protect me, she could only do so much, and my corruption damaged her irreparably and deeply. Even Khadgar and I find each other immensely obnoxious and annoying on occasion, and delight in frustrating the other, but that doesn't take away from everything else, the positivity, the love that runs, undercurrent, to it all.

I have conflict with myself, internally, as well. It is all the same. It is as it should be. I am the way I am, constructed by people who wanted things from me and then broken free of that cage into a world I was not intended for.

Light, and I'm a therian on top of that. What a mundane and easy thing to explain after all that. I'm also a raven. Does it have something to do with my mother? With Atiesh granting me a raven form? With the number of corvids that lived around Karazhan before the land died? Was I born this way? I don't know. I don't really care. On top of everything else, I am a raven in a human's body, and that changes the way I approach and look at things. I am not a human man: I am a male bird, a bright, wearing fun colors and doing little dances to impress my partner, a human, a male broodmother, who watches me with fond amusement and sometimes gives me a little kiss for my trouble.

I am not a singular entity. I never have been and never can be. The closest thing to me there is is the raven, I think, with a few other things added on. Strip everyone and everything else away and you get the animal beneath. I am totally tied up in everything else, and cannot escape the gravity of that, nor can anything else escape mine. I have an effect on people I get to know, and we begin to mirror each other to some extent, wrapped up in each other even in small ways. I just experience it more literally and directly than most—at least, as far as my sample size of my friends and headmates goes.

I am ash on the wind under the raven's wings. I am the burned-out earth around the Dark Portal, and the Portal itself, a flat surface of endless stars, eternally hungry in both directions. I am the carrion birds that follow the armies that battle each other due to Sargeras' actions, and my hands. I am everyone and everything I have ever known in varying amounts, unimaginable to most and eternal and echoing, forever and ever in the empty space of what I could have been in a world that had no chance of ever existing.

I don't believe that I mind it. I am the way I am; as many frustrations as that breeds, that is no different than anyone else. Few people like everything about themselves. I know that I am beaten and possessive and obnoxious, obsessive and neurotic and mercurial. I accept this. I could be nothing else. The only fate I accept is that which I am doomed to only by who I am. Character is fate: I am many things and many people, that are collectively Medivh, and thus I will always do what I would do. I have infinite choices in this world, but I will always only ever make the one, for I am Medivh, and what I choose will always be what Medivh would choose.

As complicated as the overlapping venn diagrams of my traits vs my loved ones' traits are, as strange as the binary stars and the solar system can be, they are my strangeness, and I embrace them wholeheartedly. I am easy to look at but difficult to explain—and I believe that I am content with that.