Northrend received him exactly as it had the first time—without a shred of welcome, devoid of any poetic sense of homecoming.
To another man, returning to the black shores where his soul had been hollowed out might have sparked a wave of nostalgic dread or bitter reflection. To Arthas, it was merely an accounting of climate.
The cold here was not weather. It was an ancient, absolute presence, woven so deeply into the tectonic bedrock of the continent that it mirrored the necrotic power braided through his own dead flesh.
Arthas felt the frost settle against the dark, jagged contours of his saronite armor, recognizing the chill the way a son recognizes the grim silhouette of a distant patriarch.
He rode Invincible at the head of what remained of his loyal forces. They were fewer now. The chaotic fracturing of the Lordaeron Plaguelands had exacted a bloody toll on his vanguard before they had even managed to secure ships for the northern crossing.
But Arthas did not dwell on the numbers. Men, ghouls, and abomination constructs were resources, and resources were meant to be expended toward an objective, not mourned once they were spent. The calculation arrived in his mind clean, entirely free from the friction that grief or regret would have once introduced to his tactical thinking.
The phantom pull in his skull grew heavier with every league they traveled north. The Lich King's voice, raw and panicked, throbbed against his temples—growing more insistent even as its texture grew alarmingly thin.
It was the desperate screech of an entity running out of sand in the hourglass. Faster. The throne cracks. Kil'jaeden's mongrels are already sniffing at our gates.
Arthas dug his spurs into the rotting flanks of his undead stallion, pressing the march into a brutal, unrelenting pace that tore the muscles of his skeletal infantry.
They encountered Anub'arak in the yawning, basalt mouth of a tunnel dug deep beneath the shelf ice. In these vaulted, subterranean spaces, the crypt lord and his sycophants had carved a sprawling empire long before the first human kingdom had even dreamed of raising a stone wall.
The ancient king was a monstrous monument of chitin and spike. Anub'arak moved through the absolute dark with the confident, terrifying economy of a predator that had never required eyes to rule its domain.
Arthas had encountered nerubians during the early days of his service, and he understood their nature well enough: they were a proud, meticulously calculating species. They possessed a rich, subterranean history that predated the Scourge by millennia, brought into alignment with the Lich King's iron will through a war of absolute extermination.
Anub'arak turned his multifaceted, compound eyes upon the death knight, assessing the prince with a cold, analytical curiosity. He was weighing the authority he was bound to obey against the lethal capabilities of the warrior standing before him.
"Death Knight," Anub'arak grunted, his voice vibrating through the cavern like heavy stones grinding together. It was a sound never meant to mimic human speech, filtered through heavy, clicking mandibles. "You come seeking the shortest path to Icecrown."
"I come because the Lich King commands it," Arthas replied, his tone as flat as a executioner's blade.
In his current state, there was no distinction between his own desires and his master's commands; the two concepts had collapsed into a single, unbreakable impulse long ago. He saw no value in pretending he possessed an independent identity.
"The throne is bleeding," Anub'arak stated. It wasn't an expression of sympathy; it was a cold diagnosis. The crypt lord's connection to the Lich King's mental web was as immediate and heavy as Arthas's own, perhaps deeper, given that his entire resurrected race acted as the nervous system for the northern empire. "I feel the tremor in the stone. The threads of the web are snapping. Something has fractured the foundation."
"The rift Frostmourne left behind," Arthas said, his gloved hand tightening on the pommel of his runeblade. "An elf's magic widened it."
"Illidan Stormrage," Anub'arak spat, the name accompanied by a sharp click of his mandibles. He had been tracking the Betrayer's movements with a thoroughness that surprised the prince. "The demon-born's ambition has managed to outpace his sanity. He has shaken the world from afar."
Arthas offered no commentary. The observation was accurate, and accuracy required no additional breath.
"The surface road to Icecrown is dead to you," Anub'arak continued, shifting his massive weight, his spiked legs gouging deep ruts into the frosted earth. "The passes between these shores and the citadel are choked. The winter storms are weaponized, the distances are vast, and the forces of the Alliance and the living elves are already mobilizing to cut off your vanguard. If you march beneath the sky, you will arrive to find a tomb."
"Then show me the dark," Arthas said.
"Azjol-Nerub," the beetle-king rumbled.
The name echoed down the pitch-black tunnel like a curse. Arthas had heard whispers of the spider kingdom beneath the ice—a cyclopean network of highways, ziggurats, and breeding pits that stretched across the roots of the continent. It was a civilization older than humanity, a subterranean labyrinth so vast that no single living mind had ever mapped its true borders.
"The old highways run directly beneath the frozen wastes all the way to the foot of Glacier," Anub'arak explained. "My tunnels bypass every surface hazard. You will march beneath the storms, beneath the armies of your enemies, and beneath time itself."
"And what is the price of admission?" Arthas asked, his eyes narrowing. He hadn't survived the fall of his kingdom by accepting gifts without counting the daggers hidden in the wrapping.
Anub'arak's mandibles clicked in a slow, deliberate rhythm—the nerubian equivalent of a grim chuckle. "Azjol-Nerub is not a quiet graveyard, little prince. There are factions of my living children who still breathe, whose hatred for your master has outlived their empire. They view me as a traitor and you as a plague. Furthermore, the Scourge's digging broke into vaults we should have left sealed. There are... older things in the deepest dark. Creatures that predate even my memory, awakened by our war, and they do not bow to the dead."
He paused, leaning his massive horned head down toward the death knight. "The road is a meat-grinder, Arthas. But it is fast. And fast is the only currency your master can afford to trade in."
Arthas didn't hesitate. The internal calculations were instant. The Lich King's psychic screams were a constant, splitting migraine behind his eyes, leaving no room for the luxury of a cautious, measured approach.
The threat of Kil'jaeden's vengeance was manifest; the demon lord's agents were already striking the outer walls of the citadel while he remained weeks away by the coastal roads.
"We take the dark," Arthas commanded. The descent into the spider kingdom was an exercise in claustrophobia. Anub'arak led them through a jagged tear in the glacial ice, descending into a dark so absolute and heavy that even Arthas's unholy vision, adapted to the gloom of graves, struggled to find the bottom.
His skeletal soldiers followed in perfect, rhythmic silence, their boney joints clicking against the damp stone. They were a perfect army; they didn't question the sanity of marching into the bowels of the earth, nor did they fear the dark.
As the column descended deeper, the biting wind of the surface faded, replaced by a stagnant, suffocating stillness. The air hadn't moved in centuries, thick with the smell of ancient dust, dried chitin, and the faint, sweet rot of long-dead cocoons.
The architecture they encountered was beautiful in a way that stirred a distant, clinical appreciation in Arthas's dead mind. These weren't mere caves; they were grand, vaulted highways flanked by massive pillars carved in the likeness of terrifying, multi-limbed deities.
The stones were fitted together with a mathematical precision that defied human engineering, built by an ancient empire that had never cared how a human eye would perceive their glory.
Anub'arak navigated the labyrinth with flawless precision. He moved through branching tunnels, hidden drop-points, and ruined plazas with the familiarity of a king walking his own palace gardens, his massive bulk sliding through the narrow corridors with terrifying grace.
The first ambush hit them within three hours of their descent. The living nerubians did not offer challenges or beat war drums. They simply dropped from the vaulted ceilings in perfect, coordinated silence—a swarm of barbed legs, dripping mandibles, and web-launchers.
They fought with the instinctive, terrifying tactical synchronization of a species that had perfected subterranean slaughter before humanity had discovered fire.
Anub'arak did not display surprise. His massive front scythes clanged together as he threw himself into the fray.
"The rebel scum," the crypt lord roared, impaling a living spider-warrior through its center and tearing it in two. "They still cling to the memory of their freedom. They know these tunnels give them the advantage, and they will use every stone to bury us."
Arthas drew Frostmourne. The runeblade screamed in the darkness, its unholy runes flaring with a malicious, icy blue radiance that illuminated the spray of black ichor.
He met the swarm with a cold, robotic efficiency. The blade hungered, and the living nerubians discovered that their ancient carapace was nothing more than parchment to the sword's unnatural edge.
Every strike from Frostmourne didn't just sever limbs; it tore the soul from the shell, leaving a cold, empty husk behind.
The fighting was tight, brutal, and utterly suffocating. The narrow walls stripped away any room for military formations; it was a chaotic melee of iron against chitin, played out in a half-blind dark where enemies could scale the walls and drop from any angle.
Arthas stood at the center of the vortex, a machine of pure, unfeeling slaughter. Ghouls were crushed to splinters around him, their bones snapping under the immense weight of the giant nerubian guardians, but he simply stepped over the wreckage and kept swinging.
Anub'arak was a force of absolute devastation beside him, his thick shell deflecting the venomous spikes of his former subjects as he trampled their lines into paste.
When the swarm finally broke—the survivors melting back into the shadows of the upper vents once they realized the price of the ambush had become too high—Arthas stood in the center of the bloody chamber, his blade dripping with dark, viscous fluid.
He looked back at his column. They were severely reduced. A third of his infantry was nothing but bone meal on the cavern floor.
"They will return," Anub'arak warned, wiping black ichor from his mandibles with a massive claw. "The deeper we march, the thicker the hives become. We are entering the territory of the Viziers, who possess magics that can challenge your own. And below them lie the forgotten deeps, where things with no names wait for the light to die."
"How long until we breach the lower foundations of Icecrown?" Arthas asked, his voice cutting through the damp silence.
"Days," Anub'arak said. "If we survive the crossing. On the surface, you would still be fighting the ice-trolls of Zul'Drak. The tunnels remain your only hope, death knight."
Arthas looked down the long, throat-like passage ahead, the oppressive weight of the ancient kingdom pressing against his mind just as the arctic wind had battered his armor on the coast.
The Lich King's voice flared again, weaker, trembling with a pathetic, desperate vibration that disgusted the prince.
Hurry. The wards are buckling. I can feel their blades against my mind.
In the small, locked box of his soul where the last remnants of Arthas the Prince still occasionally stirred, a faint flicker of irony surfaced.
He was a paladin's son, the heir to Lordaeron, descending into the dark bowels of an alien empire to defend a monstrous, caged entity that had forced him to butcher his own father. He was killing freedom-fighters whose only sin was refusing to bow to a tyrant, all to preserve a master who viewed him as nothing more than a convenient weapon.
The thought didn't make him hesitate. It didn't change his trajectory by a single millimeter. Such thoughts were just background noise now, easily muffled by the steady, heavy heartbeat of Frostmourne.
"We move," Arthas said. Anub'arak gave a slow, rumbling inclination of his great horned head, and the battered column of the dead marched forward into the deeper dark.
They plunged into the contested heart of Azjol-Nerub, racing against the clock of a dying god, while above them, the surface of the world prepared for a storm that would drown them all. Arthas rode into the gloom, his blade cold and waiting at his hip, and he did not look back.