On the first day of the new year, after a month adrift on the Great Sea, Eileen's squad finally reached Riplash Shore on schedule.
Eileen led her squad to spend the night in a human village near the coast, planning to continue north the next day.
The locals called the wilderness beneath the glacial world the Borean Tundra. After the Arathor Empire fractured, many nobles with resources at their disposal voluntarily abandoned their homes in the Eastern Kingdoms. Following rough maps left by their ancestors, they took food and the people of their domains to the northern continent in search of somewhere to survive.
The first nobles to set foot on Northrend had been deeply traditional. They refused to associate with wealthy merchants, much less head south to establish kingdoms with the nobles who had betrayed the empire.
Yet these nobles of the Arathor Empire had lacked the power to prevent its collapse. All they could do was take their noble bloodlines into unknown lands.
The Borean Tundra had originally belonged to the Frost Trolls, with outlying clans of the Zandalari tribes controlling the region.
After the first pathfinders landed on the continent and established villages and towns, they fought more than a decade of Troll Wars before finally purging the troll forces from the Borean Tundra.
Most nobles of the Arathor Empire had come from the military. Even centuries later, their martial traditions endured in the villages, where sharp weapons and arrowheads could be found in almost every household.
The village near Riplash Shore was small, numbering no more than a hundred households at most.
The people living in the Borean Tundra were close-knit. The village's young men had voluntarily formed a militia to hunt yaks and other animals in the northern tundra.
According to the locals, the Borean