- When
- The expedition, and the years Azeroth thought them dead
- Where
- The Dark Portal, Draenor
- Beside him
- Khadgar, Alleria, Danath Trollbane, Kurdran Wildhammer
- Chapter
- 5 of 10
The Sons of Lothar
Through the portal
The Second War ended with a portal still in the world. Turalyon led the Alliance expedition that went through it: the Sons of Lothar, named for the man whose sword he had lifted. Khadgar went. Alleria went. Danath Trollbane and Kurdran Wildhammer went, with the forces they could bring. On the other side was Draenor, already damaged by the Horde’s own warlocks. They won battles there. The winning did not hold.
Before he left, he was a father. Arator was born in the months before the expedition. Turalyon and Alleria left the child with Vereesa Windrunner, Alleria’s sister, against the chance that the march through the portal was a march that did not come home. That chance is what happened. Ner’zhul’s spell tore open more portals than a world can survive. Draenor came apart. The Sons destroyed the Dark Portal’s stone frame on their side to cut Azeroth free of the wreck. In the tearing, Turalyon and Alleria were separated from the others and went through a rift.
Azeroth did the decent thing and the wrong one. It presumed them dead. Statues in Stormwind’s Valley of Heroes would say so. Danath, Khadgar, and Kurdran were found again in later years, on the shattered world. Turalyon and Alleria were not among them. Their last widely known act, in the long gap, was the kind of act he would choose: a memorial for Lothar, raised on the far side of the portal. Then silence, long enough that their son grew up under other roofs.
The thousand years people mention later are not Azeroth’s years in a neat one-to-one. For the kingdoms, a generation passed and then another. For the two who fell through the rift, the war did not pause. The chapter after this one is that other clock. This chapter ends where the Alliance thought the story ended: two names on a wall of heroes, a child in Quel’Thalas, and a portal that no longer led to them.
Kurdran Wildhammer belongs in the list beside Danath and should not be smoothed into “the others.” The Sons were a company with more than one people in it: human paladin, human mage, elven ranger, Wildhammer gryphon rider, Stromgarde fighter. Turalyon’s command was an Alliance in miniature, which is why he can later sit over Alliance armies without looking like a man who only ever led paladins. The rift does not take that company evenly. Recovery, when it comes, recovers a remnant. The two who are missing are the ranger and the priest-turned-general, which is also the couple, which is also why their son’s questions and the Valley of Heroes end up telling the same story from opposite sides of the stone.
