The young troll crouched in the rain, staring ahead to where the path faltered in the face of the jungle’s dense undergrowth. The sunlight could not penetrate that foliage, nor could the breeze. That part of the island was called First Home, and nobody went there besides shadow hunters and fools.

Vol’jin was no shadow hunter.

He felt the water running in rivulets between his toes. It was a fierce rain, and each drop that hit his back pushed him toward First Home. Sometimes the shadow hunters returned, but the fools never did. Behind Vol’jin, another troll sheltered under a great palm leaf.

Zalazane was no shadow hunter either.

“We not ready,” Zalazane said, chewing noisily on hunks of kommu meat. “De judgment be for older trolls who already done mighty things. We be young nobodies.”

“I just young; you the nobody.” Vol’jin chuckled and stood up. “We got to. My papa, he stared into a fire for many hours last night, and now he actin’ like his doom be upon him. I think he saw a vision. Change comin’, and we got to be ready.”

“You think the loa goin’ to make you a shadow hunter?”

“They gonna judge me, for sure. Test me. I don’t know what dat mean, though.”

“They say the loa gonna take our minds,” Zalazane said grimly. “They gonna warp us and twist us around and make us see visions.”

“Many tests, I hear. If they find me worthy, I be a shadow hunter,” Vol’jin answered. “If they find me unworthy… nothing can save us.”

“Oh, they gonna be impressed with me.” Zalazane smiled knowingly.

“But they gonna laugh at you.” He stepped into the mud and ambled over to stand beside his friend. They looked at each other for a moment and broke into wide grins, tusks bared. Throughout their entire childhood in the Darkspear village, this had always been a sure sign that Vol’jin and Zalazane were about to do something particularly stupid.

With a mighty cry, they ran headlong into First Home. They crashed through grasping vines and roots. The place teemed with death both sudden and slow, but they were young, and they were sure they couldn’t really die.

But there were loa here. The ancient spirits of those who had transcended death could grant wondrous boons or inflict terrible punishments. Loa could give a troll second sight—or drive him mad so that he would pull out his own eyes. Their judgment was vicious, swift, and unpredictable.

Vol’jin and Zalazane ran for a time, and both began to wonder if the legends of First Home had been exaggerated. There did not seem to be any great threat. Two huge fronds blocked the path ahead. With a twitch, they slid to either side, exposing a large carnivorous plant: a nambu. Furry lips parted wide, waiting for them. Fibrous teeth writhed eagerly in the gaping maw, and Vol’jin could not stop in time. He threw himself to the left, grazing the side of the nambu.

Twisting, flailing, he skidded into something hard and scaly. He staggered back, dazed, shaking his head. That something turned, revealing that it was a very angry, very large raptor—by far the biggest Vol’jin had ever seen. He fell back farther, aware that the nambu was somewhere behind him. He could hear Zalazane making strange, muffled sounds, but Vol’jin had lost track of his friend.

The raptor darted its head down at Vol’jin, and he tumbled to his left. Immense jaws snapped shut where he’d just been standing. Ribbons of saliva flew from the creature’s mouth. The nambu reacted to the motion with lightning speed, locking its teeth onto the raptor, funneling poison into the beast’s torn flesh. Vol’jin had only a few heartbeats to take advantage of the distraction: he drew his glaive and stalked around the nambu, assessing. Zalazane was on the far side of the plant, thrashing in a nest of alchu bugs that had swarmed over him, biting and stinging. He would be no help for a time.

The raptor ripped the nambu from the ground, tearing roots and flinging the plant far away. The beast’s tiny, enraged eyes settled on Zalazane, attracted to the troll’s frantic motions.

She could have been asleep. The night elf’s features were perfectly relaxed except for her mouth, which frowned slightly as though her dreams were not pleasant ones. Her body was intact and largely unharmed, unlike many of the others they had seen in recent days. Tyrande Whisperwind knelt by the corpse to take a closer look. There was bloody kelp in the dead woman’s hair and she reeked of the sea and slow rot. Dead several days. She had probably been one of the first victims of the Cataclysm, swept away by the flood. No priestess of Elune could bring her back now.

“Tyrande!” The high priestess’s head snapped up as the voice of one of her closest confidants, Merende, rang through the air. Searching the shores along Rut’theran Village, she saw Merende comforting a younger priestess who sobbed into her white robes. Walking over, Tyrande began to understand why. The tangled body of a young night elf girl lay before them.

Her sister, Merende mouthed silently, indicating the grief-stricken priestess. Tyrande nodded and motioned for them to move away. When the area was clear, she turned her gaze to the corpse. She knew right away that there was no hope—the limbs were twisted at sickening angles and the wounds had been drained bloodless—but the night elves did not abandon their dead. The body would be cleansed, the injuries hidden, and the broken joints set right, before being committed back to the earth.

Tyrande crouched down and wiped the mud from the girl’s face, whispering soft prayers for the moon goddess to guide her spirit and comfort her sister’s grief. The grit slid away, revealing light violet skin and waves of dark blue hair. The almond-shaped eyes were still open, staring up into the clouded sky. It was a face much like one she had first seen many thousands of years ago. Tyrande shut her eyes against the oncoming tears.

Shandris… if only I could hear from you….

“How far were you able to travel, Morthis?” Malfurion Stormrage asked, handing the scout a mug of steaming hot cider. The other night elf gulped it down gratefully and suppressed a shiver. He was soaked to the skin after returning from his patrol, but comfort could wait until his findings were shared. The two druids took shelter in the uppermost room of the Cenarion Enclave.

“The winds were terrible. I could only reach Maestra’s Post, but they had received some reports from Astranaar and Feralas.” The scout settled himself on one of the wooden benches in the chamber, watching nervously as the branches of Darnassus’s trees swayed outside.

“Astranaar still stands?” Malfurion’s voice swelled with relief. He had been coordinating scouting patrols for days, but half of the druids couldn’t even reach the mainland despite their best efforts. They were starved for news, and many had feared the worst.

“Yes, it was spared along with Nijel’s Point, but the settlements along the coast have been less fortunate.”

Sylvanas Windrunner drifts in a sea of comfort, physical sensations replaced by the purity of emotion. She can grasp bliss, see joy, hear peace. This is the afterlife, her destiny. The eternal sea in which she found herself after she fell defending Silvermoon. She belongs here. With each recollection, her memory of this place palls. The sound grows distant; the warmth, cooler. The vision takes on the pallor of a half-remembered dream. But with horrific clarity, the memory always ends the same: Sylvanas’s spirit is wrenched away. The pain is so intense it leaves her soul forever torn. The grinning face of Arthas Menethil, with his lopsided smile and dead eyes, leers at her as he pulls her back into the world. Violates her. His laughter—that hollow laugh—the memory of it makes her skin crawl!

“You son of a bitch!” Sylvanas hollered, kicking aside a shattered piece of the Lich King’s frozen armor. Her voice, empty and terrifying, cracked under the strain of her hatred. The sound echoed across the peaks of Icecrown, rolling through the valleys like the cloying mists that forever haunted this horrible place.

She had ventured here, alone, to his former seat of power. To the very top of Icecrown Citadel, where a frozen throne loomed on a plateau of white ice. Of course that egotistical little boy she knew would place himself here, sitting atop the world. But where was he now? Shattered. She could no longer feel his malevolence tugging at the edges of her consciousness. His broken armor lay in pieces on the white peak before his throne, surrounded with blackened cakes of frozen gore, the remains of those who had finally brought him to his knees.

Sylvanas regretted not being there to see him broken. She picked up a shattered gauntlet, from the very hand that had once gripped Frostmourne. He is finally dead. But why did she feel so hollow inside? Why did she still throb with rage? She hurled the armor from the peak, watching it disappear into the roiling mists.

She was not alone. Nine glimmering spirits encircled the pinnacle, their masked faces turned toward her, their ephemeral forms held aloft on graceful, insubstantial wings. They were the Val’kyr, warrior maidens of old, once enslaved to the will of Arthas. Why did they remain in this place? Sylvanas neither knew nor cared. They stayed out of her way, absolutely mute, immobile even as Sylvanas hollered and raged. Were they watching her? Judging? She ignored them and crunched through the snow to the very seat of Arthas’s power.

Someone else sat atop the throne.

Sylvanas at first thought it was Arthas’s corpse, planted mockingly in this place of honor and sealed in a block of ice, but the silhouette was all wrong. She approached the throne and wiped her hand across the surface of the ice, peering at the distorted figure within. Human, yes. She recognized the profile of an Alliance shoulderplate. But the body was very badly burned, the flesh split open like roasted meat. He wore Arthas’s crown—and his eyes—that flicker of consciousness…

They have replaced him. A new Lich King sat on the throne!

Again Sylvanas cried out, shock growing into explosive rage. She smashed the flat of her hand against the ice, then her fist. The ice cracked. The immobile face within split open behind a web of fractures. Her howls faded, disappearing hollowly into the mists that enveloped the peak. They replaced him. Does this mean there will always be a Lich King? Idiots. Naively presuming that their puppet king wouldn’t someday begin twisting the world to his own ends. Or worse: become a blunt weapon for something even more terrible.

It was a bitter blow. She had expected to venture here in triumph, not to discover another defeat. The victory was hollow. But she backed away from the throne, straightened up, and accepted that the cycle would go on. Arthas was dead. What did it matter if another corpse filled his vacant throne? Sylvanas Windrunner had her vengeance. The vision that had driven her and her people for years had finally been realized. And not a single fiber of her desiccated, animate corpse cared where the world went from here.

It was over now. A part of her was surprised she was even still around, without his lingering presence always tugging at the back of her mind. She backed away from the throne and slowly turned to survey the cold gray world all around her. Her thoughts returned to that place of bliss, her half-remembered glimpse of what lay beyond. Home. It was time.

Slowly, she crunched her way to the ragged edge of the icy platform. A thousand feet below, shrouded by the clouds, lay a forest of shattered saronite spikes she had scouted out earlier. The fall alone couldn’t kill her: her animate flesh was nigh indestructible. But the spikes, the hardened blood of an Old God, they not only would tear the body apart but would obliterate the soul as well. She longed for it. A return to peace. The work she had begun in the forests of Silvermoon was finally complete with the death of Arthas.

A lone mogu, clothed in ornate, precisely tailored robes, stepped into the large tent and coldly eyed the slaves scurrying around the odd collection of polished, hollow white tubes. With a loud, scornful voice, he pronounced, “You told Warlord Gurthan your weapons would be ready by now. He is disappointed in your failure.”

The sixteen slaves—mostly pandaren, though there were a few jinyu—went still with fear. Far in the back of the tent, a bulky figure slowly stood up, face shrouded in shadow. He leaned forward. The edge of his jaw caught the glow of a flickering brazier. Despite the hostile words from the visitor, the larger mogu’s expression was forbiddingly calm.

“If Warlord Gurthan were disappointed in me, he would have told me himself, Hixin,” said Taskmaster Xuexing.

“Perhaps you are unaware of recent events. The mantid are attacking,” Hixin said blandly, as though it were possible to miss the horrific sound of the fighting to the west. “Warlord Gurthan has more important matters to attend to than a delinquent arcanist and the misuse of a few slaves.”

Delinquent? Xuexing kept a firm grasp on his temper. Hixin was by far the slipperiest of Warlord Gurthan’s advisors. He never provoked someone without a reason. No doubt he wished to carry tales of Xuexing’s rage back to the warlord. If he can’t respond calmly even to simple criticism, Warlord, Hixin would undoubtedly say, can he really be trusted with critical duties?

It was no secret that Xuexing had the warlord’s confidence in almost all areas of the arcane. Even the Zandalari sought his counsel and advice. Hixin would need to discredit him before supplanting him. He seeks to ascend by stepping on my head.

“The huatang will be ready when it is ready,” Xuexing said. “And when it’s ready, I’ll tell Warlord Gurthan myself.”

“Should I tell him to expect a working weapon in days? Weeks? Months? The insects will not wait,” Hixin said in the same bland, political voice. He ran his finger absently along the rim of a strange, ornate urn sitting on a table next to him.

“Tell him whatever you like,” Xuexing said.

“I suppose I have to inform the warlord you don’t have an answer.”

“Do not test me, advisor.”

Go together. Swarm the Wall. The empress’s words filled their minds. She gave them purpose. Her desires were their desires, and they did not hesitate to obey.

Without her, the mantid were nothing.

The strong will return. The weak will not, she said.

Kil’ruk and dozens of other flyers rose into the air and went east again. It was their third trip to the Wall, or perhaps their fourth. Kil’ruk hadn’t really kept count. All he cared about was her voice, urging him onward. He had craved battle from his first moment of life. His instincts took care of the rest. His antennae twitched restlessly. His forelegs remained tucked up beneath his abdomen, settling easily against his carapace. Even the act of keeping his four transparent wings buzzing together behind his back was as natural as breathing.

The lesser creatures must die, she sang to them all. Sweep them away.

From so high in the air, the ground itself seemed to writhe with her wrath. Thousands upon thousands of mantid pushed east without thought toward the lesser creatures and their pathetic obstacle. Even though their Wall jutted into the sky, the empress had ordered it to fall. So it would.

They call it the Serpent’s Spine, the empress had sneered. Break it.

On the ground, the swarmborn charged the Wall, attempting to climb its sheer face. Already piles of broken carapaces were growing at the base of the Spine. The climb was exhausting and dangerous, and the few mantid who managed to reach the top found themselves alone against scores of defenders. They did not survive long.

Kil’ruk and the other flyers hovered high above the Wall’s battlements, far out of range of any archers. Each of the mantid carried a net filled to bursting with strange nuggets that leaked wisps of vile smoke. An ambersmith with a missing eye had called them rounds. “Decorate their heads with these,” he had hissed while shoving nets into his forelegs’ grasp.