The reports started arriving before the blood had dried. Leylin had been expecting conflict — had understood, from the moment Elder Mosshorn described the scale of the landing fleets, that the Scourge would not simply observe two major military forces establishing themselves on Northrend's shores and continue doing whatever it had been doing.
The Lich King's intelligence, whatever its other qualities, had never been passive. Five years of watching Icecrown's development had made that much absolutely clear.
Arthas understood that a significant threat needed to be addressed before it had time to become a larger threat, and two full military expeditions establishing permanent footholds on the continent qualified as significant.
What Leylin had underestimated was the speed. The Scourge moved within days of the landings.
Not the slow, grinding advance of an undead force that understood it had unlimited time and unlimited patience — the urgent response of something that had assessed the situation and had determined that urgency was warranted. This was Arthas making a decision, and the decision was to push both expeditions into the sea before either of them had finished unpacking.
The vrykul were the piece that changed everything. Leylin had known about the vrykul — had encountered their presence in Northrend's intelligence picture as one of the continent's ancient peoples, massive and fierce and organized around a culture that predated most of the world's current civilizations by an embarrassing margin.
What he had not fully anticipated was the functional alliance that the Scourge had developed with the Dragonflayer and Winterskorn clans — the way two cultures with no obvious common ground had found in their shared hostility to the invaders a practical partnership that made both of them significantly more dangerous than either would have been alone.
Roanauk described the early vrykul raids on the Horde positions in Borean Tundra with careful precision of a shaman who understood that accurate reporting served his people better than the imprecision of shock.
The vrykul were enormous — the specific, monumental scale of beings who stood twice the height of an orc and moved with the specific, fearless aggression of warriors who had spent generations considering fear a personal failing.
They hit the Warsong Hold perimeter with coordinated assault patterns that suggested tactical intelligence rather than simple berserker aggression, the Dragonflayer clan in particular demonstrating the kind of organized, adaptive fighting that most people did not expect from beings who looked like they had been carved from the same material as the landscape around them.
"The orc warriors are not small," Roanauk said, and in the quality of this observation from a Taunka was the implicit admission that the vrykul had nonetheless managed to be startling. "But the vrykul make them look like children."
The Horde had held. Roanauk was clear on this point, and the quality of his telling suggested genuine respect rather than reassurance — the Warsong Offensive had absorbed the initial assault and had held the line with the specific, grim determination of forces that understood exactly what falling back into the sea would mean.
There had been significant casualties. The word significant, in Roanauk's account, carried considerable weight for someone whose communication style was organized around understatement.
The Alliance situation in Howling Fjord was reaching Leylin through Elder Mosshorn's network, supplemented by Aminel's channel communications and, increasingly, by Arcturis's independent ranging.
The Winterskorn clan had hit Valgarde with the overwhelming force of people who had been living adjacent to this coastline since before the current crisis had introduced the concept of crisis, and who therefore knew every approach, every defensive angle, every point of vulnerability in the terrain that the Alliance had chosen for its foothold.
The defenders at Valgarde had faced the desperate quality of being attacked by something that understood the ground they were fighting on better than they did — the Winterskorn's knowledge of the fjord's geography translating into assault vectors that no map the Alliance planners had consulted could have fully predicted.
Valiance Keep in Borean Tundra had faced a different kind of pressure — the Scourge directly, without the vrykul intermediary, hitting the Alliance's primary base with the comprehensive, grinding assault that the undead specialized in.
Not fast, not clever, not the surprising adaptive tactics of the vrykul. Simply overwhelming and relentless and continuous, the specific, exhausting pressure of an enemy that did not have morale to break and did not have a supply line to cut and did not get tired of pressing against a wall if pressing was what it had been directed to do.
The Valiance Expedition had held. But the reports reaching Leylin — stripped of the optimism that official military communications often applied to difficult situations before releasing them — described something closer to barely held than comfortably held.
The margins had been real but they had been margins, not the decisive defensive victories that the accounts would eventually smooth into.
Icemist Village, when the report arrived through the Taunka network, landed differently from the others. Icemist was a Taunka settlement in Dragonblight — not the territory of strangers, not a military base established by an outside force that had arrived weeks ago, but a place where actual people had been living actual lives for generations, people who were connected to Roanauk's network and through that network to Leylin's own monitoring activity.
The Scourge's assault on Icemist was not a military campaign against a strategic position. It was the terrible application of the Lich King's power to people who were simply there, in the way of what the Scourge intended to do.
Roanauk delivered this report personally, and the quality of his manner was different from the careful, measured reports he had given about the Horde and Alliance engagements. This one came through the quiet register of someone reporting something that had happened to people he knew.
"They came at night," he said. "The dead moved through the village before the sentries could organize a response." A pause that contained more than the pause itself. "Not all of the people of Icemist were killed. Some were taken."
Leylin understood what taken meant in the context of a Scourge assault. He sat with this for a moment without trying to manage what the sitting produced.
Some news deserved to be received without immediately converting it into analysis. Roanauk, who had been waiting in a patient way of someone who understood that being given space was its own form of respect, seemed to recognize this.
"What remains of the settlement?" Leylin asked, when the moment had run its necessary course.
"Survivors. Some of the buildings." Roanauk's jaw set in the specific, tight way that Taunka expressed grief organizing itself into purpose. "The Horde forces offered assistance when they learned of it. The Warsong shamans came."
"That's something," Leylin said.
"It is something," Roanauk agreed. The broader pattern that the accumulated reports described was clear enough that Leylin did not need to spend extensive time on the analysis — the early phase of the Northrend campaign had the specific shape of something determined to fail before it found the narrow margin through which it succeeded.
The Scourge and the vrykul had been pressing both expeditions with everything available to them, and both expeditions had been holding by the kind of margins that did not appear in the official accounts because official accounts had a specific, institutional relationship with the concept of how close things had been.
What had prevented the expeditions from being driven back into the sea was not, in Leylin's assessment, primarily tactical superiority. It was the stubborn quality of two military organizations that had been told they could not afford to fail and who had found, in that uncompromising necessity, the particular resolve that resolved things.
The Horde warriors defending Warsong Hold had the Warsong Offensive's entire Kalimdor commitment behind them — every supply ship that arrived was an argument that you did not concede the position.
The Alliance defenders at Valgarde and Valiance Keep had the full weight of an institution that had survived Lordaeron's fall and Dalaran's destruction and the Third War and had not stopped existing, and the not-stopping had a momentum that vrykul assault and Scourge pressure had found, ultimately, insufficient to halt.
Both factions had held. This was, by any honest accounting, a better outcome than the early reports had made Leylin confident predicting.
He spent several evenings composing an extended intelligence summary for the coalition's planning apparatus — the document that Alleria had asked for during the visit, the comprehensive distillation of five years of Northrend monitoring that the arriving forces needed without having to earn it the way he had earned it.
He organized it into sections: terrain by region, Scourge activity patterns and their relationship to the Lich King's observable decision-making, vrykul cultural and tactical characteristics as he had observed them across five years of indirect monitoring, indigenous people distributions and the specific knowledge those peoples held that could make the difference between a military force that understood where it was operating and one that was perpetually learning the landscape at the cost of casualties it should not have needed to pay.
He sent it through the channel in segments, because the channel's capacity and the document's length were not immediately compatible, and each segment arrived at Aminel's end with the slight delay of information crossing distance through a mechanism that was not instantaneous.
Aminel's acknowledgment, when it came back, was brief: This will save lives. Thank you.
He did not respond to this because the response it wanted was not one he was interested in providing. The document had been compiled across five years of watching. It was not a gift. It was simply the appropriate use of what the watching had produced.
In the field, as the early desperate phase of the campaign settled into something more organized and more sustainable, Leylin began extending his involvement beyond pure intelligence work.
The Tuskarr elder had asked, obliquely and then directly, whether he would be willing to help identify the specific Scourge patrol routes that had been making the coastal fishing camps in Dragonblight dangerous in ways they had not been before the large-scale landings had apparently triggered Arthas to activate more of his Dragonblight-region forces.
He agreed. Arcturis ranged the patrol routes with him, the spirit bear's awareness of the Scourge's organizational patterns complementing his own monitoring network's data in ways that made the identification faster and more precise than either approach alone could have achieved.
He mapped the routes and passed the maps to the Tuskarr camps with the practical purpose of people who needed to know where the danger was so they could not be in those places at the times the danger moved through them. It was not glamorous work. It was the kind of work that mattered.
Roanauk requested something similar for the Taunka communities in the areas most affected by the Scourge's increased activity — the patrols now ranging further south and west than they had under the previous, more contained configuration of Arthas's Northrend authority.
Leylin obliged with the same combination of his monitoring network and Arcturis's ranging, producing patrol maps that the Taunka communities used to route their movement and their supply runs in ways that kept casualties from accumulating in the specific, preventable manner that adequate intelligence prevented.
This was also not glamorous. He was becoming, he understood with the quiet clarity of someone who has noticed a thing about themselves without having planned for it, not simply the watcher he had come to Northrend to be, but something more embedded in what Northrend was actually experiencing.
Not a military commander, not a political actor, not any of the roles that the arriving forces were distributing among themselves with the organized urgency of institutions under pressure.
Something simpler and perhaps more useful — the person who had been here longest, who knew the ground most completely, and who was willing to apply that knowledge to whatever the specific, immediate, human-scale need presented itself.
The early battles of the Northrend campaign belonged to the Horde and the Alliance and their commanders and their soldiers and the costly courage of people holding positions that they understood they could not afford to lose.
Leylin's contribution to those battles was the maps, and the patrol routes, and the intelligence, and the specific knowledge of which paths through Dragonblight were watched and which were not, delivered to the people who needed it through the network of indigenous relationships he had spent five years building.