World of Warcraft: Chronicle Volume 1 (7 page)

Y’Shaarj was more powerful than the keepers had expected. It poisoned the minds of the titan-forged, drawing out their fears and darkening their thoughts.

The
Pantheon grew concerned that the Old God would overwhelm their servants. Despite the risk of harming the world, they decided to take direct action.
Aman’Thul himself reached down through Azeroth’s stormy skies and took hold of Y’Shaarj’s writhing body. With a heave of his mighty arm, he tore the Old God from the crust of the world. In that moment, Y’Shaarj’s gargantuan bulk was ripped apart. The immensity of the Old God’s death rattle shattered mountaintops and obliterated hundreds of titan-forged where they stood.

Y’Shaarj was dead, but its tendrils had bored more deeply through Azeroth than Aman’Thul had ever imagined. In excising the Old God from the world, he had inadvertently ripped an eternal wound in Azeroth’s surface. Volatile arcane energies—the lifeblood of the nascent titan—erupted from the scar and roiled out across the world.

Horrified by this turn of events, the Pantheon realized they could not risk killing the other
Old Gods in such a manner. The malignant creatures had embedded themselves so deep into the world that tearing them out would destroy Azeroth itself.

The Pantheon knew that the only course of action was to imprison the Old Gods where they lay and contain their evil forever. It would be a difficult task, but it would be possible with the aid of the keepers. At the Pantheon’s behest, the titan-forged devised a plan to shatter the last vestiges of the Black Empire forever. They would battle each of the Old Gods directly. Once they had weakened the creatures,
Archaedas would create subterranean chambers to contain them.
Mimiron would then fashion colossal machineries to lock the Old Gods in place. When this work was done,
Loken would imbue each prison with a great enchantment that would neutralize the Old Gods’ evil.

With their plans formed, the titan-forged began their campaign. Great battles tore across the land as the titan-forged fought their way southeast to the bastion of
N’Zoth. After overwhelming the Old God, the keepers used their powers to encase the creature in an underground prison.

Next, the titan-forged marched southwest to the sprawling temple city that had grown around the third Old God,
C’Thun. The keepers and their allies purged swarms of n’raqi before assaulting the Old God itself and subduing it. Much as they had done with N’Zoth, the keepers entombed the entity beneath the earth and constructed a prison of their own devising over its form.

Only one Old God remained, the vicious and cunning
Yogg-Saron. It would not fall so easily. As the titan-forged closed in on Yogg-Saron’s crumbling northern stronghold, the Old God unleashed the greatest of its generals: the
C’Thraxxi.

The C’Thraxxi were monstrous war bringers, larger and more resilient than other n’raqi. They possessed great strength and brutal intellect, and their dark powers and maledictions could drive even the titan-forged to madness.

The giant, tentacle-faced C’Thraxxi whipped the remnants of the Black Empire into a frenzy. They swarmed the titan-forged on all sides, thinning their ranks. By the time the keepers and their allies reached Yogg-Saron, their forces were greatly diminished. They found that they lacked the strength of numbers to defeat the Old God. Yogg-Saron would have destroyed the titan-forged completely if not for the heroic efforts of
Odyn.

Although scarred and battered by war, Odyn summoned his waning strength and inspired the titan-forged to launch a counterattack. He commanded Loken to weave a grand illusion spell that forced the C’Thraxxi to see themselves—and even Yogg-Saron—as the enemy. As the Black Empire’s forces turned on one another, Odyn swooped in to cut down his confused foes. The other titan-forged followed his lead, and together they succeeded in pacifying Yogg-Saron. As they had done with C’Thun and N’Zoth, the keepers buried the entity beneath the earth, locking it away in a monolithic enchanted prison.

F
or the first time in Azeroth’s history, a tentative peace settled over the world. The titan-forged had banished the chaotic elemental lords to another plane of existence. They had also purged the Black Empire and muted the terrible power of the Old Gods. Against all odds, Azeroth had been saved.

But there was much work to be done. The keepers’ most pressing concern was the horrific scar left behind when Aman’Thul had torn Y’Shaarj from the world’s crust. A constant stream of volatile arcane energy bled from the colossal rift, lashing out across the world. The keepers knew that, if left unattended, these energies would consume Azeroth over time.

The keepers labored day and night, crafting magic wards around the gaping wound to stanch the escaping lifeblood. Eventually, the tumultuous energies calmed and settled into balance. All that remained of the scar was an immense lake of scintillating energy that the keepers would call the “
Well of Eternity.” Thereafter, the power of this wondrous fount would be infused in the ailing world, helping life to take root and bloom across the globe.

With the wound healed, the keepers sought to strengthen Azeroth’s nascent
world-soul and stabilize its life force. To do so, Archaedas and Mimiron combined their powers to craft the
Forge of Wills and the
Forge of Origination. These two extraordinary machines would work in tandem, infusing Azeroth’s slumbering spirit with cosmic energies. The Forge of Wills would be embedded in the northern reaches of the world, and it would shape the world-soul’s budding sentience. The Forge of Origination would be installed in the southern reaches of Azeroth, and it would regulate the rhythms of the deep earth and fortify the world-soul’s form.

After these two machines were constructed, the keepers went to work. Odyn oversaw efforts to install the Forge of Wills within a vast northern mountain range that would become known as
the
Storm Peaks. The
Pantheon appointed Odyn the
Prime Designate for his valorous deeds in the war with the Old Gods. The task of watching over Yogg-Saron’s prison and maintaining the Forge of Wills would fall to him. Odyn and the other keepers immediately began building the great fortress of
Ulduar to serve as the main bastion of the titan-forged on Azeroth. The fortress would house not only Yogg-Saron’s prison, but also the Forge of Wills and other machineries of the keepers’ devising.

The Forge of Wills also served another purpose: it could draw on the life essence of Azeroth itself, giving shape and sentience to creatures of living stone and metal—not only giants, but other types of titan-forged as well. This new generation of titan-forged would help the keepers bring order to the world.

As the Forge of Wills churned out these new titan-forged, Highkeeper
Ra led an expedition to install the Forge of Origination in the south. He was accompanied by a number of stone-skinned creatures recently wrought from the Forge of Wills: the
anubisath giants, the leonine
tol’vir, and the indomitable
mogu.

En route, Ra discovered that remnants of Y’Shaarj’s corporeal form lay strewn across the southern reaches of the world. When Aman’Thul had ripped the Old God from Azeroth, pieces of the entity had fallen back to the surface, infusing the land with evil. The largest intact piece of Y’Shaarj was the Old God’s icy heart, a mass of diseased flesh seething with
Void energies.

Rather than destroy the heart, Ra built a subterranean vault to contain it and neutralize its evil. He, along with the other keepers, knew that studying the heart could help them understand the nature of the Old Gods and other Void creatures. Ra charged his mogu followers with watching over the Vault of Y’Shaarj. They would guard and care for the surrounding land as well.

Ra then continued his expedition and traveled west. There, he and his followers embedded the Forge of Origination in the land. The earth rumbled beneath Ra’s feet as the gargantuan machine churned to life. The highkeeper soon sensed that the twin forges were working in synergy, sending healing energies through the heart of the world. Ra and his followers erected a sprawling fortress around the Forge of Origination. This site was called
Uldum, and it would become the southernmost base of operations for the keepers.

Much like the Forge of Wills, the Forge of Origination would serve a dual purpose. In the event that Azeroth’s flora and fauna succumbed to corruption, the incredible energies stored inside the great machine could be unleashed to eradicate all life on the world, allowing it to start anew.

Highkeeper Ra commanded some of the tol’vir and anubisaths to safeguard Uldum forever. He and the rest of his servants marched northwest into a land later known as Silithus. This arid and inhospitable region was home to the subterranean prison that housed the Old God C’Thun. Ra and his allies labored to expand on the prison, ultimately constructing the mighty fortress of
Ahn’Qiraj. After the task was done, the highkeeper ordered his remaining titan-forged to safeguard the stronghold.

Ra himself, seeing his work completed, would spend the following ages roaming the southern regions of Azeroth, distantly observing his titan-forged and ensuring that they upheld their sacred charges.

W
ith the twin forges embedded in Azeroth, the keepers moved to reshape the surface of the world.

To this end, they called on the new generation of servants wrought from the Forge of Wills.

Each of these loyal and mighty titan-forged would play a different role in ordering and protecting the world. The craggy, kindhearted
earthen would specialize in crafting mountains and carving out the deep places of the world. The clockwork
mechagnomes, designed by Keeper
Mimiron, would help build and maintain the keepers’ extraordinary machineries. The stone-skinned mogu would dig out the myriad rivers and waterways of Azeroth. The task of safeguarding many of the keepers’ holdings would fall to two different groups of constructs: the iron-skinned
vrykul and the chiseled tol’vir. To shape the environment, the keepers also conscripted the powerful stone and
sea giants. They would roam the breadth of Azeroth, lifting towering mountain ranges and dredging out the fathomless seas.

As the titan-forged began shaping Azeroth, Keeper
Freya set out to populate the world with organic life. To do so, she crafted the
Emerald Dream, a vast and ever-shifting dimension of spirits and nature magic. This ethereal plane acted as a mirror image of Azeroth, helping regulate the evolutionary path of the world’s flora and fauna. A confluence of spirits and strange, otherworldly beings populated the Dream, frolicking in the surreal paradise that was their home. The mystical Dream defied mortal perceptions of reality. Concepts like time and distance held no sway within this realm of intangibles. A day on the physical world could feel like decades in the Dream.

Freya then wandered the world, searching for areas where the
Well of Eternity’s energies had coalesced. These regions created optimal conditions for the development of new flora and fauna. Freya shaped immense enclaves of nature at these places of power. She molded life of astounding diversity, seeding it around the world. The sites where Freya had done her work were located at the polar extremes of the world. They included regions that would later become known as Un’Goro Crater, Sholazar Basin, and the Vale of Eternal Blossoms.