This is one of the stories which has nagged me for a while, but I think I finally solved it. With some help. Anyway, let us start from the beginning.
A few weeks ago, people who regularly visit the Cathedral Of Light, well, the district as a whole really, would be greeted with the sight of quite the pile of bodies on the steps to the Cathedral. No reason or rhyme to their appearance, genders, races, gear, all over the place, but neither looked entirely civilian.
The local authorities did their best to clean up the mess. According to sanitation worker Werner Landfill then they had people go pick up the corpses, load them on carts and move them towards the morgue. But the bodies never made it there. Once at the morgue the sanitation workers went to offload the smelling bodies, but to their surprise - they had all vanished from the carts.
Confused about the situation they would go back only to find the corpses still - or should I say - again? at the steps of the Cathedral.
This repeated itself over the better part of a week, but no matter how much effort was made into moving the bodies, then they always ended up right back where they were. And not just in the vicinity, no, a photo was taken, and they ended up EXACTLY the same place each time.
Before:
The sanitation workers kept trying a few times a day, just as local experts were called in to investigate. One of them - a Death Knight who prefers to just be referred to as "Guttaker" - said he investigated the scene and while he, and everyone else with half a brain suspected magic was involved then he offered no further insight into the matter.
The whole situation resolved itself in 8 days however when the bodies suddenly vanished. One moment they were there, the next not. And no one had a clue how or why.
Being the investigative journalist that I am, I figured there would be one source the alliance had not tried. A troll Loa-speaker.
Exactly how I got hold of him, and where we met up, I won't go into details on, it also does not matter. The guy, "Frogs-go-poof" as his spirit-name apparently is - agreed to help me find an answer by embarking on a perilous spirit-walk to seek out Bwonsomdi for answers. He then proceeded to fill a small hut with more smoke than I think is safe, and then eat a bowl of mushrooms in syrup? Or, well, that is what it looked like.
Anyway, this spirit-walk took quite some time. I'm sure it was interesting to him, and I may investigate this topic another time - but well, all I saw was the guy sitting in lotus position almost completely shrouded in smoke and with syrupy (is that a word?) mushroom mush dripping from his chin, for what seemed liked 45 minutes. He then "returned" to speak to me:
"Bwonsomdi has no comments mon" he said before mumbling something about candied frogs and then dozed off. No wiser I returned to Stormwind.
A few days passed where I made no progress on the matter, seemed no one had a clue what had happened, but as I was browsing our archive of old editions of the paper, I stumbled upon one I did awhile back with Archmage Acheleus Moonblaze of the Kirin Tor - and the clever reader can guess where this is going now.
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I quickly went ahead and contacted his office - asking for an interview. Being a wizard - of a sort - his answer came exactly when he planned it to arrive, and an interview was set up.
Archmage Acheleus Moonblaze is a bit of a character. If you ask him a question, then you better be ready because the answer is never what you expect. Expect the unexpected with this man. Slightly eccentric (who am I kidding? slightly? pfft) but the man does know a thing or two and I have come to appreciate - well professionally anyway - his insights into matters arcane.
Besides a brief conversation about coffee elementals then he did actually have a theory, perhaps more than a theory, and perhaps more than he wanted to reveal.
"My best guess, without divining the scene, would be that an apprentice Chronomancer messed up a temporal reading. They might have been asked to retroactively investigate a crime that occurred on the steps of the Cathedral in the past, and instead of pulling -one- body out of the timeway, they overreached, pulled dozens from random times, panicked, and fled the scene."
So, a student messed up while doing some magic stuff.
"Since the anomaly they created was still up and running, it reset itself once or twice, which explains the reappearing bodies, before a Timelord or a Weaver no doubt swept in to properly clean up the mess - and the bodies disappeared for good."
"It reset itself once or twice" Right, once or twice every hour for a week more like it. Talk about an understatement. Anyway, as I understood it then a Timelord is a dragon, and a Weaver is a more mundane being who has practiced Chronomancy. I did initially confuse a weaver with someone who knits, but the Archmage was very kind in explaining the difference between regular weaving and knitting, and well, chronomancy.
"We are very lucky that the episode did not spawn a chaotid. However, it might have created epoch stones; since those are extremely valuable, I have no doubt that the aforementioned Timelord or Weaver snatched them to keep them off the hands of the general public."
This statement as well as rest of the interview did leave me wondering if the archmage was thinking of someone specific when he referred to this theoretical Weaver or Timelord, without making accusations then I do recall a ceremony where the archmage himself displayed skills with chronomancy, a cake aging before our eyes, if I remember correctly.
Anyway, that is all speculations. At this stage it seems likely that what happened was a chronomancer apprentice messing up and not owning up to it, it then took a bit over a week for a Weaver or Timelord to realize what was going on - I guess they might have been pressed for time (yes, intended) - and then stepped in to fix it. As likely a story as any, I think.