Icecrown was not merely a fortress. It was a wound in the world. From the jagged spires of black ice to the endless blizzards that screamed across its surface, the seat of the Lich King radiated a pressure that pressed upon mind and spirit alike.
To lesser races, despair was manifest. To the nerubians, it was a challenge, one that demanded a decisive answer. Thus, the elite were dispatched.
They were not an army in the conventional sense. They were executioners.
Chosen from the highest castes of the Nerubian Empire, these warriors bore armor grown rather than forged, layers of chitin hardened through ancient alchemical rites and inscribed with runes predating the War of the Ancients. Their weapons hummed with resonant frequencies designed to disrupt necromantic bindings. Their minds were shielded by psychic lattices that made them alien even to the Lich King's sight.
They emerged beneath Icecrown like a tide of living shadows. The Scourge met them with overwhelming force.
Undead legions poured into the tunnels, ghouls scrabbling across walls, skeletal soldiers marching in perfect formation, abominations clogging passageways with their massive bulk. Frostwyrm echoes rattled the caverns above, their roars shaking stalactites loose from the ceilings.
And yet… The nerubians did not break.
When the Plague of Undead was unleashed, it washed over them like cold mist, harmless, impotent. Their physiology rejected the corruption outright, chitin and ichor immune to the necromantic vectors that had annihilated entire civilizations elsewhere in Northrend.
When Ner'zhul reached out with his telepathic will, seeking to dominate, command, unmake, he found nothing to grasp. No fear. No weakness. Only layered minds that folded inward like labyrinths of silk and stone.
For the first time since his ascension, the Lich King encountered an enemy he could not simply control. His frustration echoed across Icecrown like cracking ice.
The nerubians struck everywhere. Strongholds fell in a single night, necromantic obelisks shattered, soul-forges collapsed, entire Scourge garrisons rendered inert when their control nodes were severed.
Strike teams vanished back into the earth before counterattacks could be organized, leaving behind tunnels rigged to collapse, chambers flooded with alchemical acid, and sigils that detonated when undead presence crossed them.
It was not war as the Lich King understood it. It was erosion. A thousand precise cuts delivered from the dark.
Entire regions of Icecrown went silent, undead armies collapsing where they stood as the Lich King's influence momentarily fractured. Necromancers found their spells unraveling mid-cast. Commanders lost contact with their troops.
For a time, it seemed as though the Scourge might actually be contained. But the nerubians had misjudged one thing. Time.
The Lich King did not need victory today. Or tomorrow. He needed only to endure.
For every undead destroyed, ten more rose from the frozen dead of Northrend. Fallen Scourge were reassembled, reforged, improved. Each failed assault taught Ner'zhul more about nerubian tactics, their tunnel systems, their hierarchies.
He began mapping the underground. Slowly. Relentlessly. And when he struck back, he did so with surgical cruelty.
The counteroffensive came not from above, but from below. New undead burrowers, crafted from corrupted nerubian corpses, tunneled through stone once thought impenetrable.
Necromantic frost seeped into the lower caverns, freezing entire districts solid and entombing thousands alive. Psychic beacons were driven into the bedrock, disrupting the mental coordination that had made the nerubian hit-and-run tactics so effective.
Cities vanished. Not destroyed, erased.
Entire populations were sealed beneath collapsing vaults, their last messages echoing through the empire's psychic network before cutting off forever. It was then that King Anub'arak realized the truth. Azjol-Nerub could not stand alone.
From the deepest royal chambers, Anub'arak sent emissaries. They traveled through forgotten tunnels older than the empire itself, following ancient trade routes that once linked Azjol-Nerub to its distant sister kingdom—Azj-Kahet, hidden far beneath the lands now known as Khaz Algar.
The messages were simple.
The Scourge threatens all beneath the world. Stand with us, or face this fate alone.
The first emissary never returned. Nor the second. When the third finally reached Azj-Kahet's obsidian gates, he was met not with welcome but with silence.
Queen Neferess listened from her throne of living stone, her many eyes unreadable. Azj-Kahet was different from Azjol-Nerub. More isolated. More insular.
Its people, the Kaheti, had flourished in secrecy, untouched by surface wars, untouched by the undead plague ravaging Northrend. Their tunnels were deeper, their wards stronger, their distance from Icecrown vast.
To Neferess, Anub'arak's plea sounded not like a warning… But like an admission of failure.
She spoke coldly. Decisively. Azj-Kahet would not bleed for a war it had not started.
It would not expose its people to an enemy that, so far, had not noticed them. And Anub'arak, proud, defiant Anub'arak, had challenged the Lich King openly.
He asked for this war, she declared.
Let him finish it alone.
The third emissary was imprisoned. The ancient tunnels between the kingdoms were collapsed, sealed by magic so old it predated their shared ancestry. Trade routes vanished. Psychic links went dark. Azjol-Nerub was alone.
When the news reached King Anub'arak, he did not rage. He did not plead. He stood in silence beneath the shattered vaults of his capital, surrounded by maps marked with lost cities and fallen holds.
He understood now. This war would not be won. It would only be endured. And perhaps, if fate was kind, it would be remembered. Above them all, in Icecrown, the Lich King felt the last resistance harden into desperation.
And he smiled. The web was breaking. And soon, the spider king would fall. The war did not end in a single night. It ended in layers, city by city, tunnel by tunnel, life by life, until even the stone itself seemed to weep.
When the Scourge finally committed to total annihilation, it did so without subtlety. The Lich King unleashed his executioners.
From the frozen reaches of Icecrown descended the dreadlords, ancient demons of the Burning Legion, their wings blotting out the pale glow of subterranean crystals as they entered the depths of the nerubian world.
Where the undead had once advanced methodically, the dreadlords brought terror, deception, and overwhelming force. They did not merely attack.
Entire tunnel networks collapsed as infernal magic cracked the bedrock. Ziggurats that had stood for millennia, centers of worship, learning, and governance, were shattered from within as dreadlords whispered forbidden words into their foundations.
Nerubian defenders found their carefully prepared choke points bypassed by sorcery, their psychic coordination fractured by illusions and despair seeded directly into their minds.
For the first time, fear spread through the empire. The Scourge poured in behind the demons like an unending tide.
Ghouls clambered across walls and ceilings. Skeletal legions advanced through collapsed halls without regard for loss. Frost-laden necromancers froze entire districts solid, entombing both defenders and attackers alike to create new killing grounds.
The nerubians fought as they always had, precise, disciplined, relentless. But now, when they fell, they did not rest. Their bodies rose again.
Though immune to the Plague of Undead in life, the nerubians could not escape death itself. Once slain, once their ichor cooled and their minds went silent, the Lich King's will reached into their remains and dragged them back.
Crypt fiends clawed their way up from the fallen, chitin blackened with frost and runes carved into their shells. Former warriors turned upon their kin, their movements stripped of hesitation, their minds shackled to a foreign will.
Nothing broke morale faster than familiarity. Nothing shattered resistance like seeing a trusted comrade rise again as a weapon.
At the center of the empire, Anub'arak made his stand. The Spider King fought not from a throne, but from the front.
He tore through abominations with his massive blades, shattered dreadlord illusions with ancient wards, and personally led counterassaults that temporarily halted the Scourge's advance. Even the Lich King took notice, his attention lingering longer on the battlefield than ever before.
Anub'arak was not merely resisting. He was defying. And that could not be tolerated.
The final confrontation took place beneath the broken capital, in a vault once reserved for coronations and ancestral rites. The Lich King struck personally.
Ice flooded the chamber. Psychic pressure crushed minds into screaming fragments. Anub'arak fought until his limbs cracked, until his armor shattered, until his body finally fell beneath the weight of impossible power.
The Spider King died standing.
And then—
He rose.
Bound in frost and necromancy, Anub'arak was reforged into a crypt lord, his will shattered and reassembled around a single command: serve. His towering form now radiated death, his eyes glowing with an unholy blue light that reflected the Lich King's presence within him.
Alongside him rose his fallen lieutenants, champions, generals, strategists, now stripped of memory and loyalty alike.
Together, they became the Scourge's most devastating instruments. The conquest that followed was swift. Brutal. Absolute.
Anub'arak led the undead legions into the heart of what remained of Azjol-Nerub.
Ziggurats fell one by one, repurposed as necropolises and ritual sites. Sacred chambers were reshaped into crypts and forges of undeath. The same architectural genius that had once safeguarded the empire was now twisted to strengthen the Scourge.
Resistance crumbled wherever the former king appeared. To the living nerubians, his presence was worse than death.
They named him the Traitor King.
Not because he had chosen betrayal, but because his existence symbolized the ultimate violation: their greatest protector turned into the instrument of their annihilation.
As the last enclaves fell, survivors scattered into forgotten tunnels, sealing themselves away from the world above. Azjol-Nerub was no longer an empire. It was a grave.
And the Lich King watched it all with cold satisfaction. He admired what the nerubians had built. Their towering spires. Their ribbed vaults. Their seamless fusion of function and terror.
Icecrown Citadel would not merely be inspired by them, it would inherit them. Stone and chitin gave way to ice and bone, but the shape remained. A monument to conquest. A throne built upon the corpse of a civilization that had dared to resist.
The War of the Spider ended not with victory or surrender but with silence.
And beneath Northrend, in halls that once echoed with the clicking of countless legs and the hum of living stone, only the dead now walked. Marching. Waiting. Dreaming of conquest yet to come.