Zuluhed, his jaw clenched so tight you could hear his teeth grind, finally snapped, "No one can go back to the past, Warchief! That ship has sailed!"
Orgrim merely spread his hands, a gesture of weary resignation. "True enough. But I can leave my scars, my lessons learned, my blood-soaked insights, to the next Warchief. The one who can truly lead the Horde out of this pit we're hell-bent on digging ourselves into. The one who can truly lead the Horde to a prosperity that isn't built on a mountain of corpses."
Zuluhed's eyes narrowed to slits, suspicion oozing from him like fresh lava. "Are you going to take the coward's way out, Warchief? Are you planning to throw in the towel and abandon us?"
"Neither," Orgrim replied, a grim, unsettling smile playing on his lips. "I intend to leave as much vitality for the Horde as possible, in my own damn way."
No living soul in Azeroth, save one, had the faintest clue what twisted plan was brewing in Orgrim Doomhammer's mind. That one soul? Duke.
Back in the Alliance camp, Anduin Lothar, the Supreme Commander of the Alliance forces, found himself butting heads with Duke for the very first time. It was a clash of titans, a battle of wills that threatened to shake the very foundations of their alliance.
After the glorious retaking of Stormwind City, Anduin had rushed back north to the main Alliance force. However, when he received a series of disturbing reports from the liberated regions of Elwynn Forest, his brow furrowed so deeply it looked like a freshly plowed field.
At this point, the hundreds of thousands of Alliance troops had been split into two formidable groups. The main force, a veritable tide of steel and magic, was gathered in the scorched, barren lands east of the Searing Gorge, poised for a head-on assault. The other group, a smaller but no less potent contingent of fifty thousand, primarily composed of stout dwarves, was massing in the Loch Modan area, near Ironforge. Their plan: to traverse the colossal, age-old tunnels that the dwarves had painstakingly carved through the very belly of the mountains, emerging directly into the Searing Gorge to flank the main force.
Just as they were about to unleash their full-scale, devastating attack, Anduin, alone in his command tent in the Barrens, wrestled with a heavy decision. After much deliberation, he decided to use magic to directly summon Duke, bypassing all protocol.
Duke arrived, as if on cue, sauntering into the tent with a casual grin. "What's the big fuss, Anduin? Worried about the army I'm commanding down in Stormwind, are we?" He stopped short, his grin faltering, as he realized Anduin was the only one present.
Anduin's face was a mask of grim determination, a stark contrast to his usual amiable demeanor. "In Goldshire, in Northshire, and near the Eastvale Lumberyard," he began, his voice low and strained, "my people have received chilling reports that you've allowed your men to massacre orc women and children."
Duke's heart gave a single, hard thump. The moment of reckoning had arrived, but he felt not a shred of regret. "Really?" he drawled, his tone chillingly calm. "I merely instructed every warrior to visit the settlements that the orcs had turned into charnel houses. To witness the remains of human women, still clutching their infants, cleaved in half by orcish axes. Call it… a field trip."
"You are stirring up a cauldron of hatred among our people against the orcs!" Anduin thundered, his voice rising. "I don't give a hill of beans about targeting orc warriors, but allowing the slaughter of orc women and children? That flies in the face of the very spirit of chivalry!"
Duke didn't miss a beat. "First," he countered, his voice dripping with sarcasm, "pray tell, why in the Light's name should we show kindness to a barbaric race that launched a full-blown genocide against humanity? Second, if you insist on letting the orcs' women and children skip merrily into the sunset, then ten or twenty years down the road, when a fresh batch of those green-skinned cubs grow up and raise their axes to butcher humans again, what then? Do you want us to tell His Royal Highness Varian, 'Oh, Your Highness, for the sake of chivalry, you simply must not kill the orc women and children! It'll make it so much easier for those little monsters to grow up and slaughter your people again!'?"
Duke's brutal, unvarnished words hit Anduin like a fully loaded siege engine, leaving him utterly speechless.
"Anduin," Duke pressed, his voice dropping to a dangerous growl, "we are facing an utterly brutal, barbaric collection of races. Don't you dare forget that orcs, trolls, and ogres are all part of that lovely little Horde package!"
"But if we abandon the very virtues that define us as humans," Anduin argued, his voice laced with desperation, "then what's the difference between us and the orcs?!"
"Virtue," Duke scoffed, a wry twist to his lips, "is a lofty ideal, destined to be out of reach for most. I don't deny the nobility of chivalry, but I, my dear Commander, am a wizard of extreme practicality. I only recognize races and civilizations that can be reasoned with. Anduin, you can strip me of my position as Deputy Commander of the Alliance, you can even convince Llane to revoke my dukedom, but if you want to stop me from clearing out the orcs, then you'd better bring two hundred thousand troops to do it yourself. Because I'm not stopping."
Duke's defiant words hung heavy in the air, leaving Anduin wrestling with a profound, soul-wrenching contradiction. Anduin knew, deep in his gut, that he couldn't possibly tell the Alliance to let go of their hatred. Most of the eleven nations in the Alliance had been put through the wringer, brutalized and ravaged by the Horde. How many countless human lives had been snuffed out by those green-skinned monsters?
However, allowing these Alliance soldiers to exact their revenge willy-nilly, to slaughter without restraint, was a direct violation of the sacred knight's oath. It was a moral tightrope walk that threatened to break him.
Faced with Duke's iron-clad resolve, Anduin knew that if he couldn't sway the wizard, there was no stopping the brutal tide of what amounted to a systematic extermination.
At that opportune moment, as Duke had half-expected, King Llane Wrynn strode into the tent, his expression grave.
Llane spoke earnestly, his voice calm and measured. "Duke, I have no desire to directly refute your actions with lofty moral principles. I simply wish to hear your complete, unvarnished views on the Horde."
Duke fell silent for a few agonizing seconds, then spoke, his voice heavy with grim certainty. "Do you know how many tribes are still lurking on this continent, hidden away like rats in the walls? Do you know how many forgotten corners of this land could provide a breeding ground for the Horde to thrive again, if we don't clean out as many of them as humanly possible? No! You don't know, but I – I know it all, down to the last grimy detail!"
Anduin and Llane's faces instantly hardened, their expressions turning grim.
One by one, Duke pointed them out on the map, his finger tracing grim lines across the parchment: the hidden Warsong Clan, the isolated Frostwolf Clan, and the myriad of troll clans that might yet throw their lot in with the Horde. Kargath, Flame Peak, Stonard, Grom'gol… These Horde strongholds, which were mere footnotes in Duke's gaming memories, took on a sinister new meaning when laid bare before the tactical genius of Anduin Lothar.
Gazing at these wild, untamed lands, largely ignored by most, which would inevitably become prime breeding grounds for the Horde's resurgence if left unchecked, Anduin and Llane were finally chilled to the bone.
Duke's final argument, delivered with the precision of a master surgeon, dealt the death blow to Anduin's lingering moral qualms: "Think about it, Anduin. Did Emperor Thoradin, the founder of Arathor, ever bother to count the women and children of the trolls as 'the weak' when he cleansed the lands of their menace?"
In this era, no matter their personal beliefs, every human in the Alliance looked to Emperor Thoradin as the ultimate paragon of leadership. The spirit of chivalry, while noble and admirable, simply couldn't hold a candle to the pragmatic, brutal effectiveness of the legendary leader of mankind. The choice of who was more important was painfully obvious.
Lothar was, indeed, a man of profound nobility, and Duke had no desire to shatter his core beliefs. But Duke knew he had to do this. Because, according to the grim script of history, after the Alliance's hard-won victory, King Terenas Menethil would implement a catastrophically misguided policy that explicitly forbade the Alliance from massacring tribal prisoners.
This, Duke knew, was Terenas's Machiavellian scheme: to bleed the rest of the Alliance dry, to consume them in the name of a hollow chivalry. Unless they found a damn good excuse to bail on the Alliance, they would be utterly crushed by the ever-increasing cost of housing and feeding these Horde prisoners. The very nations that truly embodied the spirit of chivalry and humanitarianism would become the ones suffering the most. And King Terenas, who had originally intended to play both ends against the middle and profit from everyone else's misfortune, would himself fall spectacularly after encountering the corrupted Prince Arthas.
Duke finally understood.
He hated the savage, old Horde with every fiber of his being and wanted nothing more than to wipe every single one of them from the face of Azeroth. Unfortunately, orcs were like cockroaches – you could never truly kill them all. It was impossible to eradicate the Horde entirely from such a vast world. So, his only recourse was to drastically reduce the living space of the new Horde and do everything in his power to keep them under a tight leash.
He wouldn't give them the chance to shatter the Alliance at a moment's notice, nor would he tolerate some loudmouth chieftain making a grandstanding roar that ruined the curb appeal of their cities and harmed the Alliance's good name.
But that was a problem for another day, a distant concern. More immediately, Duke's laser focus was on the final, cataclysmic battle of the Second Dark Portal War. In that battle, according to the original, tragic history, Duke's most respected Alliance hero, the legendary Anduin Lothar…
Would be killed by Orgrim Doomhammer!!