World of Warcraft
In the frozen silence of Northrend, where ancient civilizations once thrived beneath stone and ice, a conflict unfolded that would forever reshape the fate of the continent. Long before the living kingdoms of Azeroth grasped the true scope of the Scourge’s menace, the land itself bore witness to a quieter, more devastating war. This was a struggle waged not upon open fields, but through cavernous depths and glacial strongholds, where resilience met inevitability and survival demanded terrible sacrifice. Not merely a clash between undead and living, the War of the Spider was a reckoning between ambition and endurance, between ancient empires and a power newly born of shadow and sorcery. Its echoes linger still in broken ziggurats and hollowed tunnels, reminders of a kingdom that dared to stand against the coming winter, and of the price paid for that defiance. This is the story of how a king became a puppet, and his kingdom a shadow of the past.
Rise of the Lich King: A Prelude to War
Following his destruction upon the shattered world of Draenor, the orc shaman Ner’zhul did not find oblivion. Instead, his spirit was seized by the demon lord Kil’jaeden and bound within a prison of enchanted ice, cast across the cosmos to the desolate continent of Northrend. There, entombed yet aware, Ner’zhul was reshaped into the being that would come to be known as the Lich King. Gifted with vast psychic reach and mastery over necromancy, he was charged with forging an army of death that would one day scour Azeroth itself.
From his icy confinement, his will spread outward like frost creeping across stone. The living denizens of Northrend fell first, slain, raised, and bound into a single, unthinking host known as the Scourge. With every fallen village and shattered tribe, his influence deepened, until at last a great citadel was raised around his frozen throne in Icecrown. For a decade, the Lich King consolidated his dominion, shaping Northrend into a land of dread. Yet beneath the ice, an ancient power watched and prepared, unwilling to yield its realm without contest.
The Gathering Storm Beneath the Ice
The Nerubian Empire, an insectoid civilization descended from the aqir, had ruled the subterranean reaches of Northrend long before the Lich King’s arrival. Their cities of stone and web spanned vast underground networks, unseen by most surface dwellers. When the encroachment of undeath could no longer be ignored, the nerubians answered with decisive force. Elite warriors were dispatched through hidden tunnels toward Icecrown, striking at the heart of the Lich King’s growing domain.
To Ner’zhul’s frustration, the nerubians proved resistant to the very weapons that had ensured his dominance elsewhere. The Plague of Undeath found little purchase in their forms, and his telepathic commands, so effective against other races, faltered against their alien minds. Exploiting their mastery of subterranean warfare, the nerubians waged a relentless campaign of ambush and withdrawal, collapsing strongholds and severing supply lines before vanishing back into the earth. For a time, it seemed the Scourge had met its equal.
Yet the war strained even the vast resources of the empire. As casualties mounted, King Anub’arak sought aid beyond Azjol-Nerub, sending emissaries through ancient tunnels to Azj-Kahet, a distant sister kingdom beneath Khaz Algar. There, Queen Neferess turned away his pleas. Believing her realm too remote to draw the Scourge’s gaze, she sealed the passages between their domains and imprisoned Anub’arak’s final envoy, choosing isolation over solidarity.
The Fall of the Spider Kingdom
The Lich King answered resistance with annihilation. Legions of undead poured into the depths, led by dreadlords whose cunning matched their cruelty. Nerubian temples and ziggurats collapsed under relentless assault, burying defenders beneath their own sacred stone. Though the plague could not claim them in life, death itself offered no refuge; fallen nerubians were raised and turned against their kin.
During the chaos, King Anub’arak finally fell in battle. His resurrection as an undead crypt lord marked the empire’s true undoing. Once a symbol of unity, he became an instrument of devastation, leading the Scourge through the conquered cities and overseeing the defilement of nerubian architecture to serve the Lich King’s designs. To the survivors, he was remembered not as a fallen hero, but as the traitor king, his name forever entwined with their ruin.
Even as their world crumbled, the nerubians acted with grim foresight. In a final gambit, their viziers released a single spider deep within the capital’s ruins, nurturing it with purpose and vengeance. This creature would grow into Hadronox, Spawn of Maexxna (bastard of a boss that heals itself by poisoning the players), destined to challenge the Scourge and reclaim what little could yet be defended.
Shadows Beneath the Depths
Desperation drove the nerubians ever deeper into the earth, seeking refuge and new territory beyond the Scourge’s reach. Instead, they unearthed an older horror. From the deepest caverns emerged the faceless ones, servants of the Old God Yogg-Saron, whose presence twisted stone and sanity alike. These creatures fell upon the weakened empire with merciless ferocity.
Caught between the undead above and the ancient darkness below, the Nerubian Empire brutally collapsed. Cities were abandoned or consumed, tunnels flooded with enemies, and what remained of the once-mighty kingdom was scattered and broken. With the fall of Azjol-Nerub, the War of the Spider came to its bitter conclusion, leaving the Lich King unchallenged in his dominion over Northrend.
Legacy of the War of the Spider
In the war’s aftermath, the Scourge reaped its grim rewards. Countless fallen nerubians were raised to swell the undead ranks as crypt fiends and crypt lords, their forms and ingenuity strengthening the Lich King’s armies in conflicts yet to come. Northrend fell silent beneath his rule, its last great resistance extinguished.
Yet the nerubians were not wholly erased. Scattered survivors endured in hiding, preserving fragments of their culture and memory. Among them were the Azjol-anak, who would later emerge during the renewed war against the Lich King, driven by the dream of reclaiming their ancestral home. Others fled even farther, such as the Voru’kar, who tunneled their way to distant shores and founded a secret society within Skittering Hollow (Battle for Azeroth), guarding hidden caches of eggs to ensure their people’s rebirth.
Personal Thoughts on the War of the Spider
The destructive power of the Scourge in its time shows itself in the War of the Spider, for it stands as a somber testament to the cost of defiance in the face of darkness. It was a conflict defined not by swift conquest, but by endurance, ingenuity, and the slow erosion of hope beneath unrelenting pressure. The nerubians, confronted by an enemy unyielding, fought not only to defend their territory, but to keep a hold of their identity, tradition, and the right to exist unbound by undeath or ancient gods. Though their empire fell, its legacy endured, in the architecture of the Scourge, in the monsters that still guard forgotten halls, and in the surviving descendants who remember what was lost.
Being one of my favorite enemy factions, I found myself rooting for them after diving into the story of nerubians and what fate had in store for them. Their physical designs, the underground architecture, all of those were uniquely different from any other in Azeroth and very mesmerizing to my teenage mind. I thought that had they not been heavily stepped on by the plans of the Lich King, they would’ve been a very cool enemy to center around an expansion, to dive even deeper into their culture, and it seems we are getting some nerubian action in the War Within expansion with the kingdom of Azj-Kahet, ones that split off from the main colony a long time ago. They seem to be getting mingled with the power of the Old Gods however, which may prove their downfall yet again.