Laudwine

“Ever heard of Hopedale? No? That’s because Laudwine happened. I don’t care what anybody says, the man is as sharp as a surgeon’s needle behind that dull stare. I believe he’s got a little Scourge in him still”.

― High Executor Crenshaw

High Executor Laudwine was a male Forsaken/Undead Construct, leader of the Sylvanas Loyalist Institute and the main antagonist of the Fourth War Campaign. Ascending to the position of Leader after his predecessor Granville Black caused scandal with a failed assault on The Lamplighters, Laudwine took Control's refusal to serve the Horde as a personal insult and attacked them without mercy.

Throughout the Fourth War, his efforts to subvert the other neutral factions were thwarted by the Agents, and he made destroying them into his own personal vendetta. He was a very difficult opponent to face head on, as he was well known for being confirmed dead multiple times only to appear again at a later date even stronger.

After Sylvanas Windrunner abandoned the Horde, the Lamplighters cornered the vestiges of the S.L.I and buried the Construct beneath his own crashing necropolis base. None really believed that Laudwine was truly gone for good, and they were proven correct when the remaining Loyalists (now baseless and decommissioned) recovered Laudwine and healed him. The former High Executor attempted one final mission in Dustwallow Marsh and was thwarted by an impromptu alliance between the Lamplighters, Grimtotem tribes and the Remnants of Theramore. With help from the Blue Dragon Sathigosa (also known as the Agent Sathira), Guardian Telrua Skyfang and Right Hand Vyrona Swiftshade were both able to terminate his physical form. However, Telrua was unable to find his soul located within his constructed body.

Through the leylines, Sathira was able to detect the location where Laudwine was able to regenerate after being killed multiple times in the past: former Scourge device called The Altar of Darkness. After the Agents tracked down the device and destroyed it, High Executor Laudwine was destroyed and his soul was cast into The Maw.

Description
Laudwine was an ogre-like mockery of a man compiled from disparate and discordant corpse pieces and empowered by the debauched sciences of the Forsaken. Each of his body parts were prime specimens, carefully picked from a multitude of races and peoples; a popular rumour being that all of the pieces were harvested personally from those foes Laudwine deemed superior after he butchered them.

Any attempt to document his physique was a meaningless, futile task as the Loyalist Leader constantly sought to ‘upgrade’ himself to the pinnacle of Forsaken potential. Thus, he appeared as an unstoppable juggernaut with arms, feet and hands imbalanced and (in some cases) scaled and furred, after harvesting from Worgen and Dragonkin. No matter what his current assemblage was, Laudwine was always lopsided and cruel in his shape, with each piece picked with the purpose to cause the maximum amount of misery to any who displeased him.

The only visible part of Laudwine that belonged to his original body is his head, though even here his ears and eyes had since been replaced. A big boned skull with a sagging fleshiness to his mottled cheeks, he had a thick wormy set of lips with a wet smile across a wide mouth. His nose was flat and piggish without cartilage, his cheeks and chin appear as gristle with errant black bristles of former stubble stabbed through the rot, and his eye sockets are squinting and close-set. In his later years, rather than the familiar Forsaken yellow glow, a pair of staring blue eyes looked out of them.

Personality
Laudwine’s thuggish close-eyed face and empty features belied a brutal cunning, lightning fast mental faculties and an appetite for gratuitous cruelty. Though his size and stature was capable of a raw amount of power and strength, his preference appeared to be in winning a battle before it had begun. Many opponents and targets who faced Laudwine underestimated him as another Abomination or Ogrelike dumb brute, only to fall afoul of his imaginative ploys and traps.

Whenever he held the advantage however, Laudwine lead from the front and unleashed his full potential with a terrifying enthusiasm. He had been shown to use weapons (both simple and martial), the Blight, razor wires, hunter’s traps and unconventional objects such as furniture, animals and other humanoid beings in his attempts to utterly destroy whoever he was facing.

Mortal Life
“Laudwine” as can likely be inferred, was not the man’s birth name and it is therefore difficult to determine a clear history when researching him. Scarce few records are available to us outside of now-plagued Capital City so this document shall draw from these sources, along with the stories Laudwine himself has told about his past. Conjecture and exaggeration are likely.

Born in Hearthglen an undetermined amount of years ago, Laudwine was the bastard child of the infamous back-alley surgeon, Edwin LeFray. LeFray was by all reports a tyrant, a bully, a conman and a drunk and his ability to practice medicine was outlawed due to “acts of indecency comparable with Troll savagery”. According to the man himself, Laudwine was deposited on the doorstep of Capital City’s orphanage in his mid-teens after his father finally abandoned him for good.

He appeared next in the conscription records of the Army of the Alliance of Lordaeron {Conscripted under the nickname Laudwine meaning ‘loud one’ in Gutterspeak slang} to fight against the Orcish Horde under Orgrim Doomhammer in the Second War. His captain and fellow soldiers recognised his aptitude in the field in both his fighting skills and for his skills in field surgery. While by all accounts a strong and capable warrior, his captain makes the observation that with each passing mission, they appeared to have tapped into an underlying sadism within the man that did not seem to abate after the battle was over.

Soldier of the Scourge
It is unknown if Laudwine was killed during the War or if this was done during the initial Scourging of Lordaeron. Details about how he was raised are difficult to ascertain. It has now been made clear that Laudwine was raised using the painful, complicated but effective Scourge ritual that tied his soul inexorably to a summoned building known as the Altar of Darkness. Based upon the phylactery ritual in the creation of a Lich, the Altar's were used on the Scourge's most dangerous commanders, including Nerubian Underkings, Constructs, Death Knights and some key Liches during the Third War. As their spirit essences were tied to the Altar, they could be resurrected countless times without tiring or wearing out, however the cost to do so was still a steep one, meaning the necromancers reserved this technique only for their strongest. As such, Laudwine's physical form was able to be worked on continuously, able to make him and his counterparts bigger and stronger in all regards while retaining their magical abilities, wits and sanity.

The Necromancers were able to replace Laudwine’s body parts with larger, more effective specimens when his original limbs sustained irreparable damage or wore out entirely. He adopted this technique himself and uses brutality and intimidation tactics to lay waste to the living with a terrifying single-minded fixation.

Forsaken Military
Though freed from Arthas’ grip by Lady Sylvanas Windrunner, Laudwine showed nothing less than slavish loyalty to her, though he bore no sign of remorse for his actions among the Scourge. For his deference and competence, the Dark Lady placed the cruel creature in an esteemed position within her Dreadguard and he proved to be one of her most effective, if horrifying, commandos. His war record contains operations in Arathi Basin, Silverpine Forest and Southshore with an extensive campaign against the Worgen in Gilneas and the Alliance in the Plaguelands.

The most famous of his achievements, both among his enemies and among the ranks of the Forsaken, was the destruction of Hopedale. The hamlet was located within the parish of Andorhal in the Western Plaguelands and a holdout for the forces of the Alliance after their defeat at The Battle of Andorhal. Sylvanas recalled her previous commander of the battle, and introduced the Deathguard to sweep the area of resistance, of which Laudwine was ostensibly in charge. According to the battle report, Executor Laudwine entered the hamlet without further attempts to negotiate while ordering his soldiers to bar the gates shut behind him. The reports do not detail what occurred next, but the aftermath states that the hamlet was entirely destroyed, the earth where it stood was scorched and blighted and his actions committed there earned the Executor the moniker of "The Butcher of Hopedale" among the rank and file soldiers.

The Dalaran Plot
Laudwine was promoted to High Executor for "exemplary conduct" during The War of Thorns and the subsequent Battle of Lordaeron, and was reassigned to a prestigious posting among the Dark Lady's newly formed Sylvanas Loyalist Institute. Under the command of Granville Black and alongside Dark Ranger Ambrose, the new High Executor was tasked with persuading neutral parties that had dealings with the Horde to fully support their war effort, or deny said efforts to the Alliance in any manner, and by any means required.

The Lamplighters were one of the key organisations that the Loyalists targeted. A strong group of qualified agents, some previously aligned to the Horde, and who had dealt cordially with the Horde in the recent past, and therefore were a lucrative target. Black himself was heard professing that he believed it would be an easy negotiation. Much to his chagrin however, the meeting with Control ended in complete failure with Control refusing to abstain from helping Alliance-aligned people and would not assign any of the Horde-aligned Agents to their cause if they did not wish to - and not a single Agent did wish to, instead wanting to retain their neutrality in the War.

A covert plot was crafted to smuggle a Blight bomb into the Seeker's Library, killing and raising all the Lamplighter Agents while sparing Control, as the Loyalists wished to add both them and their considerable information gathering resources into their own forces. The plot was uncovered and before the bomb could be detonated, the Circle and several Agents stormed the guarded alcove, slew the Loyalist Agents including Dark Ranger Ambrose. The Kirin Tor were informed of the plot, however Laudwine and Black had scoured all their documentation and fled the City with the rest of their forces before the Mages could arrest the perpetrators.

Destruction of the Seeker's Library
Granville's failure was severe enough to warrant immediate demotion, and Laudwine became the Leader of the S.L.I. Under his command, the organisation dropped any pretence of diplomacy, instead focusing on strongarm tactics to make neutral factions comply. He imposed the simple motto, "Serve in Life or Slave in Death" which, while never officially recognised, became the phrase most commonly associated with the Loyalists from this point forward.

In response to the Lamplighters' refusal and thwarting of their plot in Dalaran, he ordered the now-subordinate Black to round up and detain as many former Lamplighters as possible, interrogate them and detain them in a desolate section of Dustwallow Marsh. After learning from them as much as he could about Lamplighter protocols, Laudwine then leaked the information of Black's whereabouts in a way that the Agents would intercept it. The camp was warded heavily against teleportation out of the area, and after the Agents had arrived and busied themselves with Granville, Laudwine enacted the final stage of his plan. With most of the Agents away from Dalaran and unable to quickly return, he covertly entered his forces into the City and attacked the Seeker's Library with a minimal staff and drove to capture Control by force.

The Agents were finally able to return back to Dalaran to aid Control but although they were able to slay many of the Forsaken and even stabbed out Laudwine's eyes, his forces were proving to be overwhelming. A timely intervention by the Alliance wartime operations team known as T.A.R.O.T was able to turn the tide, allowing a wounded Control and almost all the Agents to teleport away to Ironforge, while Agent Roxany Cogwhistle stayed momentarily to burn the Library and its contents to ash, barring the Loyalists from taking advantage of any of the information stored there. Laudwine was able to capture the Gnome before she was able to make her own escape and killed her. He took her eyes from her form to replace his lost ones before tossing what remained of her body through the closing portal.

Pandaria and the Necropolis
As the Fourth War intensified, Laudwine found his task became more difficult as time wore on. The Alliance, Project T.A.R.O.T and the Lamplighters were well equipped to curtail many of his Agent's plans and several neutral factions were able to keep out of the War entirely. Furthermore, his heavy handed approach to diplomacy began to backfire. Those factions he had successfully swayed with fear and threats sabotaged their efforts, or deliberately slowed and meandered in their responsibilities when called upon and even turned their backs on the Horde when the opportunity presented itself. The S.L.I was on the verge of decommission and the High Executor required a bold plan to recoup their losses. To that end, he turned his gaze on Pandaria.

Laudwine commanded the flying base of the Loyalist's activities, the Necropolis, to reposition between the mountain ranges in Pandaria out of sight before dispatching his teams into the Dread Wastes. His plans were to convert the native Mantid into Undead, then corrupt and harvest their amber supplies to reinvigorate the Forsaken soldiers. Further, the amber could also be deployed as very volatile incendiary devices, giving the Forsaken a very potent weapon that had the potential to devastate battlefields and cities.

The Lamplighters however were alerted to his presence and uncovered his plans, much to Laudwine's chagrin. They systematically began attacking the risen Mantid before uncovering his amber stores and detonating them, before overtaking one of his ships and stealing it out from under him. In their final confrontation on Pandaria, the Lamplighter Agents were able to make it on board the Necropolis itself. While Laudwine saw this as the opportunity to personally attack them head on, the Agents did not relish the opportunity for him to do so. Instead, they crippled the Necropolis' mechanisms and caused it to crash out of the sky with Laudwine aboard. Though the Agents were able to escape, Laudwine was unable to depart in time and both he, the amber and any Loyalists that remained aboard hurtled to earth and crashed into a great pile of rubble.

Resurrection and True Death
Thought dead by many in the Alliance, this encounter was not the final end for Laudwine. After the Fourth War's end, he existed in a semi-torpor within the rubble of the Necropolis, and only kept alive through a combination of his connection to the Altar of Darkness, the remaining sliver of amber contained in the vessel, and his inhuman constitution. He was able to exist in this state long enough for the last of the Loyalists to find him and remove him from the wreckage via an unstable portal, before aiding in his partial recovery in the Ruins of Southshore.

He was updated on the state of the rest of the world, including that Sylvanas Windrunner had shattered the Helm of Domination. With the Scourge running amok in the North, Laudwine tasked the Loyalist Remnants to teleport them to Dustwallow Marsh in Kalimdor. With the eyes of the world pointed elsewhere, and with enough dead situated so close to the homelands of the Orcs, Tauren and the Night Elves, Laudwine plotted to raise the dead of Theramore's and Onyxia's fallen draconic brood, and bring it to bear against the living. So long as there was death, it mattered little to the former High Executor.

He did not anticipate the presence of another enemy of his watching for signs of his movements. Sathira Dawnshimmer, also known as Kal'ethir and draconic ally of The Lamplighters, had been tracking Laudwine's movements and not long after the Construct's forces arrived in Dustwallow, the two sides broke out into open conflict. Sathira sent a tip to Control alerting them to Laudwine's presence in the region and they dispatched the Agents into the Marsh to hunt down the Loyalist remnants.

With the help of the local Grimtotem Tribe, Horde caravaners from Mudsprocket and a band of independent Human Rangers known as the Remnant of Theramore, they harassed Laudwine's forces, stealing away his power supply in the form of unearthed Grimtotem artefacts and systematically thwarting each stage of his plans. This culminated with the High Executor himself leading the charge against their main base in and around North Point Tower where they were storing the reclaimed artefacts. With the help of Sathira, the Lamplighters were able to push back the Loyalists though Laudwine himself proved much more of a challenge. Using the magic of Domination gifted to him by the forces of The Jailer, Laudwine blasted Sathira out of the sky and almost managed to bind her to his will. However, he was attacked by the Agents based in the Tower and Vyrona Swiftshade dealt the killing blow by plunging her fist weapons into his already exposed wound in his back.

His soul fragmented and pulled once again back to the Altar of Darkness to regenerate, but such a process is slow which gave The Lamplighters and Sathira enough time to track the leylines leading back to its source. They finally discovered its location in the Borean Tundra, within an abandoned Scourge stronghold; the Temple City of En'kilah. The very last of the Loyalists had been modified by the Mawsworn to resemble them and had managed to overtake the Lamplighter Agent Diaam, though she was able to escape this fate after the Altar activated. She was able to slip away, meeting up with Sathira and imparting knowledge about En'kilah and what lay inside.

Although the Mawsworn attempted to sacrifice Diaam and the remaining Loyalists to regenerate Laudwine quicker, it was not quite enough. The Lamplighters slew the forces inside before destroying the Altar at its base. Laudwine's form dissipated and the fragments of his soul unwound, unable to reform. After many years of terror, the High Executor was truly, and finally, dead.