Desolace

Desolace is a grey, dead land of bone-white plains and bare rock on Kalimdor's western side, but it was not always so. Long ago, it was a fertile grassland the tauren called Mashan'she. Tauren shamans woke the earth elemental Princess Theradras there, and she drained the life from the land around her to restore her own strength, leaving it the wasteland it is today.

The land's sorrows did not end there. Theradras took Zaetar, a son of the demigod Cenarius, as her mate, and from their union came the centaur. The centaur turned on Zaetar and killed him, then drove the tauren out of their old home, beginning a feud that has lasted ever since. Their clans still divide Desolace between them: the Kolkar in the east, the Magram near the southern mountains, the Gelkis in a ravine by the coast, and the Maraudine in the canyons around Maraudon, the sacred caverns where Zaetar is buried and Theradras still dwells.

Other powers have found Desolace's emptiness useful. The Burning Legion gathers at the Mannoroc Coven in the south, and the demon-worshipping orcs of the Burning Blade hold Thunder Axe Fortress in the north. Between them lies the Kodo Graveyard, where the great beasts come to die among the skulls of their ancestors.

Written for this site from the game's lore. Further reading: Desolace on Warcraft Wiki.