My Azeroth Life

Zul’jarra spat on the stones of Numazon and did not bother to wipe her tusks. Behind her, the last of the Witherbark captives were limping out of the crypt into a fog so thick a man could lose his own hand in it, and in front of her lay what was left of Ritualist Zongha. She hoped, she said, that whatever loa waited for the Vilebranch in the afterlife would swallow them whole and grind them with its back teeth. Burrly did not argue. He had seen what was down there.

The mist had promised to keep, and it had. Burrly came back to Shadebasin Watch at dusk, where the pines of Zul’Aman lean over the trail like old men listening at a door, and took up the two promises he had left with. Kul’amara the Fierce had been right about the fog. It had not drifted in off any river. It had been laid down over Numazon like a blanket over a body, Vilebranch magic, so that no one on the outside would see what was being done to the Witherbark on the inside.

Every night since the long walk out of the Barrens, somebody in the Cudsong family has sung to the kodo.

Not loudly, and not always well. But every night on the grass below Bloodhoof Village, when An’she has gone down behind the mesas and Mu’sha has opened her pale eye over Mulgore, a Cudsong sits on an upturned water bucket and sings low to the herd. The great beasts fold their legs, settle into the grass and chew over the day, and the song rolls over them like a blanket. The chronicler has heard it. It is the kind of music that keeps several tons of nervous animal from deciding, in the dark, that the plains wolves are closer than they are.

This is the story of three calves raised beside that song, and how they came to walk up the road to Camp Narache with a hammer, a bow and a great many questions.

The tauren say An’she was wounded by the shadows long ago, and that the sun still bleeds a little every morning to warn the world that dawn is coming. The Sunwalkers greet that wound with drums. They gather in the dark before first light, beat out the yeena’e, and call on the ancestors who died saving lives to help the sun climb.

Somebody has to feed them afterward.

For years that somebody was a broad young tauren who kept the smoke pit behind the Sunwalker camp, rising long before the drummers to bank the coals so that when An’she cleared the horizon there would be meat ready for the faithful. The Sunwalkers, who are a pious order and not a subtle one, started calling the pit-keeper Dawnbrisket. The name stuck the way smoke sticks to fur. You can wash it all you like.

The ledge at the top of the Temple of Akil’zon has no railing, and the wind up there has no manners. Zul’jarra stood at its edge with her eyes closed, trying to remember a lesson from her childhood. The eagle loa, her uncle used to say, is the loa of victory, but also of oaths and conviction. Then the trial came clear, and it was the simplest one in the world. Jump.

Burrly jumped. The chronicler will not pretend to know what a Kul Tiran thinks on the way down. Whatever he thought, the mountain did not have him.

The evening had begun in a city that was already lost. Burrly came back to the Altar of Malacrass, where the frightened of Atal’Aman had been told to gather, and spent the dusk running errands for a people who had spent centuries killing men who looked like him. He went looking for the missing elders, and among them found old Kinduru, the loa speaker, who would not leave until he had the Hash’ey Staff in hand. He proved his worth to Amani who did not want to be impressed. He took up arms blessed by the Light, which in a troll city is its own kind of joke. At Ragemaw Terrace he beat out the fires the Twilight’s Blade had set in the last of the Amani lightwood, because without that wood there would be no ballista and without the ballista there would be no shot at Mor’duun.

The pamphlets were the first thing to burn. They always are. Laotou walked into Tranquillien at dusk to find the Twilight’s Blade nailing its gospel to every post and doorframe in town, and the monk, who has never once been persuaded by a pamphlet, set about tearing them down.

The cult had been living here a long while, it turned out. Their cover was blown now, so they had stopped pretending and started fighting in the open, which is the only honest thing a cult ever does. Voidlings crawled out from between the houses. Obelisks hummed in the square. There were supply crates to smash and effigies to break, and Laotou broke them, one after another, with the patient rhythm of someone sweeping a floor.

Arator stood among the wreckage and would not let the town fall. The governor had made his terms plain: join the Blade or be executed. So while the fighting went on, the Pandaren went door to door pulling frightened elves out of the line of fire. Healers are good at this part. Nobody writes songs about it, but nobody who was carried out of a burning house forgets who did the carrying.

WoW Forever launches on November 4, 2026, and name reservation opens just before that. Like a lot of you, I’ve spent the beta weeks reading everyone’s “here’s my main” posts and wondering which way the crowd is going. Horde or Alliance? PvP or RP? How many Undead Paladins is Azeroth about to get?

So I went and counted. I read through public posts on X and Bluesky from the start of the beta to now and tallied what people said they’re planning to play. I kept the two networks separate, because it turns out they really don’t agree.

Faction (133 of 226 people named one)

Ruleset (31 people named one)

Race (98 named one)

Class, with and without the giveaway replies

The giveaway mostly boosts Hunter, Mage and Warlock. Leave it out and Paladin’s lead grows, with Druid in second place.

The Gates of Zul’Aman have kept elves out for longer than most kingdoms have kept anything. That evening they opened for a Kul Tiran who smelled of tar and salt, and the trolls on the other side were not sure whether to thank him or count their silverware.

It began at the Amani Pass, where Lady Liadrin and her Blood Knights hold the road between Eversong and the troll lands. The Amani had surrendered the lightwood they took from the elves, but Zul’jan, who led that raid, never went home. He lingered at the gates with his warriors, and Liadrin, who had run out of patience with him, sent Burrly to try diplomacy instead. The talk was cut short when a Void beast came howling out of the shadows, and the matter of who was angrier at whom was set aside so everyone could kill it. Burrly helped. When the dust settled, the elves learned that Zul’jan does not lead the Amani at all. His sister does. Her name is Zul’jarra, granddaughter of Zul’jin himself, and Liadrin said, with an elf’s gift for understatement, that this might be worse.

The Void came for the Sunwell again, the way it always does, and this time it brought a general. Gladius Slaurna held the battlements of Parhelion Plaza with Voidcallers at his feet, ready to feed them to the dark for a little more strength. Then a Kul Tiran came down the stairs, smelling faintly of tar and harbor, and the general’s evening got considerably worse.

Burrly had started humbly enough. A quick crossing to the Trading Post in Stormwind City, where Tawny Seabraid hands out each month’s tender. Then back to Silvermoon, where Magister Astalor Bloodsworn keeps a hunt table in his sanctum and a list of names. The first he gave Burrly was Grothoz, the Burning Shadow: an ogre of the Twilight’s Blade and, by Astalor’s account, the brains of a particularly stupid cabal. The magister calls it Prey. The elves have a gift for making murder sound like a hobby.

This post is also on the Nine Point Labs blog.

If you’ve been reading the Chronicler’s tales here, you may have wondered where they come from. And if you’ve seen the new My Azeroth Life podcast, you may have wondered who is doing the voices. This is the behind-the-scenes post.

The short answer: every story here starts with something I really did in World of Warcraft. AI does the writing and the narration, and I read every post and listen to every episode before it goes up. The whole site, podcast included, is published by folderblog, the small blog engine I make at Nine Point Labs.

While I play, an addon I wrote called StoryTracker quietly takes notes. It records the quests I pick up and turn in, every zone I walk into, levels gained, deaths (where, and what did it), rare and better loot, reputation changes, dungeon bosses, profession skill-ups, gold earned and spent, notable kills, groups and guilds, and how long each session lasted.

Blizzard handed out beta stats for WoW Forever, and mine read less like a report card and more like evidence.

30 characters played, 99th percentile. Ninety-nine percent of beta testers showed more restraint than I did. In my defense, every class looked fun, every race has a great starting zone, and the character creation screen is right there.

107 levels gained, 90th percentile. Spread across 30 characters, that comes to about three and a half levels each. A lot of them never made it past the first quest hub. They live on in my character list, forever level 4 and full of promise.

128 boars killed, 79th percentile. If you were a boar in Durotar or Dun Morogh during the beta, I’m sorry. Mostly. You dropped good meat.

The scarab was fat with something that wasn’t its own. That was the first thing anyone would have noticed, if anyone had been watching besides the chronicler. An Engorged Scarab, the elves of Eversong call them, which is a polite word for a beetle that has been drinking from the wrong well. It found Laotou three minutes past the gates of Silvermoon City, opened something it should not have been able to open, and the monk bled out on the gold road under the gold leaves.

So the evening began with a corpse. Most good stories do.

The chronicler would like to say the Pandaren rose with a vow of vengeance. Laotou rose the way healers always rise, mildly embarrassed, brushing leaves off the robe, and went back to work. There is a particular humility in a monk who keeps everyone else alive and then loses an argument with an insect. Laotou did not dwell on it. Pandaren rarely dwell. They save that for tea.

The candy bucket at the inn in Silvermoon City was the one honest thing in the city that night. Laotou reached in, came out with a fistful of Hallow’s End treats, and was congratulated for it as though a war had been won. Trick or Treat, the elves called it. The chronicler has seen grown heroes cheered for less, but not often.

It had been a wandering sort of evening before that. The monk began it in the Bazaar beneath the Sanctum of Light, and within a minute had a new name stitched under the old one: Azeroth Morning Radio. A guild, then. Laotou joined at the rank of Commoner, which is the most truthful rank any guild has ever handed out. Everyone starts at the bottom of the hall, sweeping. Pandaren do not mind sweeping. It is a close cousin to meditation.