World of Warcraft: Before the Storm

Chapter One

Stormwind

Rain fell on the somber throngs making their way to Lion s Rest as if even the sky wept for those who had sacrificed their lives to defeat the Burning Legion. Anduin Wrynn, king of Stormwind, stood a few steps back from the podium where he soon would be addressing mourners of all the Alliance races. He watched them silently as they arrived, moved to see them, loath to speak to them. He suspected that this service honoring the fallen would be the most difficult he had endured in his relatively short life not just for the other mourners but for himself; it would be held in the shadow of his father s empty tomb.

Anduin had attended far, far too many ceremonies honoring the casualties of war. As he did each time ­as, he believed, every good leader did ­he hoped and prayed that this one would be the last.

But it never was.

Somehow there was always another enemy. Sometimes the enemy was new, a group springing up seemingly out of nowhere. Or something ancient and long-­chained or buried, supposedly neutralized, rising after eons of silence to terrorize and destroy innocents. Other times the enemy was bleakly familiar but no less a threat for the intimacy of the knowledge.

How had his father met those challenges time after time? Anduin wondered. How had his grandfather? Now was a time of relative quiet, but the next enemy, the next challenge, doubtless would arrive all too soon.

It had not been all that long since Varian Wrynn s death, but for the great man s son it felt like a lifetime. Varian had fallen in the first real push of this latest war against the Legion, apparently slain as much by betrayal from a supposed ally, Sylvanas Windrunner, as by the monstrous, fel-­fueled creatures vomited forth from the Twisting Nether. Another account from someone Anduin trusted contested that version, suggesting that Sylvanas had had no other choice. Anduin was not sure what to believe. Thoughts of the cunning and treacherous leader of the

Christie Golden is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of more than fifty novels and more than a dozen short stories in the fields of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Her media tie-in works include launching the Ravenloft line in 1991 with Vampire of the Mists, more than a dozen Star Trek novels, several movie novelizations, the Warcraft novels Rise of the Horde, Lord of the Clans, Arthas: Rise of the Lich King, and War Crimes, Assassin s Creed: Heresy, as well as Star Wars: Dark Disciple and the Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi novels Omen, Allies, and Ascension. In 2017, she was awarded the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers Faust Award and named a Grandmaster in recognition of over a quarter century of writing.

This is easily the best book in the World of Warcraft series, and I don t say that lightly. . . . It s so much more than a tie-in novel. . . . It s a beautiful book. Blizzard Watch