Prelude

This is the Second Story of the Gate of the Elder Gods series. For anyone jumping in here please look up Gate of the Elder Gods first to catch up with the progress of this series. However we will include a quick summery here for everyone.

Two portals are discovered on Azeroth linking Azeroth with the Warhammer world, which from here on out referred to as Mallus, the first portal linking the Night Elven Mount Hyjal, near the shrine of Goldrinn to the city of Mordheim. The second portal connected the Scarlet Monestary to a hill in the wolf lands nesr thr end of the Rib Peaks branch of the World's Edge Mountains.

As these two portals slowly start to open, with possibility of far more opening across Azeroth and Mallus, the Horde and Alliance begin a scientific race to open theirs first and to explore this other world before the other. However the Alliance quickly discovers the ruined city or Mordheim on the other side of their portal and out of fear of what could happen launch an unsanctioned attack against the Horde's portal in hopes of limiting the possibility of hostile invaders entering Azeroth unopposed.

However thos lead to negotiations which would ultimately harm the Alliance, and still allow the Horde to open their portal. The Horde opened their portal and began exploration coming across secretive agents of the Skaven and forming an alliance, combating the Chaos Dwarves, and thanks to Alliance exploration of Mordheim and a subsequent battle, discovering and forming another alliance with a disgraced Vampire Lord.

As the Alliance come into contact with the Empire, finally starting the process of opening formal diplomatic channels between the two states the Horde and their new allies stuck. A mana-bomb was used in Mordheim as the opening blow of a full Skaven and Vampire assault on the city which then pushed through the portal onto mount Hyjal. Meanwhile the Horde began what is now known as The War of the Thorns. While the Army of the Light, wihnificant elements of Stormwind's SI:7 and Imperial forces aided the Night Elves in their defense of their homeland. The War of the Thorns ended with Orgrimmar subjected to massive civilian casualties from fifth column actions from SI:7, and the Empire's troops inability to distinguish between Orc civilians and soldiers. Similarly Exodar was Momentarily held by Vampire forces, but with no significant damages done or casualties inflicted. Mount Hyjal was threatened and its defenders suffered significant losses while the Shrines of Goldrinn and Aviana were both destroyed while the portal was temporarily sealed by ice and snow unleashed by the two Gods.

Lastly the Skaven with Sylvanas order burned Teldrassil while Shandris Feathermoon and just shy of a thousand surviving Night Elf Sentinels were left trapped on Mallus where the General was severely wounded before joint Imperial and Night Elf forces finally cleared Mordheim of the main armies of the Skaven and Undead. Still Sylvanas now controls the only unblocked portal to Azeroth and is bringing new forces to fight the slowly building war for Azeroth. Meanwhile other forces from the Dragons of Cathay, to the Gods of Chaos, to the servant of the Old Gods and beyond are all taking notice of the portals and imagining new potential for their own purposes.

Out of Place Review responses:

I figured I would answer some of the reviews of the final chapter of the last story here to serve as a bit of a context and world comparison.

SI:7 infiltrating Mallus, and some of these reviews have gone into micro arguements about the topic. But I'll lay out a few details to hopefully give a full overall picture of the inticracies and issues involved.

Step One: "Insertion" this is the rather shallow point where most of the argumentation has been taking place. SI:7 has amazing agent Insertion capabilities, between SpyXFamily/ Black Widow fake-faces, individual stealth abilities, and magic SI:7 has Blatantly infiltrated the Horde, a open borders society where random adventures can cannonically walk into the chambers of the highest offices of the land unchallenged, in ways that has made functioning difficult for the Horde, particularly with the sheer number of fifth column elements present in Horde territory.

The Empire as first comparison has a very weak ability to screan against any enemy agent Insertion with weak borders, and canonicallly little more active defenses against infiltration and less passive defenses. Next Cathay, Chaos and the High Elves, while the High Elves are strongly defended against any Insertion operation with a closed border policy, magic barriers, and active military patrols that challenge or just kill anyone they encounter. Cathay next has a culture built to insulate against intrusion, and controlled access points meant for propaganda and information control and openly attacks anyone attenpting to pass through the dangerous and oft patrolled other means of entry, but it's active defenses are weaker than Ulthuan. Then Chaos has no active defense but instead relies on counter intelligence and subversion of well everything to render any intelligence agency operation against them near meaningless.

Step Two: "infiltration" this step has been given many diffrent names over the years, and sometimes it's name is more dependent on the particular mission being preformed, be it establishing a supply dump, coordinating insurgents, or stealing info.

Here gameplay for most games, and WoW especially, just skips this part of the operation along with the record keeping to jump to the action and drama scenes. So we have to judge by the outside context and stories...and well the Horde is just life on easy mode for this part of the operation. Goblin individual excessive greed and corporate espionage and competition is already a vulnerability in the Horde that is easy to exploit. But then the decentralized and fluid nature of the Orc clans where you can make up a clan name and not have a single person bat a eye at you is another opening, after the Orcs the disjointed nature of the Trolls, and the divided nature Quel'Thalas, all provide easy to refrence openings.
Meanwhile the soft defense of the Horde is Borderline non-existent, besides "visions and magic" which in a universe where magic is so quantified as WoW yet those can't be quantified well its obviously hyper unreliable. A "If God wills it" type defense, combined with each member state's open policies with a reliance on organizations that are nearly non-existent, some being little more than a named organization with no head, oversight, accomplishments, or members of note. Which compared to SI:7's MI6/CIA level of organization and complexity basically implies that these agencies almost exist in name only. There's little besides the awareness of individual characters to defend the main body Horde from infiltration.
Mesnwhile the Empire while Insertion and Infiltration is "easy" but they have a more structured nation which would make them equivalent to the more difficult portions of the Horde to infiltrate. Cathay besides the HUGE culture gap to become a Magistrate (Cathay government official) requires serious screening which would then severely delay, or outright prevent any operations both in the immediate short term of this story (the time frame in which 90% of WoW's storylines happens) and short term operations in general.
The High Elves besides their powerful active defense, the Infiltration tage would represent a difficulty which would ironically stand as the opposite of the Cathayans any immediate actions to insert and infiltrate Ulthuan now would be as effective now as ten, twenty, or thirty years from now, but any long term infiltration operations would see diminishing returns as Ulthuan's court intrigue would inevitably cause intel and arranged plans to suddenly be invalidated and the High Elves become more and more likelyto capture any infiltrator...unless the DE happen to be helping them.
And Chaos well short and long term the threat there isn't in launching the operation but the question of effectiveness and if an sent agent has been compromised, or worse turned to Chaos. On the terms of effectiveness, no spy can kill on of the Chaos Gods or find some raid dungeon which would forever seal chaos to never ever...until Blizzard needs them nostalgia bucks... be a threat again. And even killing Archaon is going to be doubious as he's, first not yet known to the rest of the world at this story's point in time, and second he's latest in a line of Everchosen and there's even evidence to hint that the Gods never even cared specifically who became their Everchosen just that it was someone who could meet the, ever fickle, criteria.
Stage Three: "Execution" , this is having your insurgents rise up, taking your gathered intel and delivering back to your organization, stealing that tocket component, sabotaging that bridge, having that whistle-blower die in a freak mugging, helping Epstine commit involuntary suicide. Now depending on the operation this is either the completion of a long term ongoing operation, like the handing over of your final document taken before extraction or could be in itself the goal, the causing of a uprising in a rival nation. Either way defenses in enemy nations, and other factors can severely hamper these goals, and in Media this is of course potrayed in the most dramatic ways possible.
For the Alliance and the Horde, the conclusion of these is almost always a battle. Some Alliance operative either chooses the most blatant location for a hand off, gets trailed by randos who jump in to try and be heroes for the Horde, or the battle itself is the goal. Either way on the side of sparking conflict the Alliance vs the Horde and scoring kills the Alliance is top notch, but actually acquiring time sensitive and tangible information that could be useful...ehhh I'm going to cling to Velen's side and hope he has a useful vision for once. I mean yay the Alliance knows their enemies exist and that their enemies have stuff that can be destroyed by adventurers...all the Adventurers have to do is...accept huge sums of money to do things any military should already have been doing as a matter of it being their job to do anyways even without the given intel or sacks of gold being thrown at them.
Now the Horde's defenses against the execution stage just seems to be the passive presence of masses of combatants, and some magic detectors plus a few crude traps.
The Empire's defense here is...well far more complex. Besides nearly pointless levels of organization redundancy with multiple agencies that all serve the same purpose with different levels of access and supplies, the Empire's bureaucracy has already been thoroughly infany different and tolerated interest groups. Lahmians, Myrmidons, Witch Hunters, Sigmarittes, competing spy agencies, chaos cults, everyone has a finger in the pie, and no one is going to tolerate some new competitors trying to distupt their scheme, or kill their patsy, and so these groups all wage a background war or play interface for the Empire and it takes a large multi-faction collusion to commit to anything unimpeded. A IRL example would be the assassination of JFK, the Mafia set up a hit of the exact same set up one city before and had approached our idiot JFK shooter tonset him up to do it, yet he was trained and prepared by the KGB and had one of their spies for a wife and the man who killed JFK's killer was also married to a KGB operative, and yet none of this would have happened if not for suspicious circumstances that all had origins with the CIA and FBI, organizations who benefited from the president's assassination. It took all three of these organizations to provide the elements that made the JFK assassination the event that it was, yet which one made the original call, and which ones actually benefited from it, and why did MI6, and other spies throughout the US have signs of something happening but all were advised to keep their heads down, each told by a different source. Likewise the Empire's defense is from the labyrinth nature and opposed desires of all its agencies and infiltrators, few chaos warlords can even hope to try some dark ritual anywhere in the Empire without the Empire knowing before hand and someone, be it other cultists, Lahmians, or informed Imperial Agents trying to stop them.
Cathay has their version of the Gestapo, the Crow Men, who serve as a active interference for any operations execution with the passive defenses of the culuture and people combined with the Dragon Blooded adding yet more elements that will stop such actions from as early as the Insertion phase.
The High Elves care a little less about execution instead relying on a number of organizations to treat any spywork the same as they would their magic research or hunt for the Dark Elves.
And Chaos well we already mentioned the issues there. As the enormity of the four, the decentralized nature of their populous and the doubious value of their leaders plus the corruptive factor makes any meaningful action from espionage of little value.
And none of this long BS is saying that success for SI:7 isn't a thing, but rather a questioning of how much success and if it's against the right people.

Prolog

Anduin Wrynn looked between the assembled leaders. Between each of them he had the economic, intelligence, and military heads of Stormwind, and the leaders of Gilneas, Iron Forge, Gnomericon, Exodar and Darnassus. And to the side he had Volkmar, the Imperial's few insights had been either helpful and deep, or entirely intrusive and displaying the man's ignorance of Azeroth.

This gathering was a much smaller than the full war council that the Young King had hosted before as now that the course of war was decided, the minutiae of the war as well as wider concerns were to be decided. The clearing of the Hyjal portal and reconnecting with the Empire of Man beyond, supply and logistics, and addressing the Kaldorei concerns of trying to retake their seized territories from the Horde securing their forests against the Horde's intrusions and lumber mills.

"With the Horde's portal and our observations of Lordaeron it's obvious that they have been bringing in significant numbers from Mallus. So far we have estimated nearly twenty thousand Skaven have come through the portal in the last seven days." Marthias Shaw, head of SI:7 explained to the assembly.

"That's twice the numbers they used in the War against the Kaldorei!" One of the Stormwind finance ministers cried out earning a glare.

"However these forces lack the heavy weapons that they carried before. Mostly lightly armored troops and crude catapults." The spy answered then provided papers with sketches of the Skaven.

As the members of the room looked over the papers some with disgust, others disdain, and some interest, Volkmar finally spoke from the corner. "I recognize these ones from reports in Altdorf. They are from the Ratmen's plague cult. Likely they were waiting for the others to open the wound so they can infest your world."

"Can't your Empire stop them?" One of the nobles of Stormwind demanded her eyes trying to bore into Volkmar who just stared blankly back to her.

"Why?" The Grand Theologist responded simply.

"They're your enemy as well, they attacked your people's city, why wouldn't your Empire stop them?" The noble growled at him.

"Mordheim is a ruin, and was occupied by your people. The Horde's portal is also on the far side of the World's Eldge Mountains, which would require serious political capital to get a army over." Volkmar mentioned dismissing to woman's outrage.

"That short of a distance?" The woman scoffed almost seeming offended. "Seems that your Empire must be far weaker than the reports claimed."

"Crossing the World's Edge Mountains is no simple feat. The winds are harsh, avalanches could wipe away an entire army, cold and frostbite would surely kill many soldiers without proper precautions, and Goblins, Undead, Skaven, and entire hosts of monsters and forgotten kingdoms would surely seek to prey upon anything marching through any trails not secured and guarded at all times by the Dawi. Then the Dark Lands beyond are filled with more Greenskin tribes, more undead and unfathomable monsters. The only reason there are so many Skaven present at the Horde's portal is because their own underway passages and secret tunnel networks." The Grand Theologist explained.

Anduin had waited patiently but he would tolerate no more of the bickering. "Enough. Volkmar what would it take for the Empire to become invested in this fight? Is there concessions I could make or any other factors outside of my power that might bring them into this war?" Anduin still had hope for the Empire, trusting that they would be sufficient to change the course of the war.

"Either something convincing Karl Franz of the threat the Horde has proven themselves to be, or an act of Sigmar. Those would be the only things to bring the Empire to your side before the ice on Hyjal melts, otherwise you will need to prove yourselves worthwhile trade partners and sufficient military allies." The Grand Theologist states plainly.

Finally a voice, still weak, still filled with sadness spoke. "My daughter is still on the other side of the portal. By Elune's will if Shandris still lives, she will be this act of Sigmar you mentioned, but what would she need to do to achieve this...that way I might pray that she does it." Tyrande, still gaunt and weakened by her sorrow stated from where she had been sitting quietly brooding for the last day. The High Priestess almost seemed ready to run off to parts unknown, as a slowly building wrath seemed to slowly fill her over the hours.

Volkmar considered the Night Elf for a moment before answering. "Prove her worth, and that she and her army would serve the Empire, and then meet with the Emperor and the Elector Counts. She, if I understand, should know the Horde as enemies well enough that should some of the fools take heed of warnings for once in their lives. She might convince them to take preemptive action."

"So there's hope?" Anduin asked, some eagerness returning to him.

"The hope a drummer boy has that his lone drum might raise a Kingdom." Volkmar responded grimly.

"Shandris will beat the Drum of War until that is all that can be heard." Tyrande stated standing abruptly a new scowl on her face. "And once she returns the Night will be waiting." And with that the High Priestess left the chamber with such haste the wind of her passing closed the doors behind her.