- When
- The Alliance of Lordaeron
- Where
- Hillsbrad, Hinterlands, the long march south
- Beside him
- Anduin Lothar, Khadgar, Alleria Windrunner
- Chapter
- 3 of 10
The Second War
The lion’s second
Anduin Lothar, Supreme Commander of the Alliance of Lordaeron, chose Turalyon as his lieutenant. The choice puzzled the lieutenant. There were louder paladins and older captains. What the later essays agree on is the quality Lothar wanted: faith without the blinding kind of zeal, a young mind that could change a plan while the plan was still in the field, and a man other soldiers could stand next to. Inexperience was obvious. Willingness to work harder than the obvious men was the compensation.
Two friendships date from this war and never really get replaced. Khadgar looked like an old mage and was not. He had none of the stiffness Turalyon expected from wizards, and the two of them took to each other at once. Alleria Windrunner, ranger-captain of Quel’Thalas, was the other. She was already deep in grief and in a hunter’s fury at the Horde. The attachment between paladin and ranger started in that campaign and did not become a settled life. It became the longest argument in his life, and also its center.
The fighting itself, in the public summaries, runs from Hillsbrad north toward Aerie Peak and the Wildhammer dwarves, then back south with the Alliance as the war turned. Turalyon’s job was Lothar’s job at one remove: hold the allied armies together, keep the paladins from becoming a sect inside an army, and stay close enough to the commander that a battle could be inherited. That last duty is the one the Second War actually collected on.
He was still young enough to be surprised that anyone had handed him the second place. The war did not give him a long apprenticeship. By the time the Alliance reached Blackrock, the lieutenant was the man who would have to answer if the lion fell. Everyone around him, including him, seems to have known that without quite saying it in a way the novels let us quote cleanly. The next chapter is that answer.
Alleria belongs in this war and not only in the family chapter, because the attachment is forged while both of them are useful and furious and not yet a household. She is hunting a Horde that has burned her homeland. He is trying to be a second who does not outshine the lion. The romance the posters remember is, in the books, mostly interruption: grief, rank, and a campaign that keeps moving. What survives those interruptions is the fact they keep choosing the same road, including the road through the portal, including the road that leaves their child behind. The Second War does not marry them. It makes every later separation a variation on a march they already knew how to take.