Traces the aftermath of Cataclysm-induced disasters through Azeroth, where an all-out war erupts between the Horde and Alliance and threatens to consume both factions.

Autorentext

Michael A. Stackpole is an award-winning novelist, game designer, computer game designer, podcaster, screenwriter, and graphic novelist. He’s had more than forty-five novels published, the best known of those being the New York Times bestselling Star Wars books I, Jedi and Rogue Squadron. He has an asteroid named after him and, since undertaking to write Vol’jin: Shadows of the Horde, spends a lot of his spare time "leveling up!" 

Klappentext

A brand-new novel set in the universe of the record-breaking, internationally bestselling video game World of Warcraft!

War is coming.

Vol’jin, courageous leader of the Darkspear tribe: his strength and cunning are unmatched even among the Horde’s most exalted champions. Now on the legendary continent of Pandaria, the troll chieftain faces his greatest trial yet, one that may redefine his purpose in the World of Warcraft.

Warchief Garrosh’s assassins strike at Vol’jin, leaving him at death’s door. But fate smiles on the wounded Darkspear leader when renowned brewmaster Chen Stormstout transports him to the safety of an isolated mountain monastery. There, Vol’jin wrestles with old hatreds smoldering between the Alliance and the Horde as he struggles to recover alongside a mysterious human soldier.

Yet this is only the beginning of Vol’jin’s worries. Soon, he becomes embroiled in an invasion of Pandaria launched by the Zandalari, revered trolls driven by dreams of conquest and power. This ancient tribe offers Vol’jin a chance to seize the glory that is the birthright of all trolls...an offer made even more tempting after Garrosh’s brazen treachery.

Amid these troubling events, Vol’jin is rocked by intense visions depicting his race’s grand history. As he questions where his loyalties lie, he knows he must make a choice about his own destiny that could save his people or damn them to languish under Garrosh’s heel in the Shadows of the Horde.

Leseprobe
World of Warcraft: Vol’jin: Shadows of the Horde

1

Brewmaster Chen Stormstout couldn’t think of anything he didn’t like. There certainly were some things he liked less than others. For example, he wasn’t terribly fond of waiting for his latest brew to ferment and mature to the point where he could sample it. That wasn’t because he was anxious to know how it tasted. He had that figured out already—it would be fantastic. What he liked less about waiting was that it gave him all sorts of time to think of new brews, with new ingredients, and he wanted to dive right in and work on them.

But brewing took time and care. With the equipment at the brewery fully involved in the last batch, waiting to develop a new batch was his only option. That meant he had to find something to do by way of distraction, otherwise waiting and planning and brewing things up in his mind would drive him crazy.

Out in the world, in the lands of Azeroth, finding distraction had been easy. There was always someone who didn’t like you, or a hungry creature that wanted to eat you—and discouraging both did wonders to occupy an idle mind. And then there were places that had once been, or were becoming, something else that might be again what they were. On his travels he’d seen many of those places and more, and had even helped make some into something.

Chen sighed and looked toward the center of the sleepy fishing village. There his niece, Li Li, was entertaining a dozen of Binan Village’s cubs—most of them residents, some of them refugees. Chen was pretty sure she had intended to tell them stories of her travels on Shen-zin Su, the Great Turtle, but this plan had gone awry. Or maybe she was still telling a story but had enlisted their aid in acting out a scene. Clearly the story of a fight, and one that apparently involved her being swarmed over by a pack of young pandaren.

“Is everything going well, Li Li?”

The slender girl somehow surfaced from amid a boiling sea of black and white fur. “Perfectly well, Uncle Chen!” The frustration in her eyes belied her words. She reached down, plucked one scrawny boy from the pack, and tossed him aside, then disappeared beneath a wave of shrieking cubs.

Chen thought to step in but hesitated. Li Li was in no real danger and she was a strong-willed girl. If she needed help, she’d ask for it eventually. To intervene before that would make her think he doubted she could take care of herself. She’d sulk for a bit, and he just hated when she did that. She’d also be outraged and then would go do something to prove she could take care of herself, and that might land her in even greater trouble.

Though that was his primary line of reasoning, the whispers and tutting from the two Chiang sisters gave him further cause to hold back. The two of them were old enough to remember when Liu Lang had first departed Pandaria—or so they said. Though their fur ran much more to white than black, save where they darkened it around their eyes, Chen assumed they weren’t quite that old. They’d spent all their lives in Pandaria, and very little of them in the company of those who had lived on the Wandering Isle. They’d developed opinions of those who “chased the turtle,” and Chen had taken a delight in confounding them by acting against type.

Li Li, in their eyes, was purely one of the turtle’s wild dogs. Impulsive and practical, quick to action and a bit prone to overestimation of her own abilities, Li Li was a fine example of a pandaren accepting the philosophy of Huojin. It was people of such an adventurous spirit who had departed on the turtle or adventured in Outland. Such conduct, in the minds of the Chiang sisters, simply was not to be condoned or given any credit.

Nor were those who did such things.

Chen, were he of a nature to dislike things, certainly would dislike the Chiang sisters. He’d actually taken a liking to them. In addition to fixing up the Stormstout Brewery and concocting fantastic beverages, he’d wandered Pandaria to learn more about the place he’d determined would be his home. He’d seen them, two maiden sisters, struggling with a small garden patch that had gone untended during the yaungol siege, and had offered to help.

They’d not so much as replied to him, but he’d pitched in anyway. He repaired fences and weeded. He laid down new stones for the path to their door. He entertained their great-grandcubs by breathing fire. He swept, hauled water, and piled up firewood. He did that under their disapproving stares and only because, beneath it all, he read disbelief in their eyes.

He’d worked long and hard without their speaking a word to him before he first heard their voices. They didn’t speak to him or with him or even really at him. They spoke toward him while speaking to each other. The elder had said, “It is the sort of day that tiger gourami would be nice.” The younger merely nodded.

Chen knew it was a command, and he complied. He did so carefully. He fished three gourami out of the ocean. The first fish he threw back. The last one he kept for the sisters, and the largest he gave to a refugee fishwife and her five cubs because her husband was still one of the missing.

He’d known that giving the sisters the first fish would have been seen as a sign of his being hasty. To give them all three would show he was prone to proud displays of excess. To give them the …