Nathanos Blightcaller

Full History

Before Lordaeron collapsed under the plague, Nathanos Marris distinguished himself in a calling usually associated with the high elves of Quel’Thalas. He learned their ranger craft and gained a reputation extraordinary enough for human officers to remember it years afterward. A ranger depended on patience, knowledge of terrain, and the ability to strike enemies before they knew they were hunted. Those talents would remain recognizable even after Nathanos himself passed out of the world of the living.

The kingdom that had produced him was consumed by the Scourge. Its armies and graves swallowed soldiers, farmers, nobles, and wanderers alike. Nathanos returned as one of the undead, but he did not remain merely another soldier in a mindless host. When Sylvanas Windrunner broke from the Lich King’s control and established the Forsaken, she gathered followers capable of giving the dead a political and military purpose. Nathanos became one of her most formidable servants. The name Blightcaller announced the distance between the ranger Lordaeron had admired and the figure now feared on its ruined frontiers.

In the Eastern Plaguelands, Nathanos made the Marris Stead his stronghold. He was no ceremonial champion waiting in a distant hall. His work placed him amid the abandoned fields and hostile territories where the Forsaken, the Scarlet Crusade, the Argent Dawn, and the Scourge all struggled to survive or prevail. Undead hounds and hostile servants guarded him, and adventurers who entered his service found little warmth. He prized results and treated hesitation or incompetence as an insult.

For the Forsaken, the Blightcaller embodied a grim kind of continuity. A man trained by the high elves now served a leader who had herself been ranger-general of Silvermoon before the destruction of Quel’Thalas. Sylvanas had not simply recreated her old command, however. Her soldiers belonged to a people who could not return to the lives they had lost. Nathanos’s old skill gave the Forsaken strength, but his changed allegiance made him an enemy to those who once would have welcomed him as an ally.

The revelation reached Stormwind through the investigations of Flint Shadowmore and other surviving agents of Lordaeron. Highlord Bolvar Fordragon learned that the famous ranger was alive only in the bleak sense permitted by undeath, and that he had become the Banshee Queen’s champion. It was a personal affront as well as a strategic threat. Nathanos stands at the crossing of several tragedies: the fall of Lordaeron, the ruin of Quel’Thalas, the birth of the Forsaken, and the struggle over the Plaguelands. For one side he is a formidable protector; for the other, proof that death has turned old heroes into new adversaries.