An Estate Given to Death

The Cult of the Damned needed places where its work could proceed unseen. The Barov family’s bargain with Kel’Thuzad supplied one beneath their home at Caer Darrow. The promise of immortality opened the estate to a power its owners would not control.

The underground chambers became Scholomance. What had belonged to a noble household now served the training of necromancers. Alexei Barov himself became an undead servant rather than an independent beneficiary of the bargain.

The academy tied private ambition to the approaching public catastrophe. The plague was not simply a force arriving from outside the kingdom: its servants had already gained shelter within Lordaeron’s own institutions and estates.