5th August 2026

Part 2 of the Veilstrike series

He woke some time later, in the graveyard at Deathknell, with dirt in his mouth and no memory of the walk that had gotten him there. A Forsaken was standing over him, unbothered, the way Forsaken tend to be unbothered by exactly the things that alarm everyone else. “You’re awake,” she said, which struck him, even then, as a strange thing to need saying out loud.

He remembered the fight in pieces. He remembered Unclegrumble. He remembered a flash of something gold, and underneath the gold, images that didn’t feel like his own — armies of the dead, standing under a banner that had never flown in his own Azeroth, a Lich King whose war had actually finished rather than merely continuing. He did not recoil from any of it, which frightened him rather more than the images themselves did. The name Edric Shadowspur felt, on trying it out, like a coat that no longer fit properly. What came up instead, from wherever new Forsaken pull their names from, was Veilstrike.

He spent his first weeks working out what he’d actually become, which turned out to be a slower process than anyone had warned him about. He was Forsaken, not Scourge — the distinction mattered to him more with every day that passed, mostly because he kept catching himself wanting to be the second thing anyway, in a way he had no honest explanation for. He felt pulled toward Northrend the way some people feel pulled toward a bad decision they haven’t made yet, and he had no idea whether that pull belonged to him or to whatever Morgrave had left inside him along with the rest of it.

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More in the Veilstrike series

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