War stories, articles & game guides
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2026
Expeditions,
War Stories &
Culture
War stories, articles & game guides
Gamer
Tribute
2026
Expeditions,
War Stories &
Culture
“You may look at Scourgeholme now and see a rancid pit of decay, but one day it will be a place of glory and honor. Highlord Fordring has deemed it “Justice Keep.” Alas, even an impregnable fortress like Icecrown Citadel began with but a single stone. So begins our search for the stone to start a revolution. Travel to Crystalsong, south of here, and seek out the Unbound Thicket in the east.
Once there gather crystalline heartwood from the thicket floor and elven masonry from the Ruins of Shandaral.”
-Crusade Architect Silas
Crusade Architect Silas at the Valley of Echoes in Icecrown wants you to retrieve 10 Trunks of Crystalline Heartwood and 10 pieces of Ancient Elven Masonry.
You will be able to choose one of these rewards:
You will also receive: (if completed at level 100)
Upon completion of this quest you will gain:
Quest Giver: Crusade Architect Silas — Valley of Echoes, Icecrown
Objective: Collect 10 Crystalline Heartwood and 10 Ancient Elven Masonry from the Unbound Thicket and Ruins of Shandaral in Crystalsong Forest.
Quick Facts
Walkthrough
Architect Silas needs building materials for the Argent Crusade’s planned fortress, “Justice Keep,” to be built on the ruins of Scourgeholme. Both items are ground-spawned objects in Crystalsong Forest, south of Icecrown. Fly south through the zone border.
Crystalline Heartwood
Ancient Elven Masonry
Efficiency Tips
Explore Icecrown’s hidden easter eggs, lore mysteries, and connections across Warcraft history in Vikstone’s Icecrown Chronicles, along with the complete quest storyline.
Vikstone's War Journal“You may look at Scourgeholme now and see a rancid pit of decay, but one day it will be a place of glory and honor,” Silas said. “Highlord Fordring has deemed it ‘Justice Keep.'”
Now there is an architect at the Valley of Echoes with drawings, and the thing has a name.
Justice Keep. Absalan the Pious told me on the Skybreaker’s deck that in my heart I knew justice was the only true path. Fordring has gone and put the word on a building.
“Alas, even an impregnable fortress like Icecrown Citadel began with but a single stone. So begins our search for the stone to start a revolution. Travel to Crystalsong, south of here, and seek out the Unbound Thicket in the east. Once there gather crystalline heartwood from the thicket floor and elven masonry from the Ruins of Shandaral.”
Crystalsong is a shock after this glacier. The trees there have gone to crystal and the light comes through them rather than off them, and the whole forest makes a noise in the wind that is not the noise wood makes. I stood in the Unbound Thicket longer than the errand required. I have not been under a canopy since Moonglade.
Shandaral is the other thing.
That was a high elven city. Which is to say it was built by the ones who were put out of Kalimdor for what they would not stop doing with magic, and they came all this way north and built something beautiful out of the same habits, and then lost it. I knelt in that rubble picking up dressed stone that my own people’s exiles cut.
“Heartwood by nature is resistant to disease, rot and plague,” Silas said when I brought it all in. “This heartwood, however, goes so far as to repel such things! The masonry, affected by the fallout of the Unbound Thicket, will work in much the same way.”
So the walls of the place will be made of wood that plague cannot enter and stone that was quarried by exiles for a city that did not last.
Silas had one problem left, which is that the ground he intended to build Justice Keep on was still sitting over something the nerubians had left buried, and nobody wanted to say out loud that It Could Kill Us All.
