Last Updated on September 22, 2026 by Vikas Reddy
An Illustrated Novel Set in Wrath of the Lich King
The Shadow of the Lich is a war epic and dark fantasy novel set in the Warcraft universe during the events of Wrath of the Lich King. It runs 63,000 words. I wrote it with my co-author Shawn French, and it was illustrated by Christian DiBari and Simon Gough. You can read it right now on GamerTribute: The Shadow of the Lich.
Everything on this site exists to honor an era and the people who shared it with me. The quest guide is that tribute in screenshots. This book is that tribute in fiction.
Why This Book Exists
In 2008 and 2009, I played through every storyline quest in Northrend on my Night Elf Warrior, Vikstone, alongside my guildmates in Trinity Exiles on US-Terokkar. I documented all of it. That playthrough became Vikstone’s Classic Expedition, the quest archive and leveling guide that makes up most of this site.
But a guide can only hold what was on the screen. Somewhere in those months of questing, a different version of the story started living in my head. What the war against the Lich King felt like from the ground. Who these soldiers were when the quest log wasn’t looking. What it costs to keep marching north when the dead outnumber the living and keep growing.
That version sat with me for many years while the guide grew around it. Then in late 2024, rebuilding this site put me back inside every quest of that playthrough. The story stopped waiting. Shawn and I started writing, and months later it was a finished, edited, illustrated novel.
Arthas got his book. The soldiers who marched against him never got theirs. WotLK deserved that story, and so did the people I played it with. A long time ago, I promised my late friend Asa Minhas and my guildmates that one day I’d tell the story properly. This is my best attempt at keeping that promise, written by someone who was there the first time.
The Story
The novel follows Vikstone himself. It opens at Honor Hold, in the war for Outland that still wakes him at night, and then at home in Elwynn Forest, where he has a wife, Namarie, a six-year-old daughter, Lunara, and every intention of being done with fighting. The Scourge takes that from him: his wife and daughter are raised as banshees in service to a lich called Malthrax the Undying. So when word comes that the old crew is getting back together to venture north and take the fight to the Lich King, Vikstone has more reason than anyone to answer. Somewhere in Northrend, Malthrax is waiting.
From there, the book travels Northrend the same way the expedition did, zone by zone. Valiance Keep and the Borean coast. Daggercap Bay and the Fjord. Wyrmrest Temple, the Grizzly Hills, the dead kingdom of Zul’Drak, the impossible green of Sholazar. The Wrathgate happens in these pages, written from ground level. And the road runs all the way to Icecrown, in a final battle of our own design.
The crew that reunites in these pages is my guild. Every major companion is based on a real person from Trinity Exiles and the character they played beside me in 2008. Mardagan, a seven-foot paladin and brother of war. Calvey, one of the most skilled hunters Vikstone has ever known, and the reason he’s alive to know it. Wopak, a stout dwarven warrior with a braided beard and a battered iron pipe. Gabe, a priest at Wyrmrest Temple who hauls books the size of his torso and finds the things in them nobody else can. There are others too, and some of them you should meet on the page.
The People Who Made It
Shawn French is my co-author and a fellow WoW player. Every fight in this book has his fingerprints on it. We spent countless hours together playing and researching the lore of Azeroth and Northrend to get this world right, and the novel is as much his as mine.
Jonathan Oliver, a veteran fantasy editor whose career runs through some of British fantasy’s best-known imprints, and Michael Scott Williams edited the manuscript with great care.
Christian DiBari and Simon Gough illustrated it, Christian on line art and Simon on colors. Both are passionate artists whose portfolios run through DC and Image Comics, and they brought these characters to life in ways I never could have imagined. Their work tells the story beyond what words alone can do.
And Trinity Exiles. You’ve already met them in the story section, because they’re part of the cast. The people I stayed up too late with, wiped on group quests with (even before WotLK), and kept in touch with long after the servers emptied out. The originals, in their 2008 screenshots, are documented in WotLK Player Chronicles. Many years later, the friendships are the part of the game I never logged out of. They’ll recognize themselves in these pages, because I put them there on purpose. This story is as much theirs as it is mine.
How to Read It
The full text is free to read in the viewer on the novel’s page, starting with Chapter 1.
At ~63,000 words it’s about the length of The Hobbit, an evening-or-two read, and it works on a phone as well as a desktop. The illustrated 3D flipbook edition, with the complete DiBari and Gough artwork placed throughout the story, is the full experience and lives on the same page.
The Shadow of the Lich is a free, unofficial tribute. It will always be free.
For Asa
This story is dedicated to the memory of my friend, Asa Minhas (1986-2010).
Asa was my friend from medical school, a fellow WoW veteran, and he was a friend to a great many of us there. He knew this project in its earliest days, back when the whole thing was just a kid with a Print Screen key and a first attempt at a website, and he gave me advice on my earliest writing.
He never got to see any of it finished. I knew whose name belonged in the front of it before there was a book to put it in.
