It was a fantastical story. An ancient, yet primitive world with a number of different races and kingdoms that had been upended through some sort of invasion by monsters from another world, like he had read about in stolen pulp novels before coming to Hogwarts. The otherworldy monsters were even green, which had been a recurring motif in the muggle books.
They weren't exactly little green men though. These Orcs were apparently enormous, ferocious, demon-worshipping brutes, and from the description he was surprised that the humans and their allies, apparently high elves (long extinct in Tom's world) and dwarves (who stuck to their holds in the Swiss Alps), had been ultimately victorious. He was less surprised at the damage the wars had done to the allied kingdoms.
Several wars against the Orcs had greatly weakened the kingdoms of Azeroth. Tens of thousands of soldiers were killed in each war, entire towns and regions were razed to the ground by the rampaging orcs. In the aftermath, bandits, wild beasts and trolls (who sounded much more organised than those he was familiar with) had become a threat too.
But the worst was yet to come.
The Third War sounded almost unimaginable. Not in terms of the extent, he had seen plenty of pictures of flattened French and Belgian villages from the last war, entire forests and meadows turned to a sea of mud. In terms of the numbers, it was less deadly than the Great War, or the war that was going on at home now, but the sheer scale of the magic that had been used was more than had probably been seen on Earth in centuries, at least since Merlin and Arthur's fights against the invading Saxons.
Demonic hordes, prophets, something called the "world tree", some mystical mountain, a race of nymph-like elven druids... His story to the warband of a world of industrialised, non-magical humans and hidden wizards and a few other small populations of other magical races was much more boring by comparison, although his brief description of the blitz caused a stir.
The magic of this world sounded exciting. There were several in this group with magical talents, including the "mage" Narth and the "paladin" Onno, who apparently wielded some sort of holy magic that could heal or cure much easier than any potion or spell the healers at St Mungos knew. The group's leader, Finnall, told him of an entire wizard kingdom, the city-state of Dalaran, which apparently had closed itself off from the dead and dying world. He could only approve of their logic.
The magic of this world even felt stronger than that in Britain; he had only ever felt it nearly this strong on the old pagan holidays, or when visiting a ley-line intersection. Some of the spells and feats the wizards in the group described would have rivalled Merlin. That said, the magic also sounded... limited in a way. It seemed as though it was almost entirely focused around combat, and to a lesser extent the enchanting of weapons and armour.
Interestingly, the local wizards did not use wands. Or at least, not wands like they had on Earth. Wands here were apparently simple enchanted weapons, spelled to cast a basic bolt of energy in a straight line from the end of the wand. It didn't channel the wielder's magic through the wand, but rather relied on a set reserve of magic stored in the wand when it was enchanted, and would need to be recharged eventually if not topped up.
Sure, some of the local wands could be quite powerful, if they had been created and enchanted by powerful mages, but they were basically second-to-last resorts before a dagger.
Instead, the locals seemed to use either staves, or cast just through pure will as young wizards on Earth did through their accidental magic. It was quite interesting, he was somewhat skilled at wandless magic, thanks to the control he had built as a child, but could only cast simple spells through this method. The local mages wandless powers were not completely extraordinary, the key to casting was intent after all, and a channeling object like a wand did just that, channel the magic to allow the intent to form the spell more easily. In a world such as this with such strong and wild magic, he could understand how some powerful mages just didn't need to follow that step.
The man in the purple robes, Narth, who Tom was talking to seemed equally interested in wandlore. "And this core in your wand, what is it made of?"
"The core is always made of a magical element, such as the hair from a unicorn's mane, or dragon heartstring, but mine is one of the rarer cores; Phoenix feather..." the mage made a strange face, and he saw that the elves in the group were also looking at him again, "What?"
"Perhaps the word phoenix means something different in your world, but in Azeroth phoenixes are not living creatures, rather fire elementals, summoned by the elven blood mages." Narth explained, he had a drawling accent like all the other locals, but it still fit somewhere unplaceable in the mix of English regional dialects he had heard before. "I've only ever heard of it, as far as I know, the spell was only even invented recently, after the elves went into exile."
"I honestly don't know where phoenixes came from originally on Earth, perhaps they were originally created by magic." like the basilisk, he added mentally, "They are birds, with flame-based powers, and eventually they die and burst into flame, and then are born again from the ashes."
They then returned to the history of this world, and the end and aftermath of the Third War. The expedition of Prince Arthas, and his sudden return and unexpected murder of his own father. The Prince Arthas had become the "Lich King". He had heard the term Lich before, though it was almost forgotten on Earth as the existence of horcruxes were also mostly unknown. Apparently they called the object which held the portion of a Lich's soul a "philactory", which he had not heard before, but everything else was close enough that it could have been a related ritual to what he had attempted.
The Lich King had first spread the curse of undeath via trickery and betrayal, infecting citizens in a number of cities across the Kingdom, before outright warfare began, as an order of holy knights, remnants of the kingdom's armies and others stood against him. Apparently a mass exodus from this and neighbouring kingdoms had also taken place, fleeing across the sea to the Kalimdor place and creating a refugee colony.
Within Lordaeron, the Lich King's Scourge in its endless and nearly infinite hordes of undead had destroyed the land piece by piece. Farm after farm, village after village were slaughtered and those corpses that weren't too devoured to move were raised to join the ranks, and the slaughter continued. Graveyards were raided, and the dead walked. Some of the undead were familiar; ghosts, banshees, etc., and the ones the locals called zombies sounded like inferi. He could easily picture the wandering skeletons too, but creatures such as ghouls, geists, wights, bone golems, abominations, flesh giants, etc., were unfamiliar and ominous.
Apparently this band of warriors was just one of many groups of survivors in Lordaeron. Those who had somehow managed to evade the Scourge so far were fighting a guerilla campaign against the undead enemy, and attempting to protect what unspoiled land and unslaughtered civilians remained. These various groups were divided, but apparently didn't fight against each other.
"The largest remnant group in Lordaeron, by far, is the Scarlet Crusade." Finnall said, "Including the civilians in the towns they protect, there are tens of thousands of them. Their capital, Tyr's Hand, alone probably has more than 10,000 inhabitants if you count all the refugees. Then there are the towns in the Enclave, as well as in the Hearthglen area, and the villages in the western glades, as well as a number of military outposts."
A Lord Raymond George lead a small breakaway group of Crusaders who claimed that the Scarlet Crusade were losing their way, as the leadership became more paranoid and hostile. A knight named Tirion Fordring was thought to have a small group of companions in his own group, but nobody knew where, though apparently his son was a commander in the Crusade. A chapel devoted to the local religion stood alone in the Plaguelands and somehow weathered the storm.
Most of western Lordaeron was controlled by an undead faction that supposedly had somehow gained freedom from the Scourge, and was ruled by a former-elf turned banshee. Functionally they were no different from the Scourge though, killing the living where they found them and raising as many dead as they could from the cemeteries and burial mounds to bolster their own ranks. This faction was also allied with the Orcs and their Horde.
The elven kingdom Quel'Thalas had cut itself off from the outside world after suffering immense damage from first the Scourge, then the mad Marshal Garithos and also tribes of savage trolls. As far as anyone knew, they were probably still fighting the Scourge, and given that they had renamed their entire species the Blood Elves, it didn't sound like they were much better off than the Lordaeronians. Several rogue groups of elves survived in old hunting lodges across the wastes, cut-off from the kingdom and unwilling to attempt a journey through one wasteland to what may be another.
There were also several other small bands hidden around the region like Finnall's, as well as lone survivors or small groups who were occasionally discovered and sent off to one of the Crusade's protected settlements, or absorbed into whichever warband found them. These had been more common during the early days, but by now it was assumed that there were very few, if any, unknown survivors left in the ruined kingdom.
There were a few more survivors in places like the Silverpine Forest, where a handful of villages survived deep in the woods despite being abandoned by their magical protectors and allies. Lordaeron had fallen, and Dalaran was of course in self-isolation, while the Kingdom of Gilneas had also completely cut itself off, albeit with enormous physical walls rather than magical barriers.
The state of Kul'Tiras, the island kingdom, was mostly unknown but assumed to be bad, as huge numbers of residents had been killed in the wars or fighting the Scourge, and much of the rest had either emigrated to the Kalimdor colonies ruled by the Grand Admiral's sorceress daughter, gone to the surviving kingdom of Stormwind, or formed one of a number of pirate fleets that now harassed Goblin shipping (he wasn't at all surprised that the Goblins apparently formed a sort of mafia here, like those Yank gangs that were always in the newspapers; they couldn't be that different to the ones at home).
Stormwind, the southernmost human kingdom had suffered quite a lot of damage in the wars against the orcs and the horde, but the Scourge raids hadn't made it that far south, so they were in a much better position than the northern kingdoms. That said, they weren't actually doing very well, as their King had apparently disappeared without a trace and nobody had been able to find him, and bandits and orcs apparently still haunted several counties.
The Kingdom of Alterac, not that far to the south of his current location, had been destroyed by its own allies during the wars. Like the Tirasian pirates, most of the survivors had formed bands of bandits and highwaymen in order to survive. These groups formed another mafia-style group called the Syndicate, but the only interaction they had with the Lordaeronians was when they robbed refugees or occasionally sent a group north to loot one of the abandoned villages.
The Arathi region was a war ground, between the Horde and the remaining members of the old human alliance. The final (and apparently original) human kingdom, Stromgarde, was in just as terrible a state as most of the others. Locked in a war with the a number of different factions - Syndicate highwaymen, hordes of trolls and ogres, undead and the Horde - their Prince Galen was too busy personally leading the fight in his capital city to send any aid to the North.
As well as the humans, there were still a few Wildhammer dwarf clans in the mountains south of Lordaeron, as well as the Bronzebeard Kingdom of Ironforge closer to Stormwind. The Wildhammers had been close allies of Lordaeron, but they too were decimated in the wars, and were barely clinging to their traditional homeland. A few small independent clans lived on in the mountains of Northeron, allied with the mainly human Crusaders.
The gnomes, much different to those of his world, had somehow lost their kingdom in a matter completely unrelated to the war or the Scourge apparently, and now lived as refugees in Ironforge and Stormwind. The high elves had been members of the alliance once, but were now officially neutral under their new name and replaced by their distant relatives the night elves of Kalimdor, who nobody here seemed to know anything much about.
It was a grim picture, mainly because it sounded quite inconvenient for someone who wanted to get back to Earth. Something told him he was going to be too busy focusing on his immediate survival to find a way home any time soon. But he was sure that it would be eventually possible. After all, hadn't the hordes of orcs and demons come from another world?
Once the shock of the horcrux ritual and his transportation began to wear off, young Tom started planning. He could play nice with these savages for now, especially if it meant learning their foreign magic, and when possible he would return home to pick up where he left off in Britain; perhaps with an army at his back.
Elsewhere
Doran Stoenbrow was a proud Dwarf, from a proud clan. But even he had to admit that things had been better for his people. Living in the hills of Northern Lordaeron, between Hearthglen and the Glades, his clan had for centuries traded with the teeming human cities of the south, and the mystical elven realm of the north.
There wasn't anybody left to trade with anymore. Oh sure, the humans had managed to hold Hearthglen, Mardenholde, Northridge, and a few other towns and tiny villages on the fringes of the mountains, but there just wasn't a market anymore for pristine marble carvings and dwarven stonemasonry.
And honestly, there weren't enough of his clan left to do the work in the same quantity as they had once, even if there was a market for it.
His brother, Dorgar, previous chief of the clan, had taken a number of the men to join their allies in the war against the demons and orcs - only one had returned, a few months ago, bringing message from the humans in this Crusade asking for any assistance they could give.
They couldn't afford to send any more troops, and they didn't have any weaponry or armour to spare. They were barely holding the line at their own small holding, the Red Caverns, with the Scourge constantly growing bolder and raid after raid destroying their livestock and whatever unlucky dwarves could be found alone or in small groups.
Apparently his brother Dorgar had died a heroic death. That was something at least. Lost in the depths of an Alteraci cave, surrounded on all sides by slaughtered enemies. Although Doran grieved, he was used to the feeling after the last few years, and he knew his brother had gone out the way he wanted - fighting.
He couldn't afford to send any warriors, or weaponry, to their friends in the Crusade. But there was something he could do for his brother at least. Dorgar Stoenbrow would be memorialised, like any Stoenbrow chief, only in the halls of his allies, at their Monastery.
It was a good place for a memorial. Holy. He would like to pray there, one day, when this was all over.
He sent two stonemasons and a quantity of marble back with the messenger, who had insisted he return to his comrades rather than stay with his kin. None of them would ever return again.
Doran sent the Crusade more than enough marble for a single statue.