The war in Grizzly Hills started the way wars between the Alliance and Horde always started — over something that was simultaneously trivial and not trivial at all.
Lumber. Minerals. The practical resources that two military campaigns running simultaneously on the same continent needed in quantities that the continent's available supply could not comfortably provide to both.
Leylin had been tracking the resource tension in the Grizzly Hills region since before the Wrathgate, noting in his intelligence summaries the gathering quality of two factions that were cooperating against a common enemy while competing for the same substrate — the unstable configuration of people who need each other and resent the need simultaneously.
The Wrathgate had resolved that instability by destroying it entirely. What replaced cooperation was war, and it arrived in the Grizzly Hills with the ugly momentum of a conflict that had been building pressure for months and had finally found a context in which the pressure could express itself.
The Alliance went for the trappers — the human communities scattered through the hills whose knowledge of the terrain and whose existing supply networks made them natural allies for any force trying to establish a foothold in the region.
The Horde responded to this by attacking those same human communities, which had the ruthless logic of denying your opponent a resource by destroying the resource rather than simply outcompeting for it.
Leylin's reports to Alleria about the Grizzly Hills fighting carried a frustrated quality that his reports about the Scourge engagements had not contained — the particular frustration of watching capable people expend themselves against each other when the actual enemy was still sitting in its citadel, watching, calculating.
He sent a separate note to Jaina, briefer and more direct: Grizzly Hills is on fire. Not from the Scourge. Talk to Thrall if there is still a channel through which talking to Thrall is possible.
He did not know if the channel existed. He sent the note anyway. Arcturis brought the first indication that something stranger than faction warfare was happening in the hills.
The spirit bear had been ranging through the Grizzly Hills region since before the Wrathgate, maintaining the ambient intelligence coverage that Leylin's monitoring network provided for every region in Northrend where the situation was sufficiently active to warrant it.
In the days following the Wrathgate, Leylin finally arrived there and he saw the destruction caused by the Forsaken's betrayal. Corpses from both factions littered across the area.
After observing the area, Leylin continued onwards to Icecrown and he received new intelligence from his magical network.
A weird situation that which Leylin struggled to organize into something he could precisely interpret — not the clean, identifiable character of Scourge activity or the equally identifiable character of faction military engagement, but something older and stranger and wrong in a way that sat differently from the wrongness of necromantic saturation.
He spent two evenings trying to read the ambient impression more precisely before he identified the specific quality he was encountering.
Worgen. He had knowledge of worgen — had assembled, across five years of careful monitoring of Northrend's various elements, an understanding of the worgen as a phenomenon connected to the druidic traditions of Kalimdor and to specific events in Gilneas that had reached him through the intelligence channels as fragmentary, partial accounts.
What he understood was that the worgen curse was real, that it transformed its bearers in ways that made them something other than simply humans with enhanced characteristics, and that the transformation was connected to something significantly older than the current crisis.
Finding their presence in the Grizzly Hills, in numbers sufficient for Arcturis to register the ambient quality of it across multiple circuits through the region, was not what he had expected the hills' intelligence to produce.
He filed it carefully and continued monitoring while on his way to Icecrown. The trappers were the key that unlocked the fuller picture.
Roanauk's network, which maintained contacts closer to the Grizzly Hills' human communities than Leylin's own monitoring covered directly, started returning accounts of specific trapper individuals behaving in ways that the accounts' sources — Taunka hunters familiar enough with the hills' communities to notice the changes — described as wrong without being able to specify what wrong meant precisely.
Leylin was beginning to understand what it meant. The Wolfcult arrived in the intelligence picture as a name before it arrived as a fully understood organization — mentioned in a report from a Horde contact who had been investigating the strange behavior of trapper communities in the hills' northern reaches, who had found evidence of organized activity centered on something ancient and blood-soaked that the local geography was only beginning to reveal to outside eyes.
He sent what he had to both Alleria and Jaina with careful framing of intelligence that was incomplete but significant enough to transmit before it was complete — noting that something was organizing the worgen presence in the Grizzly Hills, that it was connected to the trapper communities in ways that suggested infiltration rather than simple proximity, and that whatever was organizing it had a relationship to the Scourge's overall operation that was not yet clear but that should probably be assumed to exist until evidence demonstrated otherwise.
The response from Jaina came back quickly: Arugal. He recognized the name.
Archmage Arugal — the mage who had summoned the worgen from the Emerald Dream decades ago in an attempt to create a weapon against the Scourge, who had instead lost control of his creation and had been consumed by it in ways that were the specific, cautionary account that every mage who had ever read the historical record of Dalaran's early experiments with the worgen knew.
The man had been slain. He should have remained slain. He's been raised, Jaina wrote. On Arthas's orders. We're receiving reports that confirm it. He's the Shade of Arugal now — whatever that means for someone who was already half-consumed by what he summoned in life.
It meant, Leylin thought, that whatever Arugal had been capable of in life, death and the Lich King's enhancing touch had made it both more powerful and more completely directed.
A mage who had lost control of the worgen curse when alive was now, as an undead shade, controlling it with the cold, absolute precision that the Lich King's authority imposed on everything that served it.
The Wolfcult was Arugal's instrument. The trapper communities were the Wolfcult's recruitment pool. And the whole structure was pointed at adding a worgen force to the Lich King's available assets at exactly the moment when the Scourge's conventional assets had suffered significant losses through the ongoing campaign.
Bloodmoon Isle arrived in the intelligence picture in the third week after the Wrathgate, and it arrived with the quality of a destination — the Wolfcult's center, the place where Arugal's greatest lieutenants had gathered and from which the organization's influence radiated outward through the hills.
The combined operations that followed — Alliance and Horde agents, operating separately in the hills because the Grizzly Hills war had not produced the cooperative relationship that the earlier campaign phases had achieved, but converging on the same destination through the shared logic of two parties who had independently reached the same conclusion about where the problem was centered — had a quality that Leylin found simultaneously encouraging and melancholy.
Encouraging because the two factions, even in the middle of actively fighting each other, retained the practical intelligence to recognize when the Lich King's work needed to be addressed regardless of the inter-faction fighting.
Melancholy because the recognition was producing parallel independent operations rather than the coordinated combined effort that the same intelligence had produced before the Wrathgate had destroyed the trust that combination required.
They could still identify the same enemy. They could no longer fight it together.
The combat that occurred on Bloodmoon Isle reached Leylin through the monitoring network as a series of discrete, dramatic magical events — the signatures of champions from both factions engaging Arugal's lieutenants in the kind of encounter that produced the quality of magical output that his sensors flagged as extraordinary even within the broader context of the Northrend campaign's ongoing operations.
Not army-scale engagement. The concentrated, high-intensity quality of small numbers of extremely capable individuals against something that was powerful enough to have warranted those numbers being the ones sent rather than larger, less select forces.
He tracked each event as it registered. The lieutenants fell. One by one, with the specific, accumulated weight of an organization being dismantled from its command structure downward, the Wolfcult's leadership was removed from the equation.
And then Arugal himself. The Shade of Arugal's destruction registered in Leylin's monitoring network as something that his sensors required several minutes to fully process — not because the event was difficult to detect, but because what an undead shade of a mage who had been saturated with worgen-adjacent power, raised specifically by the Lich King and enhanced by the death's specific, augmenting touch on something already significant, produced when it was finally destroyed was a magical release that his instruments had no prior reference point for.
He watched the readings settle over the course of twenty minutes, parsing what they were telling him about the nature of what had just been ended.
The Wolfcult's organizational structure did not survive the removal of its leadership. This was the expected result — the cult had been built around Arugal's organizing will and the Lich King's direction of that will toward a particular purpose, and without Arugal the cult's remaining members were left with the structure of an organization whose organizing principle had been removed.
Some of the transformed trappers, by later accounts that reached Leylin through Roanauk's network, retained their curse in ways that the cult's destruction had not resolved. But they were no longer organized, no longer directed, no longer the Lich King's instrument in the hills.
The threat was over. He added the Wolfcult's resolution to the intelligence summary he was building and noted the strategic implication that the outcome carried — not simply the removal of a regional threat, but the confirmation of a pattern in how the Lich King was responding to the campaign's pressure.
Arthas was not simply defending Icecrown and allowing the peripheral losses to accumulate. He was actively building new instruments, raising new servants, attempting to create complications that would slow the coalition's progress and extend the timeline of the campaign.
The Shade of Arugal had been one such attempt. Anub'arak had been another. The assault on the dragon shrines had been another. Each one addressed, at cost, by the forces opposing the Lich King.
But each one was also evidence of Arthas working. The citadel was not simply sitting and waiting. The intelligence inside it was actively making decisions, deploying resources, responding to the campaign's pressure with the cold, calculated creativity of something that had a great deal to work with and was not yet close to running out.
The Grizzly Hills war continued after the Wolfcult's defeat, because the resources the two factions were fighting over remained contested regardless of the shared threat they had both addressed.
This was the dispiriting quality of inter-faction conflict — it did not pause to acknowledge the achievements of the periods when the factions operated in the same direction.
He sent a final note to Jaina about it, more candid than his formal intelligence summaries allowed.
The hills will keep burning as long as both factions need the same timber and neither has enough. This is not a problem that removing the Wolfcult solved. It is a different problem, and the only resolution available to it is either a negotiated allocation — which requires trust that the Wrathgate has made unavailable — or one faction prevailing over the other, which wastes resources that both of them need for Icecrown. I don't know what the correct answer is. I am noting it because noting it is what I can do from here.
Jaina's response was brief: I know. I'm trying. Keep watching.
In the a cave somewhere in Icecrown, that evening, he sat with Arcturis for a longer time, the bear's enormous form settled beside him in the companionable quality that five years of shared work had developed between them.
He thought about the Grizzly Hills — about the trappers who had been transformed against their will by a cult built from an archmage's raised shade, about the Alliance and Horde soldiers bleeding over lumber in the same hills where those trappers had been struggling with something considerably darker.
About Bloodmoon Isle, cleaned now of its leadership, the dark organizational structure dismantled by the combined if separate efforts of two factions that trusted each other too little to work together and understood each other well enough to reach the same conclusion independently.
He thought about Arthas, who had made the Shade of Arugal and had watched it fail the way every other peripheral deployment had failed, and who was sitting in the citadel, calculating, and was not going to stop calculating simply because the calculations had produced failures.
The cold pressed in from the north with the specific, patient quality that had been pressing since the first morning he had stood at this settlement's edge and looked toward Icecrown Citadel from a far.
Somewhere in the hills, the war between factions continued. Leylin looked north, and continued watching, and thought about what the next thing would be.