Even as Azjol-Nerub burned and froze beneath the Scourge's advance, the nerubians were not a people who surrendered to despair without leaving something behind.
In the final days of the War of the Spider, when the last ziggurats trembled and the tunnels echoed with the marching dead. The surviving viziers gathered in secrecy beneath the ruined capital. These were not warriors, nor kings, but keepers of legacy: architects of fate who understood that empires might fall, yet vengeance could endure.
It was there, in a chamber warded against necromancy and psychic intrusion, that they enacted their final design.
From a clutch of carefully preserved eggs, the viziers chose one.
It was unremarkable in size, small enough to fit within the palm of a clawed hand but it carried within it a lineage older than the empire itself. The viziers poured into it everything that remained of their hope, their hatred, and their will to endure.
Through ancient rites, the spider was bound to the land of Azjol-Nerub itself. It would feed upon corruption. It would grow stronger with every undead it consumed. And above all else, it would remember.
They named the creature Hadronox. Not a king. Not a god. But a reckoning.
With a final invocation, the viziers released the spider into the deepest tunnels, sealing the passage behind it as the undead closed in. Hadronox scuttled into the dark, carrying with it the collective grief of a fallen civilization, and a singular purpose:
To reclaim its home.
Above and below, the war grew even more desperate.
As Scourge forces seized the upper vaults of Azjol-Nerub, the surviving nerubians made a fateful choice. Their enemies were endless, and their sanctuaries were no longer secure. If the undead could not be stopped above, then perhaps salvation lay below.
The empire dug deeper. Far deeper than they ever had before. What they found was not salvation.
The first signs were subtle. Tunnels that seemed to twist when unobserved. Echoes that answered back with voices not their own. Walls that pulsed faintly, as though breathing.
Then the miners vanished. Then the screams began.
From the deepest reaches of the earth, ancient horrors stirred, the faceless ones, servants of powers older than memory. Their forms defied reason: writhing masses of flesh and eyes, tentacles dragging across stone, minds that fractured thought itself.
They were the heralds of Yogg-Saron. And they were hungry.
The faceless ones surged upward, crashing into nerubian defenses with horrifying ferocity.
Where the undead were cold and methodical, these creatures were madness incarnate. Psychic screams tore through hive-minds. Veteran defenders dropped their weapons, clutching at their skulls as forbidden truths were forced into their thoughts.
The nerubians had prepared for death. They had not prepared for unreality. Caught between the Scourge above and the Old Gods' minions below, the last defenders of Azjol-Nerub were crushed from both sides. Ancient tunnels collapsed under the strain. Entire districts vanished into chasms as reality itself buckled under conflicting magics.
The Lich King, sensing the presence of something even he did not fully command, withdrew his attention from the deepest reaches, content to let the Old Gods' servants devour what remained.
Either way, Azjol-Nerub would fall. In the end, there was no final stand. No grand proclamation. Only silence.
The War of the Spider ended not with a decisive blow, but with the extinction of an empire, its survivors scattered, enslaved, or entombed beneath layers of ice, bone, and madness. Yet not all threads were severed.
Deep within the forgotten tunnels, Hadronox grew. It fed on the undead that wandered too far below. It learned the rhythms of Scourge patrols, the taste of necromancy, the weakness of overconfidence. Each corpse consumed strengthened its chitin, sharpened its instincts, and deepened its hatred.
Azjol-Nerub might be dead. But its vengeance lived on.
With the nerubians crushed and no rival left to challenge him on Northrend, the Lich King turned his gaze outward. His armies swelled without resistance.
Icecrown Citadel rose higher, darker, and more terrible with each passing year. The time for consolidation was over. The time for conquest had come.
And as the Lich King began his preparations to bring death to the rest of Azeroth, beneath the frozen earth a single spider waited, patient, relentless, and bound by a promise older than undeath itself.
The web had not been broken. It had merely been pulled tight. The War of the Spider ended not with triumph, but with quiet inevitability.
When the last echoes of resistance faded from the frozen tunnels of Azjol-Nerub, the continent of Northrend belonged to the Lich King alone. No banners opposed him. No great armies marched to challenge his dominion. From the icy coasts to the jagged peaks of Icecrown, death reigned supreme and it was orderly, patient, and inexorable.
In the wake of the war, Ner'zhul turned his attention to consolidation. The fallen were too valuable to waste.
Across the shattered ziggurats and collapsed tunnel networks, the Scourge began its grim labor. Necromancers and death knights descended into the ruins, guided by Anub'arak and the dreadlords, raising the countless nerubian dead from where they had fallen.
The process was methodical. The bodies of common warriors were reshaped into crypt fiends, their chitin reinforced with necromantic energy, their instincts stripped of loyalty to hive or king and replaced with absolute obedience to the Frozen Throne. Once-proud sentinels who had guarded sacred passages now scuttled at the vanguard of undead armies, mandibles dripping with frost and poison.
The nobility fared no better. Viziers, generals, and ancient guardians, those whose will had once guided the empire, were reforged into crypt lords, towering undead commanders infused with dark intelligence and bound directly to the Lich King's will. Their knowledge of subterranean warfare, ambush tactics, and siegecraft made them invaluable. Where the Scourge had once relied on brute force, it now possessed precision.
The irony was not lost on the few living nerubians who still watched from the shadows. The empire that had resisted the Plague of Undeath had become one of its greatest weapons.
With the addition of the nerubian undead, the Scourge evolved.
Battlefields that once favored living armies became killing grounds. Crypt fiends undermined fortifications from below, collapsing walls before defenders even realized they were under attack. Crypt lords orchestrated campaigns with chilling efficiency, coordinating undead waves with flawless timing.
The Lich King observed all of it in silence. Anub'arak, now fully bound as his champion, oversaw the transformation of Azjol-Nerub into a necropolis beneath the ice.
Ziggurats were repurposed, their sacred chambers converted into hatcheries for undead spawn. The ancient architecture of the spider kingdom became the blueprint for new Scourge strongholds across Northrend.
Where once there had been a civilization, there was now a factory of death. And yet—Not all threads had been severed.
In the deepest reaches of Northrend, beyond the reach of necromancers and beyond even the casual awareness of the Lich King, survivors endured.
Small groups of living nerubians had escaped the final collapse. Some fled into sealed tunnel networks that even Anub'arak could not fully map, forgotten passages carved long before the rise of Icecrown. Others retreated toward the borders of the continent, where the Scourge's control was thinner and its patrols less frequent.
These survivors were broken, but not extinguished. They adapted. The remnants abandoned great cities and rigid hierarchies, living instead as nomads of the deep.
They silenced their hive-minds to avoid psychic detection, communicating through pheromones and gestures rather than thought. Light sources were shunned; bioluminescence was masked or extinguished entirely.
Their numbers dwindled, but their memory did not. They remembered Anub'arak as he had been. They remembered the betrayal of Azj-Kahet. They remembered the moment the earth itself turned against them. And they remembered the promise whispered by the viziers before the end.
Far below, in tunnels thick with corpse-dust and necromantic residue, Hadronox continued to grow.
The beast had become legend even among the undead. Scourge patrols that ventured too deep simply vanished. Crypt fiends sent to hunt the creature were found drained, shattered, or cocooned in silk infused with corrosive magic.
The Lich King was aware of the anomaly. He allowed it to persist. For now. Hadronox was contained. It did not threaten Icecrown. It did not challenge his authority. And in Ner'zhul's cold calculus, any force that culled the undead's excess in the depths was not an immediate liability. Still, the web tightened.
On the surface, Northrend fell silent.
With no great enemies left to oppose him, the Lich King shifted his focus outward. His armies no longer expanded merely to conquer the continent, they were being prepared for something greater.
Ships of bone and ice began to appear along frozen coastlines. Necromantic energies flowed southward, testing the boundaries of distant lands. Agents were dispatched beyond Northrend, sowing fear, plague, and whispers of an approaching doom.
The War of the Spider had been a crucible. From it, the Scourge emerged refined, disciplined, and terrifyingly efficient.
Yet beneath the ice, in the ruins of a fallen empire, living eyes still watched. The nerubians had lost their kingdom. They had lost their king.
But they had not lost their will to endure. And as the Lich King prepared to bring war to the rest of Azeroth, the echoes of skittering claws in the deep served as a quiet reminder: even in death's domain, some debts were not yet paid.