The Library - Rise of the Horde

Warcraft's history abounds with heroic tales, fierce battles and painful losses that have had a lasting impact on the world of Azeroth. This series, "The Library," presents fiction depicting some of the Warcraft universe's most epic moments and greatest mysteries.

The proud orcs once lived peacefully among the verdant hills and valleys of Draenor, hunting game, honoring their ancestors, and treating the regions they called home with the utmost reverence. These times became but a distant memory as a new power rose, conquering everything in its path and striking terror in Draenor's denizens with the bone-chilling war cry "For the Horde!"

In Christie Golden's Rise of the Horde, Warchief Thrall tells how the honorable orc clans were forged into the bloodthirsty Horde through the machinations of Kil'jaeden and the Burning Legion. This tragic story unfolds around the friends Durotan and Orgrim Doomhammer, who witness as their people fall victim to deceit and treachery.

Intertwined with the orcs' tale are the draenei, a courageous race that settled on Draenor after being pursued by the Burning Legion for millennia. Seeking to eradicate the elusive draenei once and for all, Kil'jaeden manipulates the orcs into drinking the blood of the pit lord Mannoroth, thus enslaving them to the will of the Legion. Infused with demonic power, the blood-cursed orcish Horde sets out to exterminate the draenei, causing vast destruction throughout the lands of Draenor as a result.

Rise of the Horde recounts how these dreadful events forever changed the orcs—with some of them losing their brown skin color for a demonic green—and continue to shape the fates of all those who dwell on Azeroth and Outland, the shattered realm formerly known as Draenor!