Author Note: Before I begin, I wanted to inform you that the maps of Azeroth have changed dramatically between Warcraft II and the World of Warcraft video games. It is the nature of game design that landmarks and land masses must change in order to advance or aggregate the story being told, especially if the telling of that story spans fifteen years of real-world development time. The map of Blackrock Spire has at no point been consistent. During Warcraft II, which told much of the story of the Second War, Blackrock Mountain was located on the southeastern edge of a landmass that jutted into the sea. However, in World of Warcraft, the area of the Burning Steppes is landlocked, a barren wasteland. WoW is the most current continuity, and I'll thus be using its version of these territories to tell this story. However, I won't be giving precise battle tactics, as that would be presumptuous of me. All I can do is try to instill the mindsets of the two factions who have ground each other down over the last year of that world's time to reach this point.


And there they stood -- the hegemon of the Horde and all the vicious brethren at his beck and call, stuck between the Scylla of the Alliance's armies and the Charybdis of Blackrock Mountain. The Horde, tired and defeated, had limped across half of Azeroth to reach Blackrock Spire, harried by Alliance scouts the entire way. Once they reached the Orc fortresses at the mountain, their only greetings were the grunts of Orcs who had expected to see them again only after conquering the north, their only 'welcome home' signs were the banners of clans who had been decimated or entirely cut down. There was no victory song, only the dirge of catapults being tightened, the metallic grind of axes being hammered to their razor-sharp and most cutting edge.

If there had been a chance of peace, it had been utterly lost with the audacious murder of Anduin Lothar. So much hope had ridden on his shoulders, and now that hope was gone, cut down by the Doomhammer. Lothar's lieutenant and right-hand man, the knight Turalyon, had collected the broken pieces of Lothar's blade and carried it with him as he and precious few other soldiers broke through the Horde encampment back to the safety of the Alliance's front lines in the Burning Steppes.

And there they stood, row upon row of humanity's finest warriors, the Alliance in all their fury and melancholia. They had come to put an end to the Horde, once and for all, to consecrate the land and rid it of the Orc threat. All of these soldiers had seen the ashes and ruins of the cities that the Horde had destroyed, heard tales of the skull piles the Horde had erected to deprecate the human territories. Some had seen the death knights, the bodies of holy knights ritually executed and instilled with the aberrant souls of Orc warlocks. Some of them had seen the red dragons, enslaved and brainwashed, turning fields and city streets to char. All of them had seen Turalyon flee the front lines of the Horde encampment with Lothar's broken sword held high, the symbol of a failed treaty.

And then, it began. From one side of the front lines to the other, Turalyon rode in his righteous fury, holding aloft the broken greatsword of his general, a symbol that all men knew. There was no speech he could have given that would have outweighed the cornucopia of fervor brought on by the sight of that broken blade. Every single soldier was ready to crusade against the Horde, to fight and die to end the Orc menace... All he did, all he needed to do, was hold up the broken hilt and cry, “For Lothar!” One by one and with great ardor, the men of Stormwind, of Stromgard and Kul Tiras, began to march forward across the hot, rocky expanse of the Burning Steppes.

And there, within the hot, oppressive mountains, the fate of man and Orc hung in the balance, a scale that would only move with victory by one side or the other. The initial assault was met with tremendous resistance. The Orcs had three major defensive fronts with which they could hold the Alliance, and they were by no means interested in a siege. Orcs of the Frostwolf and Blackrock clans hammered down on the Alliance front lines, a storm of spears and catapults wrestling their victims to the rocks. Yet, the Alliance charged on against the Horde line, bearing down again and again on their barricades.

After the Battle of Silvermoon, the leadership of the elves had seen the wisdom of bolstering the Alliance's ranks with their own soldiers, and Turalyon used the Elven auxiliaries to great effect. Led by Alleria, the Elven archers worked their own kind of magic – arrows doused in fire and fragile flechettes filled with combustible chemical agents cycloned down upon the Horde bulwarks, sparking fires all along and within the first line of defenses. Elven ballistae, machines capable of shooting tree-trunk-sized spears, blasted their massive armaments through the fortifications, toppling towers and bastions like the fall of Jericho. Their healers were instrumental in keeping the footmen in the fray, prolonging the initial onslaught well past the point when lesser armies would have fallen.



Yet, even with all of their efforts, the Alliance could not claim victory just yet. During that first day of conflict, Turalyon's forces had gouged a deep crevice within Doomhammer's forces, but the Horde's defenses had held firm. The Orcs were each mighty, and they had all the determination of a caged tiger fighting for its life. The sun set and the twilight cast long shadows across the Horde and Alliance's strongholds. It was clear to all that the battle would not be decided that day.

Nor was it ended the next. Instead, the battle raged for days, a tug of war with life-and-death consequences. The Alliance would push at dawn, fight and claw against the Horde's citadels and, as the moon rose, sit tensely behind their own bulwarks, fearful of a midnight rush. Sometimes, the Horde would take the offensive, stretching Doomhammer's long reach out into the field of battle. Always, though, the Alliance would push back. Orc grunts met soldiers and footmen with a clash of axes and longswords; their warlocks cast black magic in the sky only to be met with equal sorcery from Alliance wizards. The monstrously strong Ogres went toe to toe with the weaker but much more mobile horsemen of the Alliance. Troll spearmen, the few that were left, traded javelins for Elven arrows, and, above them all, the maddened red dragons fought tooth, claw and fireball with the Dwarven gryphon riders, whose lightning bolts rent dragonscale from bone. It was the bloodiest and most violent battle in the war, yet, every hour that passed, the Alliance slowly gained ground.

There was no single act of bravery that finally tilted the scales in the Alliance's favor, no great magical spell that ended the battle. Instead, it was the collective effort of the forces under Turalyon's command, the slow, sweating grind. The sand wore down the stone, cracking it's shell until the layers themselves gave way to the center. Each of Doomhammer's three defensive camps were crushed and set aflame. The troll spearmen were pierced; the grunts struck and cut down. The death knights fell to the holy fire of the Lightbringer's paladins, the souls of the indwelling warlocks sent to oblivion. The red dragons cried, closed their eyes and slipped from the air, released from their madness and torment. From the mountain itself sounded a cry, a deep trumpeting from Horde command: retreat, fall back, run for your lives.

With that piercing wail, the battle proper was finished. The Horde commanders forfeited Blackrock Spire, and the Orcs – no longer an army but a frenzied, terrified mob – fled in a frenzy. There was no disciplined retreat, just an egress of each Orc cluster as the units turned and sprinted away. The Horde commanders sent scouts into the mountains to warn the last of their forces at the Dark Portal, but then they too felt the Alliance's wrath. Those clusters of Orcs who chose to stay and die honorably were summarily cut down by the Alliance onslaught, while those who laid down their arms were chained and imprisoned. This was the fate of all who stayed behind, including the Doomhammer himself.



It was the end of the Horde. The massive force that had come through the Dark Portal in numbers greater than any army ever before was gone, the only remainders being the stragglers and the small army of clans that guarded the entrance to Draenor. Turalyon allowed his forces a few days to scour the Steppes for any signs of Horde troops that remained in the area. He erected prisons for the Orcs that had been taken prisoner after the battle, and he placed special protections around the Horde commanders. Then, he gathered his army for one final push, the last battle of the Second War. He had his target in mind. He was going to destroy the gate that linked his world with that of the Orcs, so that his homeland would never again have to face such an alien threat. He was going to break the Dark Portal.

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Publisher Note: When we left off last week, I thought for sure that this article would end in a cataclysmic event or some diabolic betrayal or something monumental that would save the Horde in order to keep the money pig that is the World of Warcraft going. How on earth are they going to keep the game going if the Horde has been defeated and imprisoned?

I guess we need to keep reading in order to find the answers to that question.

In the mean time, join us in the forums so we can talk about this. How do you think you would keep the plotline going post Alliance-Horde saga? -- Chris

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