A Choice

Winter mornings were always harder to endure than nights. The Lordaeron encampment lay in silence, but between the rows of crude barracks, squads of soldiers on duty continued to patrol their assigned routes. The heavy tread of their boots and the clatter of their armor carried into the distance through the thin morning mist.

Inside the small fortress at the center of the camp, on the second floor, the hall where they held their daily meetings was cold. The firewood in the large hearth had burned low long ago, leaving only a few scattered sparks in the embers, which were nearly dead. The smell of burning wood that had filled the hall had almost faded, while the biting cold steadily ate away at the warmth indoors.

Feeling the temperature drop, the young commander, his eyes bloodshot, pulled the blanket around his shoulders and shivered. After working through the night, Maxwell Dala yawned and sank deeper into the soft cushions, going over the night's work in his mind.

It had been about half a month since the first battle of Lordaeron's campaign against the valley where Zul'Aman stood. They had captured the enemy's acting commander at the cost of a large number of Gnoll cannon fodder and a third of their catapults.

On the third day after that victory, before the five-hundred-strong support convoy escort made up of mid-tier warriors—which headquarters had assigned to Northland Fortress—had even reached its post, the leader of the Mossflayer Trolls led more than a thousand of his elite warriors in a nighttime raid on a convoy carrying supplies.

As a competent battlefield commander, Maxwell had, of course, made sure the supply lines were protected. But with the enemy matching them in numbers and holding the advantage of terrain, Lordaeron's soldiers had paid dearly for being caught by surprise.

Though every human soldier fought with all his might and held his ground to the death, they still couldn't protect all the supplies against the Troll elites. According to the post-battle tally, the Trolls had failed to achieve all their objectives, but had still destroyed at least a third of the supplies. If Alvin hadn't sent out the only guard unit he could command freely, things might have gone much worse.

Still, there was good news. The Goblin-made high-explosive bombs had proved devastating in the counterattack. Hundreds of Troll warriors had been left on the battlefield by Lordaeron's blades and the engineering products of the Steamwheedle Cartel.

Many more Mossflayer Trolls had been wounded by the explosions and flames from those inconspicuous little devices. Their commander, Kalekin, had reportedly dismissed the danger and been injured when a bomb burst in his face. Other Troll warriors had carried him off the battlefield.

Given the situation, at least for the time being, the wounded Trolls wandering through the forest wouldn't be able to target the supplies again, now that the convoy had a larger escort. Archbishop Faol, who was overseeing supply distribution at Northland Fortress, had also dispatched an additional shipment after the battle. The shortage of clothing and food that headquarters had feared never materialized, and a potential crisis was averted.

After that, Maxwell decisively increased the commitment to the front. The Gnoll cannon fodder from the Redpine and Mudsnout clans had been expended in great numbers, and the human soldiers of Lordaeron had suffered some losses as well. But the sudden escalation inflicted even greater casualties on the Mossflayer Trolls, who were trapped in Zul'Aman and had lost their original commander.

Before the vast valley, the long slope had become pitted and scarred, a veritable road of blood. Warriors of three different races had been thrown into this enormous meat grinder, their hot blood staining the dust-covered hillside a glaring black and red.

Every clear day, thunderous battle cries rang through the forest. The Gnolls' howls, the Trolls' roars, and the humans' shouts joined to form a mournful Warsong over the blood-soaked battlefield. Like a dirge for the dead, it echoed above the woods long after the fighting, accompanying every warrior locked in combat and bearing witness to each moment between life and death.

But the problem troubling the seasoned commander wasn't the escalating fighting or mounting casualties. From the start of the war until now, the total number of human soldiers killed and wounded was still lower than the number of people who died or were injured each year in Darrowmere Forest because of wandering Gnolls and raiding Trolls.

In the fierce fighting, the large number of Gnoll cannon fodder had become, as Prince Alvin had hoped, a heavy weight on the Kingdom of Lordaeron's side of the scales of victory, profoundly changing the course of the war—

To the cautious human leadership, the sharp decline in casualties was an enormous achievement. To the common soldiers, a far better chance of surviving the battlefield was an even more immediate benefit. As for the Gnoll warriors who gave their lives to clear a path for the Kingdom of Lordaeron, most people simply offered a quiet word of thanks in their hearts before using force and temptation to send these two-legged beasts back to their deaths on the battlefield.

After all the slaughter and fighting, Zul'Aman's defenses were growing weaker by the day. The allied Gnoll and human warriors had once been driven back down the slope every time they attacked. In recent days, they had managed to reach the defensive ramparts at the valley entrance. The tide had turned in their favor.

One by one, the Mossflayer Trolls threw themselves in the way of the kingdom's advance, fighting to the death. But if they held out a little longer, the might of the Kingdom of Lordaeron would eventually shatter the Trolls' delusions. They only needed a little more time!

The young commander could almost see victory beckoning just ahead. But at this critical moment, an urgent military dispatch from Northland Fortress sent the renowned warrior of the Darrowmere region plunging from heaven into the abyss.

Stormwind City in the south had fallen. Anduin Lothar, the last descendant of Emperor Thoradin, was sailing north with Varian Wrynn, the surviving prince of the Kingdom of Stormwind, and a large number of refugees. They had passed through Menethil Harbor and were about to land on the southern coast.

The continent of Lordaeron would soon face a savage, bloodthirsty foreign enemy. The kingdom's leaders, who needed to make preparations for the impending Orc threat, had issued a final ultimatum to the troops still gathered at Zul'Aman, fighting the Mossflayer Trolls: end the war as soon as possible!

Further increasing their commitment and forcibly escalating the war would mean more casualties among Lordaeron's young men. Yet Maxwell was even more worried that the Gnoll warriors, pushed almost to their breaking point, might be unable to endure it and rebel. They might not do much damage to the heavily guarded troops, but the loss of their cannon fodder and the resulting blow to morale could change the course of the entire war—or even tip the balance of power.

Now the commander was caught in a dilemma: gamble with the lives of those young men, or simply halt a war that might not be won anytime soon?