Is Stormwind Kingdom About to Get Wiped Off the Map?
This bone-chilling question has been eating away at every soul in Stormwind like a cancer for months now, whispered in dark corners and behind closed doors with the kind of terror usually reserved for ghost stories around campfires.
The orcs weren't just terrifying—they were straight-up nightmare fuel that made grown men wet themselves and hardened veterans wake up screaming. Every survivor who crawled back from the frontlines painted pictures so horrifying that mothers pulled their children closer and fathers reached for their weapons with shaking hands.
If it weren't for King Llane, strutting around in armor so blindingly golden it could signal ships from three kingdoms away, making his rounds on Stormwind's walls three times daily like clockwork, this panic would've spread faster than wildfire in a drought-stricken prairie, consuming every last shred of hope in the kingdom.
Llane Wrynn, Anduin Lothar, and Bolvar Fordragon—somewhere along the way, this trinity had become the pillars holding up the entire kingdom's sanity. And as citizens watched those walls grow thicker than a brick shithouse and taller than a redwood, with those bizarre, alien-looking arrow towers and trebuchets shooting up like weeds on steroids—gaining almost a full story every single day—people finally started sleeping a little easier at night.
Standing on Stormwind City's outer ramparts and staring into that menacing forest that stretched endlessly like a green ocean of death, Llane finally dragged his gaze back to survey the masterpiece of paranoid engineering before him. The original outer wall of Stormwind had been transformed so completely it looked like an entirely different fortress—as if the gods themselves had decided to play architect with unlimited resources and a serious attitude problem.
After pumping that wall full of magical "cement" until it was nearly twice as thick as a mountain, they'd jacked up the height by fifty percent for good measure. But that wasn't nearly enough for these madmen—oh no, they'd slapped two more walls outside the original like layers on the world's deadliest cake, creating massive killing fields between each barrier. According to the blueprints, this death trap was called a "city wall"—though it looked more like something designed by someone who'd studied every siege in history and decided to make attackers' lives a living hell.
The three walls connected through passages so narrow that attacking forces would be funneled like cattle to slaughter, with massive iron plates positioned at critical choke points. Each plate hung by a single bolt connected to a small mechanism—one yank from a defender, or one pull of an iron chain from the wall above, and WHAM! Down comes several tons of metal, turning any poor bastards beneath into pancakes flatter than roadkill.
But the real genius lay in the walls themselves, which bristled with mysterious diamond-shaped protrusions that looked like the fortress had grown geometric tumors overnight.
Every officer who'd witnessed the front lines—whether Lothar or Bolvar—couldn't shut up about these prismatic structures, praising them like they'd discovered fire all over again. According to them, these bad boys could shrug off the orcs' primitive but devastatingly powerful catapults like they were throwing pebbles at a battleship.
Rising behind this triple-layer deathtrap stood hexagonal arrow towers that pierced the sky like massive spears, their pointed edges aimed outward like middle fingers to any approaching army. These towers narrowed as they climbed higher, and without some revolutionary technique called "reverse molding," building these architectural marvels would've been about as impossible as teaching a pig to sing opera.
Beyond the arrow towers loomed even bigger turrets, each one capable of housing multiple crossbows or a catapult large enough to launch a horse. The sheer number of war machines bristling from every surface was enough to make seasoned warriors break out in cold sweats—and all of this insane construction had happened AFTER the orcs had already invaded Elwynn Forest, turning panic into productivity at a pace that defied all logic.
"Edwin, are these really all Duke's designs?" Llane asked, his satisfaction barely masking the disbelief in his voice as he turned to the young man trailing behind him like a loyal hound.
Edwin VanCleef, twenty-eight years old and built like someone who'd spent his life wrestling stone into submission, served as senior foreman of the Brotherhood of Stonemasons. But now he wore a different hat entirely—engineering supervisor handpicked by Duke himself to serve the crown, a position that had elevated him from nobody to somebody practically overnight.
"Yes, Your Majesty," VanCleef replied with the kind of certainty that comes from absolute faith. This was a far cry from the bitter, revenge-obsessed villain he'd become in later years—the man who'd be corrupted by a manipulative black dragon, betrayed by Stormwind's nobility, and driven to form the notorious Defias Brotherhood. The Edwin who'd eventually seize Moonbrook Town in the Western Wilderness, transform its mines into the infamous Deadmines, and wage war against every Stormwind citizen he could get his hands on was still just a distant nightmare waiting in the wings.
Right now, Edwin VanCleef burned with the pure fire of youth and righteousness, his heart still untainted by the betrayals that would later turn him into Stormwind's most wanted enemy.
When Makaro had appeared at his door carrying Duke's personal instructions, Edwin had been struck speechless—not just starstruck, but genuinely flabbergasted that someone of his lowly station had caught the attention of greatness itself.
Makaro wasn't just anybody—he was the personal "butler" of Sea King Duke, which in practical terms made him more powerful than half the nobility in the kingdom!
Edmund Duke—the kingdom's brightest star, a business mogul whose wealth grew faster than rumors in a tavern, a rising magical prodigy whose power seemed to expand daily, and the mastermind behind an entirely new faction that was reshaping Stormwind's political landscape like a hurricane reshapes coastlines.
And Edwin? He was just a craftsman, someone the upper classes looked at with the same enthusiasm they'd show a particularly persistent piece of gum stuck to their shoe.
Yet here was Duke's personal representative, seeking him out like he actually mattered. When Makaro laid out the offer—that Duke wanted Edwin as a direct subordinate, not just another hired hand—he'd accepted faster than a starving man grabs bread, barely believing his incredible luck.
Even though he'd never actually met his mysterious master face-to-face, everything that followed had cemented Edwin's loyalty stronger than the walls he was building.
Duke had tasked him with constructing a network of fortresses designed to slow the orc advance to a crawl and completely rebuild Stormwind City's defenses from the ground up—not just repairs, but a complete metamorphosis that would make the old walls look like children's toys.
The compensation was beyond generous—Duke had paid everything up front, offering choices that seemed too good to be true: either pure gold coins that gleamed like captured sunlight, the finest white bread that melted in your mouth like clouds, or fresh sea fish so delicious it made grown men weep with joy. When these options had been laid out before VanCleef, he'd nearly broken down on the spot—not from joy, but from sheer relief that bordered on religious experience.
With Stormwind bursting at the seams with refugees fleeing the orc invasion, basic necessities had become scarcer than hen's teeth. These three offerings were exactly what the poverty-stricken members of the Stonemason Brotherhood needed most desperately, and Duke had delivered them like manna from heaven.
The national crisis had transformed every craftsman into a man possessed, working with enthusiasm that burned at two hundred percent intensity, laboring with the kind of selfless dedication usually reserved for religious zealots. Workers were literally collapsing from exhaustion on the construction sites, dropping like flies under the relentless pace, but not a single complaint could be heard—only the sounds of hammers, saws, and unwavering determination.
Duke had also kept his word about protecting the workers' families, sending a special ship to evacuate them before anyone else—a privilege typically reserved for the bluest of blue bloods, the kind of treatment that marked the difference between being somebody and being nobody in this kingdom.
After watching his beloved daughter Vanessa sail safely away from the approaching nightmare, Edwin's devotion to Duke had transcended mere loyalty—it had become something approaching worship, the kind of fanatical dedication that moves mountains and builds impossible fortresses in record time.
King Llane knew nothing about these behind-the-scenes machinations, but he could recognize genuine devotion when he saw it, and Edwin's almost religious fervor pleased him immensely. He clapped the young foreman on the shoulder with the kind of approval usually reserved for knights returning from glorious victories. "You've knocked this one out of the park, son. With the outer wall finished, you can move on to the inner defenses. The orcs are breathing down our necks now, and it's time for the warriors to take center stage."
"Your wish is my command, Your Majesty."
Suddenly, as if summoned by their conversation about impending doom, a powerful wind erupted from the forest depths, carrying with it a stench so foul it could gag a vulture. The surging air current twisted and spun like a living tornado, snatching up sand, dust, and vegetation, hurling everything skyward in a writhing dance of debris that formed massive waves of airborne filth.
This reeking gale tore through the flattened forest and slammed into Stormwind's outer defenses like nature's own battering ram. The hurricane of leaves and grit was so intense that seasoned soldiers couldn't even lift their heads, forced to hunker down like children hiding from a thunderstorm.
Every person on those walls found themselves covering their faces with desperate hands, letting their hair whip wildly in the gaps between helmet and skull, squinting through the chaos to witness something that would haunt their nightmares forever—the emergence of green from within that ominous treeline, carried forward by the howling wind like a plague made visible.
The surging green tide, accompanied by footsteps that thundered like an approaching earthquake, countless alien greens that flooded the entire forest like a biblical plague. They moved like army ants covering every mountain and valley, converging into streams, streams becoming rivers, rivers becoming oceans of living nightmare pouring out of the woodland depths like hell itself had opened its gates.
The thick green tsunami rolled forward endlessly, orc blood flowing like a raging flood, squeezing through every gap in the forest canopy like water through a broken dam. Every corner of the woodland surged and writhed, this ominous emerald tide reflecting in the horrified eyes of every defender like the last thing they'd ever see.
What followed was the sound of war drums and battle horns that didn't just break the silence—they shattered it like glass, booming across the landscape with the force of divine judgment.
In preparation for this moment, every tree within a full kilometer of the city walls had been clear-cut, creating a killing field so barren it looked like the surface of the moon.
But now that carefully prepared 800-meter expanse of open ground was completely filled with the green tide of orcs, a living carpet of death that stretched to the horizon like the end of the world made manifest.
At the front of this nightmarish parade rode a towering green-skinned orc whose very presence seemed to bend reality around him, carrying two massive animal skeletons across his shoulders like trophies from some cosmic hunt. He sat astride a warg that made other wolves look like puppies—this beast was three times more massive than the biggest bull any human had ever laid eyes on, a creature that seemed to have crawled out of legends specifically designed to give children permanent insomnia.
The alpha warg reared up on its hind legs and released a howl that pierced the heavens themselves, its pure black mane spreading in the wind like death's own banner, looking so ferocious and magnificent that it made every human heart skip several beats in pure, primal terror.
"AHHHH, AHHHH, AHHHHHH—"