The History of Warcraft

The Titans are colossal beings of pure Order who roam the cosmos ordering worlds and waking the nascent 'world-souls' - infant Titans - sleeping inside them. Azeroth holds the most powerful world-soul ever found, and that single fact drives nearly everything that follows.

Long before history, the Void-spawned Old Gods crashed into Azeroth and sank their tendrils through the whole planet, corrupting it toward madness. The Titans' servants - the Pantheon's keepers and the earthen - waged a brutal war and chained the Old Gods deep underground rather than risk killing them and destroying the world-soul with them.

The Pantheon's greatest champion, Sargeras, hunted demons across creation until he came to believe the Void would inevitably corrupt every ordered world. Despairing, he turned on his own kind, freed a prison of demons, and forged them into the Burning Legion - an endless army sworn to burn all life before the Void could claim it.

The night elves rose beside the Well of Eternity, a lake of raw arcane power at the heart of the single super-continent of Kalimdor. Their queen, Azshara, grew so drunk on that power that when Sargeras whispered to her, she agreed to tear open a portal and let the Burning Legion in.

The first great invasion nearly ended the world. A desperate alliance of night elves, dragons, and demigods fought the Legion's commanders Archimonde and Mannoroth to a standstill. When the Well was destroyed to sever the Legion's anchor, the backlash shattered Kalimdor - the Sundering - drowning most of it and leaving the continents and the churning Maelstrom in its place.

Azshara and her court were dragged beneath the sea and twisted into the serpentine naga. Illidan Stormrage secretly hoarded a vial of the Well's water and created a second one, an act that saw him imprisoned for ten thousand years - and set up his role in wars still to come.

On the distant world of Draenor, the shaman orc clans were manipulated by the warlock Gul'dan and drank the blood of the demon Mannoroth, binding their whole race to the Legion's bloodlust. Gul'dan opened the Dark Portal, a gateway to Azeroth, and the First War saw the orcish Horde burn the human kingdom of Stormwind to the ground.

The survivors fled north and rallied the human, dwarf, elf, and gnome nations into the Alliance of Lordaeron. The Second War pushed the Horde back, the Portal was destroyed, and the orcs were herded into internment camps. On the orcs' own side, the reckless reopening of portals tore Draenor apart, leaving the shattered ruin later known as Outland.

The Legion returned with a new weapon: the Lich King, a tormented spirit bound in ice in Northrend, who spread a plague that raised the dead as the Scourge. Prince Arthas Menethil of Lordaeron chased the plague into madness, purged his own city of Stratholme, took up the cursed runeblade Frostmourne, and murdered his father to serve the Lich King.

Arthas paved the way for the demon Archimonde to invade Kalimdor. There the sundered peoples - Thrall's new Horde, the humans of Jaina Proudmoore, and the ancient night elves - united at the last moment. At the Battle of Mount Hyjal they lured Archimonde to the World Tree Nordrassil, where the night elves unleashed its stored power and destroyed him.

In the aftermath Arthas traveled to Northrend and merged with the spirit of the Lich King atop the Frozen Throne, becoming a single, greater terror. Thrall founded the orc homeland of Durotar, and the stage was set for the world players would enter.

With the Legion beaten back, the Horde and Alliance settled into a tense cold peace and began to rebuild. This is the Azeroth players first explored: a world of frontier towns, unquiet borders, and dungeons full of stirring old enemies.

The threats of this age were remnants and the deep past clawing back up: the fire lord Ragnaros and his cult under the mountain, the black dragon Nefarian's experiments, the death cult raising Naxxramas, and - most tellingly - the Old God C'Thun waking beneath the desert of Ahn'Qiraj. The buried gods were not as chained as the Titans had hoped.

The Dark Portal flared back to life and armies marched into Outland, the shattered husk of Draenor now floating in the demonic Twisting Nether. There the exiled Illidan ruled, hunted by his own former allies, while the blood elf prince Kael'thas and the naga Lady Vashj served the Legion's schemes.

Two peoples joined the war for good: the blood elves, desperate for a new source of arcane power after the Scourge shattered their homeland, and the draenei, refugees who had fled the orcs' corruption across the stars. The age ended at the Sunwell, where the Legion lord Kil'jaeden was pulled back through a portal at the moment of his arrival.

The Lich King stirred the Scourge to war, and both factions sailed to the frozen continent of Northrend to end him. The campaign climbed all the way to Icecrown Citadel, the Lich King's fortress of bone and ice at the top of the world.

At the Frozen Throne, Arthas was finally cut down. Because the Scourge can never be left leaderless - a world without a Lich King means the undead run wild - the noble Bolvar Fordragon, burned but unbroken, took up the Helm of Domination to become a new, watchful jailer for the dead.

Deathwing the Destroyer - once Neltharion, the black Dragon Aspect meant to guard the earth, long ago driven insane by the Old Gods - erupted from the world's core. His emergence, the Shattering, tore open zones across Azeroth and reshaped the map players had known for years.

The other Dragon Aspects, their powers fading, made a final stand against him. To land the killing blow they poured the last of their draconic might into a weapon, ending Deathwing but also ending the age of the all-powerful dragonflights - a sacrifice that echoes for expansions to come.

A lost continent, Pandaria, emerged from the mists that had hidden it since the Sundering. Its peace guarded a dark secret: the Sha, physical manifestations of negative emotion - doubt, hatred, despair - left behind by an Old God the pandaren had buried long ago.

Warchief Garrosh Hellscream, Thrall's chosen successor, turned the Horde into an engine of conquest, destroyed the city of Theramore with a mana bomb, and tried to weaponize an Old God's heart. His own people and the Alliance stormed Orgrimmar together to depose him - the first crack in the idea that the Horde and Alliance could only ever be enemies.

Awaiting execution, Garrosh escaped into the past of an alternate Draenor and stopped the orcs from ever drinking demon blood. Free of the Legion's curse but armed with modern war machines, these clans became the Iron Horde and reopened the Dark Portal to conquer Azeroth.

The champions of Azeroth were pulled back through to that untamed world to break the Iron Horde at its source. But the warlock Gul'dan slipped free and rededicated the clans to the Burning Legion, summoning Archimonde once more - a direct prelude to the invasion everyone had feared.

The Legion invaded in full, and the assault on the Broken Shore cost the factions dearly. In answer, Azeroth's champions claimed legendary artifact weapons and carried the fight from the Broken Isles all the way to Argus, the Legion's home world, where the imprisoned Pantheon finally struck back and bound Sargeras himself.

In his last act of spite before he was chained, Sargeras drove his enormous sword into Azeroth, stabbing the wounded world-soul through the desert of Silithus. The golden blood that welled up - Azerite - became the most sought-after substance on the planet, and the wound itself set the whole next era in motion.

The scramble for Azerite and a horrific act - the burning of the night elf World Tree, Teldrassil, on the new Warchief Sylvanas's order - plunged the Horde and Alliance back into all-out war, drawing in the naval kingdom of Kul Tiras and the resurrected empire of Zandalar.

Behind the faction bloodshed, the last free Old God, N'Zoth the Corruptor, escaped its prison and tried to remake the world in madness before it was struck down. Sylvanas revealed her war was only a means to an end, betrayed the Horde, and tore open the sky to the realm of the dead - fleeing to a master no one had yet seen.

With the veil between life and death torn open, Azeroth's heroes followed Sylvanas into the Shadowlands - the realms where every soul is sorted and sent on: the honored halls of Bastion, the war-forges of Maldraxxus, the dreaming forest of Ardenweald, and the gothic tribunal of Revendreth. Beneath them all lay the Maw, a prison for the truly damned.

The true enemy was the Jailer, Zovaal, an exiled cosmic being who had corrupted the afterlife's design and schemed to unmake reality and remake it under his absolute control. A grand alliance of the living and the dead - and a redeemed Sylvanas - finally cast him down and set the broken cycle of death to rights.

The Dragon Isles, the dragons' ancestral home, woke after ten thousand years and called the dragonflights back. The expansion turned inward and hopeful after so much cosmic war: rebuilding, reconnecting, and the awakening of the dracthyr, a created dragon-people who became the game's Evokers.

The threat came from the Primalists and the elemental Incarnates, led by the storm dragon Raszageth and the fire-mad Fyrakk, who rejected the Titans' order over dragonkind. In answering them, the Aspects came to terms with their diminished power and chose a future led by mortals and dragons together - a deliberate bridge into the saga that follows.

The current chapter opens the Worldsoul Saga, the trilogy that pays off the oldest thread in the story - Azeroth's world-soul. Strange visions and a Void assault drive the heroes deep underground into Khaz Algar, through the nerubian kingdoms and the machine-cities the Titans left behind, chasing an enemy that has been whispering since the very beginning.

The manipulator is Xal'atath, a herald of the Void turning the Old Gods' old ambition into a coordinated plan to claim the waking world-soul. From here the saga builds toward its next acts - a Void-shadowed assault on the high elves' homeland, and a final reckoning in the frozen north where the Titans' greatest secrets, and Azeroth's fate, still wait.