Night draped the banks of the Huangpu River like a pale blue curtain.
In the night sky, the moon was dim and the stars sparse. The whole world seemed to have fallen asleep.
The land lay silent, and the Alterac Mountains were no exception. A gust swept through, setting the surrounding trees swaying.
Alterac City.
The capital of the Kingdom of Alterac had once been a brilliant jewel of the Eastern Kingdoms, a city with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants.
Cities in Azeroth followed a peculiar pattern. No, perhaps peculiar was not quite the right word.
It was a pattern shaped by Azeroth's environment.
In an ordinary world, people were usually scattered across the land rather than concentrated in the capital. Though a capital might have a large population, far more people lived throughout the rest of the country.
Azeroth was different. Its population distribution was the exact opposite: most people lived in and around the capital.
The Kingdom of Alterac, for instance, had once had only about a million people, yet hundreds of thousands had lived in this capital alone. The present Kingdom of Gilneas was much the same; there was little difference between them.
The pattern was identical. Only the population figures differed.
The reason lay in the monsters that filled Azeroth.
Azeroth was a world teeming with monsters. A creep could spring out of some unknown corner and swallow you whole.
Wandering monsters and monsters entrenched in the area-one after another, they made Azeroth a dangerous place.
People longed for safety, so they gathered somewhere secure, and the capital best suited that purpose.
It was much like cities in an apocalyptic world, where people clustered together and established one stronghold after another.
Alterac City, once so prosperous, had now been reduced to ruins.
There were very few