The Collapse of Those Who Deceive Themselves Takes Only One Lie

Elisande had been stripped of her power.

Ten thousand years of authority had ultimately failed to withstand the fatal threat right before her eyes. She had known from the very beginning what those "Troll spies" appearing throughout the city really were, but she had chosen the wrong way to deal with them.

This directly ignited all the conflicts that had been building up in Suramar for ten thousand years.

Elves hated Trolls more than anything else. Yet even the most cold-blooded elf needed tremendous courage to raise a blade or cast a spell after witnessing their family and friends deteriorate into Trolls under the torment of the Magic Plague.

What was more, this sort of thing had always been less about scarcity than unequal distribution.

If one family on a street suffered Magic Plague degeneration, the others might help them "retain their dignity." But when every family on the street was infected by the Magic Plague, who would dare say, "Trolls must die"? Did they think the fathers, children, mothers, and elder brothers driven nearly mad would not be the first to strangle them?

When an individual problem became a collective problem, a storm of ideological reform would arrive far faster than anyone could imagine.

On the night Elisande ordered the city guard to eliminate the "Troll spies" in the market district, one-third of the guards openly "rebelled" within thirty minutes of the order being issued. The chaos of that night made every elf and "Troll" who experienced it tremble in fear.

But the Magic Plague did not care about any of that.

It was a magical infectious disease, so naturally it followed both mystical and epidemiological logic. Disease and death had always been the two fairest things in the world.

So what if they were great families that had