The Chronicle of AzerothWarcraft, beginning to now

Chapter 01Before recorded timeCosmology

The Six Forces

Everything in Warcraft is downstream of six energies, arranged in three opposed pairs. Learn them once and the next thirty chapters explain themselves.

The Great Dark Beyond — the physical universe of stars and worlds — is only one plane among several. Around and through it press six primal forces, each with its own realm, its own natives, and its own idea of what reality should be. They are not good and evil. They are appetites.

• LightOrder through hope and unity. Naaru, paladins, priests. Its extreme is a tyranny that would burn a world to save it.
• VoidEntropy through corrupting whispers. Old Gods, void lords, faceless ones. It does not destroy — it converts.
• OrderArcane and titanic structure. The Pantheon, the titan-forged, ley lines, magic as engineering.
• DisorderFel and chaos. The Twisting Nether, demons, warlocks. Power bought by burning something permanent.
• LifeThe Emerald Dream, wild gods, druids, the Red Dragonflight. Growth without limit is its own kind of ruin.
• DeathThe Shadowlands, necromancy, the Scourge, val'kyr. Not evil — the machinery that recycles souls.

At the centre of the diagram sits a seventh thing that is not a force at all: a world-soul. Certain planets are pregnant. Within their crust sleeps a nascent titan — a god gestating over millions of years, which will one day wake, shed its rocky shell, and stride into the cosmos. Azeroth is one of these. It is, as it turns out, the largest ever found.

Every war in this chronicle is ultimately a war over who gets to hold that sleeping child.

Chapter 02Aeons pastChronicle

The Pantheon and the Fall of Sargeras

The titans woke, organised the universe, and appointed a champion to defend it. He is the reason it nearly ended.

The first world-souls to wake became the Pantheon: Aman'Thul the Highfather, Golganneth of the storms, Eonar of life, Norgannon of magic, Khaz'goroth the shaper, Aggramar the warrior, and Sargeras — greatest of them all — who was made the Pantheon's champion and sent alone into the dark to hunt what threatened order.

What Sargeras found broke him. He discovered the void lords, entities of pure entropy, and learned their design: find a world-soul, infest it with Old Gods, corrupt it in the womb, and let it wake as a dark titan — a god of annihilation with the power of a Pantheon member. He also found a world already too far gone, and, seeing no cure, destroyed it entirely.

He brought his conclusion back to the Pantheon: creation itself is compromised, and the only way to deny the void lords their prize is to unmake the physical universe and start again. Aman'Thul refused. Sargeras left.

The greatest defender of order became the greatest agent of disorder — not out of malice, but out of a conviction he could never argue his family into sharing. It is the oldest tragedy in the setting, and the shape of every later one.

• SargerasTitan champion turned destroyer. Believes annihilation is mercy. Will not be stopped for roughly twenty-five thousand years.
• Aman'ThulHighfather of the Pantheon. Overrules Sargeras — and later makes a rushed decision on Azeroth that scars the world permanently.

Chapter 03Aeons pastChronicle

The Burning Legion

Sargeras went to the prison-worlds where the Pantheon had sealed the demons he'd captured, and released them all. The eredar lord Kil'jaeden and the nathrezim Tichondrius became his lieutenants; the demon hunter's future nemesis Archimonde became his hammer. Together they formed the Burning Legion, an army that cannot truly die — demons slain in the physical universe simply reform in the Twisting Nether and come back.

The Legion's method never changes: find a world, corrupt its natives into a servant army, invade with that army, burn the world, move on. Over aeons it consumed thousands.

On the world of Argus, Kil'jaeden and Archimonde accepted Sargeras's offer. Their fellow eredar leader Velen refused, and fled with a handful of followers aboard a stolen naaru dimensional ship. They renamed themselves the draenei — "exiled ones" — and spent twenty-five thousand years running, one step ahead of Kil'jaeden's hatred, world to world.

Their flight is not a footnote. It is the fuse that eventually reaches Azeroth.

Chapter 04~ 150,000 years agoChronicle

The Old Gods and the Black Empire

Long before there were elves or orcs, Azeroth belonged to five parasites and their slaves.

The void lords found Azeroth and seeded it with Old Gods — Y'Shaarj, N'Zoth, C'Thun, Yogg-Saron, and one other. They landed as spores, burrowed into the crust, and grew into vast fleshy organisms whose tendrils wrapped the world's interior and pressed against the sleeping world-soul.

Above ground they raised the Black Empire: aqir insectoid legions and n'raqi faceless ones, ruling a planet of madness. Only the four Elemental Lords — Ragnaros, Therazane, Al'Akir and Neptulon — resisted, and they were beaten and bound into service.

The Old Gods are the setting's most patient antagonists. They cannot be killed cleanly; when Aman'Thul later tore Y'Shaarj out of the ground, the wound became a permanent scar and Y'Shaarj's dying heart went on corrupting Pandaria for millennia. Every Old God defeat in this chronicle is a containment, not a cure.

• N'ZothSubtlest of the five. Whispers rather than rages. Behind Neltharion's fall, Azshara's bargain, and — 150,000 years later — the near-end of the world.
• RagnarosFirelord, enslaved by the Old Gods, later banished by the titan-forged, later still the first raid boss most players ever feared.

Chapter 05~ 146,000 years agoChronicle

The Ordering of Azeroth

Drawn by the strength of Azeroth's world-soul, the Pantheon arrived and went to war with the Black Empire. They could not simply exterminate the Old Gods — the parasites had grown so deep that killing them outright would kill the world-soul with them.

So the titans improvised. Aman'Thul ripped Y'Shaarj free by force and instantly regretted it; the extraction left the Well of Eternity's future site scarred and gouged the Vale of Eternal Blossoms. The remaining Old Gods were instead imprisoned in place, sealed in titan-forged vaults beneath the surface, alive and awake and waiting.

Then the Pantheon reshaped the surface: raised continents, seeded oceans, and built titan-forged servants of living stone — earthen, vrykul, mogu, mechagnomes — to maintain the machinery. Above them they set the Keepers: Odyn, Freya, Thorim, Loken, Mimiron, Archaedas, Ra-den. And at the world's heart they installed Azeroth's own guardians, chief among them the great dragons empowered as Aspects.

• Alexstrasza · Life-BinderRed. Guardian of all living things. Enslaved in the Second War, widowed twice over, still the setting's moral centre.
• Ysera · the DreamerGreen. Bound to the Emerald Dream, Azeroth's blueprint made real.
• Nozdormu · the TimelessBronze. Keeper of time — who has seen his own corruption into Murozond and can do nothing about it.
• Malygos · the Spell-WeaverBlue. Guardian of magic. Will be driven insane by grief and later hunt every mortal spellcaster on the planet.
• Neltharion · the Earth-WarderBlack. Given the deepest ties to the world — which put him closest to what was sealed beneath it.

Chapter 06Deep antiquityChronicle

The Curse of Flesh

The Old Gods lost the war and won the peace, with a single act of sabotage that created every mortal race in the story.

Unable to break out, the imprisoned Old Gods reached instead for the titan-forged, and infected them with the Curse of Flesh: a slow transformation from immortal stone into soft, short-lived, fertile, imperfect meat. It was meant as an insult and a weakness.

Earthen became dwarves. Mechagnomes became gnomes. Vrykul became — after a generation of vrykul parents began abandoning their weak, small offspring on the shore — humans. Mogu decayed into warlords, and the aqir splintered into trolls' great enemies and, elsewhere, into the ancestors of the qiraji and nerubians.

The joke did not land the way the Old Gods intended. Flesh brought mortality, but it also brought free will, invention, ambition and the capacity to change — the exact qualities that will, thirty chapters from now, be the only reason Azeroth survives at all.

Chapter 07~ 10,000 years agoWar of the Ancients

The Well of Eternity and the War of the Ancients

A tribe of trolls drank from a lake of raw magic, became something new, and invited the end of the world through the front door.

At the site of Y'Shaarj's extraction lay the Well of Eternity, a lake of pure arcane energy and the source of all magic on the planet. Dark trolls who settled beside it were changed by it into the kaldorei — night elves: tall, immortal, and increasingly convinced of their own centrality.

Their queen, Azshara, and her Highborne nobility pushed the Well harder and harder. Their experiments punched a hole in reality, and something on the other side answered. Sargeras had at last found Azeroth.

Azshara, offered godhood and a world remade in her own image, agreed to open a portal large enough for Sargeras himself. Her sorcerer Xavius became the first satyr; Archimonde and Mannoroth led the invasion; the Legion poured across Kalimdor and burned it.

Against them stood an improbable alliance: Malfurion Stormrage, the first druid, taught by the demigod Cenarius; the priestess Tyrande Whisperwind; the dragon Aspects; the tauren, furbolg and earthen; and Malfurion's twin brother Illidan, who wanted Tyrande, wanted the Well, and could never be sure himself which he wanted more.

• Illidan StormrageJoins the Legion as a double agent, or a traitor, depending on which of his own explanations you believe. Blinded and given fel sight by Sargeras.
• AzsharaQueen of the kaldorei. Trades her people for power and, when the sea takes her, trades again — with N'Zoth.

Chapter 08~ 10,000 years agoWar of the Ancients

The Sundering

Two things went wrong for Sargeras at once. Neltharion, the Earth-Warder, unveiled the artefact he had secretly forged at the whispered instruction of the Old Gods — the Dragon Soul, into which the other four flights had unknowingly poured their power. He turned it on everyone, and became Deathwing.

And Malfurion, judging that the Legion's portal could not be closed while its source burned, destroyed the Well of Eternity itself.

The Well imploded. The single supercontinent of Kalimdor was blown apart, its fragments becoming the continents players know: Kalimdor, the Eastern Kingdoms, Northrend, Pandaria. The seas rushed into the crater and became the Maelstrom. Azshara and her court, drowning, accepted N'Zoth's bargain and were reborn as the serpentine naga. Illidan, who had secretly saved vials of the Well's water and used them to create a second Well atop Mount Hyjal, was imprisoned beneath the earth by his own brother for ten thousand years.

Over the new Well, Alexstrasza, Ysera and Nozdormu grew the World Tree Nordrassil — and its blessing gave the night elves immortality on one condition: they must never touch arcane magic again. The surviving Highborne could not comply, and were exiled. They crossed the sea, founded Quel'Thalas, created the Sunwell from stolen Well water, and became the high elves.

Chapter 09~ 2,800 – 1,200 years agoChronicle

Trolls, Arathor, and the Making of Humanity

While the night elves slept behind their forests, the shorter-lived races got busy. The Amani and Gurubashi troll empires dominated the eastern continent. Humanity, descended from cursed vrykul, spread out of Northrend and founded the kingdom of Arathor under Thoradin.

When the Amani moved on Quel'Thalas, the high elves were losing badly enough to break their isolation and beg Arathor for help — offering, as payment, to teach humans magic. Thoradin agreed. The Troll Wars ended with the trolls broken, and human sorcery loosed on the world.

Those first hundred human magi founded the city of Dalaran. Arathor eventually fragmented into the seven human kingdoms: Stormwind, Lordaeron, Gilneas, Alterac, Kul Tiras, Dalaran and Stromgarde. The dwarves emerged from Ironforge, the gnomes from Gnomeregan, and the world settled into something recognisable as the map players would later walk.

Chapter 10~ 2,700 years ago – Year 0The Last Guardian

The Guardians of Tirisfal

To stop the Legion quietly, Dalaran built a weapon out of a person. It worked for two thousand years, and then it opened the Dark Portal.

Aware that demons were slipping into the world, the magi of Dalaran and their elven allies created the Guardian of Tirisfal: one mortal invested with the pooled might of the Council, tasked with hunting demons in secret so that ordinary people never had to know.

The greatest was Aegwynn, who held the office for nine hundred years and refused to give it up. In Northrend she confronted an avatar of Sargeras himself, and destroyed it — or believed she had. In truth Sargeras let her win, and let his spirit slip into the corpse she buried, and then into Aegwynn herself, and then into the son she conceived precisely so she could pass on the Guardian's power on her own terms.

That son was Medivh. He grew up in the tower of Karazhan with a titan-killing demon lord asleep behind his eyes, and when the power woke, so did Sargeras. The last Guardian of Tirisfal — the office invented specifically to stop the Burning Legion — became the mechanism by which it finally reached Azeroth.

• AegwynnGreatest Guardian. Her one act of pride costs two kingdoms and starts every war in the games.
• MedivhPossessed from conception. Opens the Dark Portal, is killed by his own best friend, and returns from death to save the world anyway.

Chapter 11Years −25 to −5Rise of the Horde

Draenor: The Orcs and the Draenei

The orcs were not born monsters. They were farmed into them, deliberately, by a demon with a grudge that predated their entire species.

The draenei's long flight ended on a red world they named Draenor, home to shamanic orc clans, ogres, arakkoa and gronn. For two centuries the two peoples lived apart but peacefully. Then Kil'jaeden found Velen again, and decided that this time he would not merely kill his old friend — he would take his neighbours first.

Kil'jaeden appeared to the elder shaman Ner'zhul in the guise of his dead wife, and told him the draenei were plotting genocide against the orcs. Ner'zhul preached holy war. When he discovered the deception and tried to recant, his apprentice Gul'dan went to Kil'jaeden directly and took the job — and the power that came with it.

Gul'dan founded the Shadow Council, cut the orcs off from the elements, and replaced shamanism with fel warlock magic. He united the clans under Blackhand as the Horde. Then he had the clans drink the blood of the pit lord Mannoroth — every warrior who drank was bound to the Legion, skin turning green, rage becoming permanent.

The Horde fell on the draenei and slaughtered them almost to extinction. Velen and a remnant survived in hiding. And having burned their own world, the orcs had nowhere left to go — until Gul'dan's visions found a mind reaching back toward him from across the void.

• Gul'danThe first orc warlock. Sells his entire species for personal power, twice, across two timelines.
• Grommash HellscreamFirst to drink Mannoroth's blood, and — decades later — the one who spills it.
• DurotanFrostwolf chieftain who refused the blood. Exiled, then murdered. His infant son is left in the snow.

Chapter 12Years 0 – 5Warcraft: Orcs & Humans

The First War

Medivh — or the thing wearing him — reached across the void to Gul'dan, and together they tore open the Dark Portal in the Black Morass. The Horde poured into the kingdom of Stormwind.

The humans were catastrophically unprepared. King Llane Wrynn held the capital as long as he could with his knights Anduin Lothar and Medivh himself; the Horde's assassin Garona, compelled by the Shadow Council, murdered Llane in his throne room.

Lothar and the young apprentice Khadgar had by then worked out the truth about Medivh. They stormed Karazhan and killed him — freeing Azeroth of Sargeras's avatar, but far too late. Stormwind fell. Lothar loaded the survivors, including Llane's small son Varian, onto ships and fled north across the sea to Lordaeron.

Meanwhile Gul'dan, cheated of his own reward, put himself into a coma searching for Sargeras's tomb, and Blackhand was murdered by Orgrim Doomhammer, who took the Horde for himself and had the Shadow Council executed.

Chapter 13Years 6 – 8Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness

The Second War

The refugee crisis of the First War produced the Alliance. It also produced the political shape the entire franchise still runs on.

Lothar convinced the seven human kingdoms, the dwarves of Ironforge, the gnomes and the high elves to unite as the Alliance of Lordaeron. Doomhammer answered by recruiting the ogres, the forest trolls under Zul'jin, the goblins, and the treacherous human kingdom of Alterac.

The war's atrocity was aerial. Using the Demon Soul, the Dragonmaw clan captured Alexstrasza herself and forced her to breed dragons as living bombers. Quel'Thalas burned. The Alliance answered by inventing the paladins — the Knights of the Silver Hand, founded by Archbishop Faol with Uther the Lightbringer, Turalyon, and a young Tirion Fordring among the first five.

At the gates of Blackrock Spire, Lothar fell in single combat to Doomhammer. Turalyon picked up his shattered sword, rallied a broken army, and beat the Horde back through the Dark Portal, which Khadgar then destroyed. Doomhammer was captured. Surviving orcs were rounded up into internment camps, where — cut off from demon blood — an entire generation sank into a lethargy that looked like defeat and was really withdrawal.

• Anduin LotharLast descendant of Arathor's line. Dies at Blackrock. Two kings are named for him.
• Turalyon & AlleriaPaladin and elven ranger. Vanish through the Portal for a thousand subjective years and come back changed by Light and Void respectively.

Chapter 14Years 8 – 10Beyond the Dark Portal

Beyond the Dark Portal

On Draenor, Ner'zhul made one last play. He reopened the Portal, sent raiders to steal the artefacts he needed — the Book of Medivh, the Skull of Gul'dan, the Scepter of Sargeras — and used them to tear open a dozen new gateways at once, intending to lead his people to fresh worlds.

He tore too many. The portals ripped Draenor apart from the inside. The Alliance Expedition under Khadgar, Turalyon, Alleria Windrunner and Danath Trollbane destroyed the Dark Portal from the far side and were stranded as the world came apart around them. What remained — a shattered fragment of continent floating in the Twisting Nether — became Outland.

Ner'zhul fled through his own portal and fell directly into Kil'jaeden's hands. Kil'jaeden flayed his spirit apart, sealed it in a block of ice with a helm and a runeblade, and hurled it at Azeroth. It landed in Northrend. Ner'zhul became the Lich King — a weapon meant to soften Azeroth for a Legion invasion.

Chapter 15Years 15 – 23Lord of the Clans

The Rise of Thrall

The orphan left in the snow was raised as a slave by the man running the internment camps, and grew up to give his people back the thing Gul'dan sold.

Thrall — Durotan's son — was found as an infant by Aedelas Blackmoore, who raised him as a gladiator and intended to use him as a figurehead to command an orc slave army. Thrall was taught to read, to fight, and to think, and then he escaped.

He found the Frostwolf clan in exile, and through the shaman Drek'Thar he learned shamanism — the elemental faith Gul'dan had stolen from the orcs generations earlier. He found Grommash Hellscream's Warsong clan, still free and still raging. And he found Orgrim Doomhammer, escaped and living in hiding, who named Thrall his successor and died covering his advance.

Thrall broke open the internment camps, defeated Blackmoore, and rebuilt the Horde as something it had never been: not a demon-driven war machine, but a coalition of the dispossessed, built on honour and the elements. Then the prophet came — a raven-formed Medivh, returned from death — telling Thrall to take his people west across the sea, immediately, or die.

Thrall believed him. He was the only leader who did.

Chapter 16Year 20Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos

The Fall of Arthas Menethil

Every step Arthas took was the reasonable next step. That is the whole point.

The Lich King, from his Frozen Throne, sent the plague south. The exiled Kirin Tor mage Kel'Thuzad, dead and raised as a lich, seeded Lordaeron's granaries with plagued grain. Anyone who ate it died, and rose again as Scourge.

Arthas Menethil, crown prince of Lordaeron and paladin of the Silver Hand, rode out to stop it. He found the city of Stratholme already infected and not yet dead, and concluded that the only way to deny the Scourge an army was to kill the population himself, immediately. Uther, his own mentor, refused the order. Arthas dissolved the Silver Hand on the spot and did it alone. Jaina Proudmoore — who loved him — walked away.

Hunting the dreadlord Mal'Ganis to Northrend, Arthas burned his own ships to stop his men from leaving, and th... (36 KB left)