The return

Commander, then regent

Back on Azeroth he fought as an Alliance commander in the Fourth War. At the Battle for Stromgarde he was one of the Alliance leaders, and the battle went their way. After the war, Anduin Wrynn named him Lord Commander of the Alliance forces. The task attached to the title was the capture of Sylvanas Windrunner. The family irony does not need underlining. He took the work.

Then Anduin was taken by the Mawsworn. With the king gone, the House of Nobles backed Turalyon as regent and protector of Stormwind. A man who had rebuilt the city once, as Lothar’s heir, was holding it again for a Wrynn who could not. He was still High Exarch. He was still Lord Commander. Regent was the title that put him in the Keep and in the arguments about what the Alliance was allowed to do while its king was a prisoner in another cosmology.

The king’s return did not snap the regency back into a simple coronation. In the account given by the novel that leads into Midnight, Anduin is in Stormwind again and has not taken the crown back up. Genn Greymane is the one holding the city, because Turalyon is away on the war that book is about. A wedding between Turalyon and Alleria is prepared in that same story, in Suramar, and does not happen. They had never formally married in the thousand years before it. The chronicle does not promote them to husband and wife to make the sentences easier.

What the regency shows, underneath the offices, is the same appointment Lothar made. When the obvious king is absent, the Alliance keeps handing the chair to the paladin who can be endured by priests, nobles, and soldiers at once. He is good at the chair. The chair keeps him from the people he would rather be standing next to, and the next war does not ask his permission.

Stromgarde is the battle that should not be skipped on the way to the throne room. The Fourth War’s argument about who owns the Arathi highlands ends, on the Alliance side of that fight, with Turalyon among the commanders and the field taken. It is the first large proof, after Argus, that the High Exarch can still win an Azeroth war that is about land and flags rather than the Nether. The Lord Commander title comes after that proof. People who start his modern life at the regency miss the sequence: a battle, a commission, a missing king, a chair. The chair is the last step, not the personality.

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