WARNING: Patch 12.0.7 Spoilers in this post!
Meeting in Harandar
Prior to the events of this short story, a few key events happen during patch 12.0.7. After being invited to Harandar by Elder Hagar, the elf and troll leaders of Azeroth all bore witness to a revelation: they are all related to each other through ancient ancestry.
While the details of that ancestry may be slightly muddy, the reaction from leaders of all kinds was almost unanimously negative. Lor'themar in particular was particularly aggrieved by this news, frustrated at the prospect of putting aside his hatred for the Amani in the name of peace.
In the wake of the gathering, Lor'themar is invited by Lady Liadrin to one of the haranir's nearby lodges for a drink. In truth, however, Liadrin had invited him not to meet her, but to meet another of the Amani leaders who had been invited: Torundo the Grizzled. While he is a familiar face to players, having appeared a number of times in Zul'Aman's main story and side quests, his face is new to Lor'themar... or perhaps not, if his suspicions prove true.
With bloodshed forbidden on haranir grounds, Lor'themar and Torundo are forced to talk rather than fight, an unusual prospect for both races and both men. Rather than battling with blades, they battle with wits and will, challenging the other to consume the 'acquired taste' of the haranir beverages. After brief introductions and a toast to Liadrin's deception, Lor'themar seems certain he has met Torundo before.
Rather than answer, Torundo instead discusses Liadrin, and the diplomacy she has been establishing between elves and trolls thanks to her friendship with Zul'jarra. Despite her past -- parents murdered by the Amani, and torture at the hands of their former leader Zul'jin -- she found it within herself to understand the difference between Zul'jin and the rest of his people, including his granddaughter. Over the course of Zul'Aman's leveling story, Liadrin went from a tense alliance with Zul'jarra to her genuine advisor, and seemingly now seeks to share that understanding with the rest of her people.
A Past Encounter
Neither Torundo nor Lor'themar seem to share that understanding, at least not in the early moments of their talk. Instead, they both find ways to compliment the others' people in backhanded ways. While Lor'themar sees Zul'jan's reaction to Hagar's revelation as a childish tantrum, Torundo sees it as understandable anger, in contrast to the cowardice that the elves hide behind 'dignity'.
“I have always admired one thing about your people: the endless ability to lie to yourselves. The blood all washed from your hands, the dirt scraped from your fingernails, the streets swept fresh before you head off to your banquets and functions.” Torundo smiled while making those words sound like curses. “Bunch of clean people standing around, pretending they were never dirty. Calling themselves dignified. Flimsy masks, and so difficult to wear.”
“Oh. You sound envious.” Lor’themar enunciated each syllable with precision. “Tell me, will it trouble you when Zul’jarra has you commit some new atrocity? She must have learned well from her grandfather. It’s been too long since I’ve seen Amani raiding parties pose dead innocents in creative ways. Perhaps she will turn to the old, familiar style: summoning some ancient problem that my people must lay to rest once again.” Lor’themar put a touch of pity into his voice. “Or perhaps she will find a new approach to teach me her perspective on dignity."
Their discussion on the dignified nature of elves leads Torundo to discuss the wounds inflicted upon Zul'jin by the high elves, and the repayment that he had gifted to the high elves in turn -- to Lor'themar in particular. In that moment, Torundo reveals how they had met: he had been present when Zul'jin tortured Lor'themar, Liadrin, and their high elf allies.
A young Lor'themar and Liadrin in the bottom left.
Lor'themar had not truly met Torundo many years prior when the elderly troll general had still been a boy, but the features he recognized on Torundo's face were those of his uncle. Lor'themar had taken part in a raid on Torundo's home village of Zen'tamani under the command of Lireesa Windrunner, the mother of the Windrunner sisters and Ranger-General at the time.
In response to a brutal troll attack on high elf civilians -- as well as to critique that she was too soft on the Amani -- Lireesa had led the attack in the night on the sleeping, drunken raiding party that had killed the elves... and after they had been captured, she led her Farstriders into Zen'tamani and slaughtered every troll they could find as repayment for harboring those who butchered elven civilians.
In response to their village being razed, the surviving Amani civilians fled to Amani'Zar within Zul'Aman's walls and pledged themselves to Zul'jin's cause of repaying their losses in blood. Torundo had been among those survivors, and that traumatic incident as a child had been his reason for entering the cycle of violence between elves and trolls that continues to this day.
The History of Elves vs Trolls
While Lor'themar and Torundo both comment on the conflict between their people coming to an end, the bloodshed inflicted back and forth is still fresh in their minds as they converse in Harandar. To understand the broader nature of the conflict surrounding Torundo and Lor'themar, our story has to go back over 7,000 years, long before any living Amani troll or blood elf had been around.
Chris Metzen's classic High Elf vs Troll artwork.
After being exiled from Kalimdor for refusing to give up their use of arcane magic the Highborne night elves sailed east, where they landed on the shores of Lordaeron. After discovering a dark presence there that disturbed their minds, they chose to venture north in search of lands to settle with powerful magical leylines, and along the way transformed into high elves thanks to the distance from their font of power in Kalimdor.
While the high elves eventually did found the nation of Quel'thalas around their newly birthed Sunwell, they first encountered the Amani forest trolls along the way, whose lands they were stealing and desecrating to create their new nation. Elves and trolls battled fiercely back and forth, but the elves ultimately succeeded in using their immense arcane power to force the Amani from their lands and establish what we now know as Eversong Woods.
In the following millennia, the Amani and high elves continued to fight over their borders, trading atrocities and attacks back and forth but ultimately never changing the status quo. It wasn't until the arrival of emissaries from the distant Zandalari Empire that the Amani saw a chance to take their land back for themselves, and initiated the conflict known as the Troll Wars. Unfortunately for the Amani, the high elves allied with the neighboring human tribes to fight back, dealing devastating blows to the Amani's numbers and forcing them even further out of their lands, establishing the border at Atal'Aman that we know today.
In more recent years, during the decades prior to the opening of the Dark Portal, the Amani had come to be led by Warlord Zul'jin, who gradually rallied their scattered tribes into a united force. He promised them not only vengeance on the elves for the land they stole, but for the loved ones they had taken from the Amani in the process as well. Torundo had been one such troll, driven out of his village by the likes of Lireesa and Lor'themar, and eventually rose to the rank of General in pursuit of vengeance.
In an attempt to discover the secrets behind the elven runestones that protected Quel'thalas, Zul'jin kidnapped a number of magisters and rangers, including characters like Liadrin, Lor'themar, and Dar'Khan Drathir, the elf who would one day cause the true downfall of Silvermoon. When the elves refused to give up their secrets, Zul'jin and his trolls brutally tortured them, painting their faces with their own blood and scarring them with memories they would never forget -- and never forgive, in Lor'themar's case.
Zul'jin suffered in turn for his actions during the events of the Second War, where his alliance with Orgrim Doomhammer and the Orcish Horde ended in catastrophic failure. Captured by the elves after their failed attempt to destroy Silvermoon, Zul'jin lost an eye to their torture, and in his efforts to escape captivity, he was forced to cut off his own arm as well. His survival only emboldened him as leader of the Amani, and he continued to rally survivors of elven violence with the promise of vengeance.
His final attempt to conquer Silvermoon would ultimately come during The Burning Crusade, where he worked with Hex Lord Malacrass to enslave the powers of their loa into troll avatars. Torundo was among the soldiers who served Zul'jin during this time, and while he had never protested, he knew in his heart that their betrayal of the loa for the sake of vengeance was a step too far. In the end, Zul'jin's attempt was halted before it could even begin, when players assaulted Zul'Aman and killed both him and his loa avatars, leading us to the loa-bereft Amani that we saw during Midnight.
Perhaps the most important note throughout all of this history is just how far back it stretches. Even by elven standards, 7,000 years is an enormous length of time, and almost no living blood elves were around for the initial conflict with the trolls, let alone any who actively partook. For the Amani, the difference is even more obvious with their average lifespans, and their connection to both the origins of their conflict and the Troll Wars are a generational history, not a personal memory.
Which brings up the question: whether the conflict started with hostile trolls, elven colonization, or any other manner of event, how do those events matter to those in the present day? Are they the cause for Torundo's village being destroyed? Are they the cause for the brutal civilian deaths at the hands of the Amani that preceded its destruction?
The Truth of Torundo's Past
That question brings us back to the present in our short story, where the heated debate over the conflict escalates until Lor'themar defies the Haranir's rules against violence and punches Torundo across his face. Despite the act of violence, Torundo takes it on the chin (literally) and tells the Haranir to excuse the outburst.
Even though he flagrantly broke the Haranir's rules, Lor'themar does not regret his actions, save for the virtue of civility it cost him. Torundo claims that to be yet another lie that Lor'themar tells himself, just like the lies about the attack on Zen'tamani Village. Rather than continue the battle of words, Lor'themar endeavors to ask Torundo to tell him the truth -- his version of the truth, at least -- of that day.
According to Torundo, the Amani warriors had not attacked civilians intentionally, but by accident thanks to a false flag maneuver by the Farstriders. By hiding weapons among a civilian caravan and using them as living shields to disguise themselves within, the Farstriders tricked the Amani warriors of Zen'tamani Village into attacking the caravan and slaughtering civilians and Farstriders alike. In truth, the reason the raiding party had been drunk and so easy to capture had been because they wanted to wash the horrors of the Farstrider trick from their minds.
The resulting slaughter of Zen'tamani Village had been equal action in the eyes of the elven public, a just retaliation for the slaughter of their own civilians. Yet just as Lireesa Windrunner had used the attacks to justify her position and rally against the Amani, Zul'jin had rallied the Amani tribes to his side with the very same reasoning: matching escalation with escalation. That very attack had led to another slaughter of civilians in Windrunner Village, which certainly led to further slaughters in Amani villages, and so on.
In the end, Lor'themar and Torundo were both high ranking military members who had devoted themselves fully to the bloody lie they had told themselves: that the pain inflicted upon them and their people justified the pain inflicted upon their enemy. The truth of the war's start mattered little to either man at this point, nor to either civilization. As they aged, they only inflicted further pain upon the next generation -- but for elves, that pain spanned centuries and millennia, not the mere decades of a troll life.
Torundo’s voice was soaked in earnestness. In sincerity. “The war’s older than either of us. We lived in the hatred of generations past. We wiped out the enemy where we found them as our friends were wiped out in turn. Horrified by it and enjoying it in its season. We died for it or learned to live with it. What else could any of us have done?”
Torundo examined his mug. “Does it matter what our war is about today? Territory or decades-old massacres or just habit? We’re both bound to it. Can’t find our way out. We don’t want to.” The Amani general offered an exhausted laugh.
“I lived for this war,” Torundo continued. “Perhaps my time as warrior ends because we make peace, or because we don’t. But I won’t live too long, regardless.” He smiled at Lor’themar, triumphant. “Time is cruel to your people in that way. From birth to death, my war won’t last a fraction of yours. Has it felt like forever? How much longer can that dignity last?”
Truthfully, Torundo did not know the exact details of the raid on Zen'tamani Village, nor the elven slaughter that preceded it. Perhaps it had been orchestrated by Lireesa Windrunner herself, or merely some low-ranking Farstrider leader. Torundo had only been a child then, and all he knew was that the people around him had never committed such crimes prior. The truth mattered less than the results: Torundo had been brought into the fold with promises of vengeance by Zul'jin, and he had contributed to the war that led to where his people are today.
Likewise, what happened as a child amidst the cycle of violence also matters less than the burgeoning peace that was occurring now, in Torundo's eyes. As an old warrior, Torundo is content in the knowledge that while he may die soon, in peace or in war. With a new generation led by Zul'jarra, the results of their conflict would be in their hands. In victory or defeat, the Amani will pass on, but the blood elves are a different story. Even if they win the war, they are cursed to live with the wounds of that cycle of violence and pass it on to future generations for far longer -- perhaps forever.
Torundo looked sympathetic. “Tell Lady Liadrin I am glad she deceived me. This conversation was a true gift, but I must leave. Extinction awaits my people, at the hands of yours or others.”
“Perhaps it does,” Lor’themar said. “I wish you the outcome you deserve.”
Torundo, already walking away, laughed loudly. “What a terrible curse. I will grant you one in return: I wish you the forever you think you want.”
And then he was gone.
Lor’themar sat alone, watching the lodge empty its patrons. The word forever hung in his mind in a way he did not like. And the last sip lay bitter on his tongue.
“A terrible curse,” he agreed softly.
Peace In Our Time?
With the conflict between Zul'Aman and Quel'thalas taking a proper spotlight in Midnight, one major question has been asked throughout the expansion: will we see peace between trolls and elves?
While the conflict between the Amani and the Blood Elves is foundational to their story, it would be far from the first reconciliation of previously unreconcilable differences we've seen in recent years. The Horde and Alliance have managed to forge a lasting peace since Battle for Azeroth, the goblin cartels have de-prioritized their profit motives to rebuild Undermine, the Dragonflights have shed their alliegance to the Titans and united as a family, and even the Man'ari Eredar have been given a chance to re-integrate into Draenei society and atone for their millennia of genocidal actions.
Perhaps most notably in recent times is the unity forged between the scattered elves of Azeroth. As much as elves and trolls have a history of conflict, the elves have just as much of a history warring with their own kin. The very foundation of Quel'thalas came from the high elves being exiled by the night elves, and the modern-day high elves have had a violent history against their blood elf kin throughout WoW's various expansions.
Despite this, all of these groups were able to set aside their differences and unite against Xal'atath and the threat she posed to the Sunwell in Midnight. More than that, they were able to pull pieces of their cultures together to transform the corrupted Darkwell into the Dawnwell as a symbol of their unity. While this choice has been very controversial among the fanbase for a number of reasons, it seems to be a sign that WoW is looking to put past conflicts to a permanent rest, and the question of if that will apply to elves and trolls has become the next big debate.
It is certainly a question brought up in 12.0.7, not only by this short story but by the reactions to Hagar's announcement of their shared ancestry. Characters like Lor'themar and Vereesa are absolutely incensed by the idea that shared ancestry would make them reconsider their hatred for the Amani, and even characters more prone to peace like Liadrin question why the haranir believed it would help matters. Ultimately, the answer seems to be a resounding no... not with the current leaders, at least.
Lor'themar Theron says: We share a lineage with the trolls? With the Amani? This... this is preposterous!
Lady Liadrin says: These are shocking revelations. But I have fought beside them, Lor'themar. We share more in common than you may think.
Lor'themar Theron says: And what now? We open our gates to them? Welcome them into the very city they have long sought to burn to the ground?
Lady Liadrin says: No one is suggesting that. This is merely a new perspective, a chance to--
Vereesa Windrunner says: Liadrin. You of all people should understand the pain and loss the Amani have inflicted upon us.
Vereesa Windrunner says: They destroyed our homes and slaughtered our families. They captured and tortured us when we fought back.
Lady Liadrin says: I know, Vereesa. Believe me, I know. It... has not been easy for me to move past my anger. But it is a path worth walking.
Vereesa Windrunner says: Then I admire your grace. You will find I am not as forgiving as a paladin of the Light.
Vereesa Windrunner says: I will never regard the Amani as kin. Not after they robbed me of my true family.
Vereesa Windrunner says: Selama ashal'anore, Blood Knight. Justice for our people.
The Next Generation of Leaders
As Torundo points out in this story, the cycle of violence only lasts as long as the new generation chooses to perpetuate it. For the Amani, that seems to be coming to an end with Zul'jarra, who has found common ground with Liadrin and an understanding that her grandfather's hostilities hurt her own people just as much if not more than the blood elves.
Following the bloody confrontation at the end of Eversong Wood's leveling story and the subsequent aid offered by Liadrin in Zul'Aman, the Amani have entered into a tense ceasefire of outright hostilities, for the moment. Zul'jarra even made the decision to aid Liadrin and the blood elves at the Sunwell, though she was unable to muster more than a few warriors from the Amani to do so. For the Amani, the cycle of violence may be slow to halt, especially with no recompense given by the blood elves for the land they have stolen over the millennia, but Zul'jarra seems to be the start of a new generation of peace.
Is it the same for the blood elves, though? Unlike the Amani, their leaders do not experience the same turnover of elders aging out of their roles and being replaced by a new generation. Their last King, Anasterian Sunstrider, was the very same ruler that led Quel'thalas against the Amani during the Troll Wars where their current borders are established 3,000 years ago, and it took the full might of the Scourge and near-annihilation of his people to remove him from that role. Since then, Lor'themar has proven himself a highly competent ruler, and shows no signs of leaving his role through age in the same way an Amani might -- and yet his hatred for his neighbors clearly remains.
In the meantime, however, Midnight has shown a number of newer characters rise to the forefront of Blood Elf culture. Though far from young, Liadrin has taken the initiative to put aside her hatreds and forge a personal bond with Zul'jarra despite her grandfather's actions. Arator has likewise become the face of overcoming hatreds and prejudices of all kinds throughout Midnight, being the one responsible for preventing the violence at the end of Eversong's story from escalating.
Both Arator and Liadrin have also come to see the conflict beyond the immediate back-and-forth that Lor'themar and Torundo discuss in this short story. Liadrin may be one of the first blood elves to truly learn about Amani culture, and Arator directly remarks upon how the denial of access to their sacred lands makes for an understandable reason for the Amani to keep fighting. The root cause of these issues is unlikely to be addressed by someone like Lor'themar, but could it be addressed by a member of the next generation of elves?
Lor'themar has historically disliked the role of politician, despite his aptitude for it, and he has had a number of issues with his wife Thalyssra over the conflicting nature between their role as political leaders and their marriage to each other. His position as Regent-Lord was never intended to be permanent, and the blood elves have never truly discussed what their leadership structure will look like in the years to come. Lor'themar may never leave his office through age like the Amani, but will he perhaps leave it by choice?
That question is one that remains to be seen, especially as the story of Midnight progresses further in 12.1 and beyond. Peace between Amani and Blood Elves, especially at the cost of such beloved leaders like Lor'themar, would certainly be a controversial choice to make. WoW has already seen story after story end with tensions resolved and peace established, and one has to wonder what conflict will remain for these races to explore in future expansions as a result.
In the end, however, this short story does not have nearly as grand of a scope. It examines the conflict in the here and now, what motivates both sides to continue the cycle of hatred, and how it affects elves and trolls in different ways. What did you think of this short story? Did you have any additional thematic insights not covered here? Let us know!
Read or listen to the short story The Bitter Truth here.
