Quick Overview
Shadowfang Keep stands above Pyrewood Village in southern Silverpine Forest. The wizard Arugal summoned worgen to fight the Scourge, but the creatures escaped his control and helped destroy the keep's old household. Arugal came to regard the beasts as his children and made the haunted fortress his refuge. Its story is one of desperate wartime magic that traded one terror for another.
Full History
The Scourge's advance through Lordaeron left neighboring human lands desperate to defend themselves. Arugal, a mage linked to Gilneas, sought a weapon against the undead and turned to dangerous rites that brought worgen into the world. The new soldiers were fierce, but once their violence slipped beyond control they ceased to distinguish between the kingdom's enemies and the people they had been called to defend.
Shadowfang Keep became the seat of that catastrophe. The household of Baron Silverlaine fell, and its ghosts remained amid the shattered corridors. Above Pyrewood, Arugal withdrew into the fortress with the worgen he had unleashed, calling them his children while the surrounding village endured a growing curse. Silverpine's fear was therefore not simply fear of monsters in the forest; it was fear of the failed defense that had created them.
At the original-era snapshot, the keep is still the haunted fortress of Arugal and his pack. Later expansions revised the surrounding history and its occupants, but those developments do not belong in a patch 1.1 portrayal.
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Through History
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Further Reading
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