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Izal rubbed her eartips and cursed the bizarre climate of the Broken Shore.There was something fundamentally unsettling about snow. With rain, a person knew where she stood. Rain had a weight to it, a sound. Snow was almost imperceptible, until she got a sudden blot of cold in her face and the ground crunched and collapsed under her feet.Even now tiny icy crystals of it floated down to stick in her hair and cling to her back-spurs, melting and dripping down her back. Snow was terrible and she hated it. But given the noise in the camp below the other Illidari were massively excited by this development. Izal straightened and squinted down over the cliff edge. Demiyssa and Lyra scraped and shunted the snow away from the paths, creating large snow piles as they went. Each mound already had at least two Illidari perched atop it, squabbling for space.Sally had moved her travelling kitchen up to the main camp least she be entirely buried in the snow. Even from up here Izal could smell something warm and delicious brewing. Her stomach growled. She had spent the last hour digging and salting a path up to the Deliverance flightpoint. Her beloved felbats huddled together on their platform, whiffling at her as she grumbled her way through her work. Banshee was starting to go silver with age, but still wrapped her wings protectively around the younger bats.The wooden lean-to she’d hammered together- badly- ought protect them from the worst of the snow and the wind. Still, she would have to check it often to ensure it wasn’t in danger of collapsing.That was the thing about snow. It didn’t have the decency to drain away into the soil. Each flake became part of a greater burden, collapsing roofs and concealing roads, weighing the world down beneath its inevitability. Not unlike the Legion, really.She bumped heads with the bats and cooed at them until they were settled, then opened her wings and let the wind carry her home.This immediately made her a target. She yowled in protest as she was pelted with snowballs and had to come to a hasty landing as Allari leaped from the top of their central tent, trying to knock her out of midair.The human and dwarf soldiers took the snow very seriously. The dwarfs in particular would regale any listeners with tales of griffins frozen solid in midair by blizzards, of entire cities trapped underground in winter. So great was their concern that an expedition of them had arrived up to the Illidari camp in order to ensure the damnable demonic elves weren’t freezing to death. All night elves lived in temperate forests and all the blood elves in a hot continental clime. They would surely all be lost and disorientated in the snow, in dire need of rescue.Instead they found that the Illidari were coping quite merrily, skidding to and fro on the ice and shouldering each other into snowdrifts. Their fel infusion left them resistant to extreme cold and heat while their spectral sight allowed them to see right through the snow flurries and blizzard whiteout. Marius and Valdel steadily walled up Tehd’s tent with blocks of ice while Allari and Kor’vas leaped from the top of the command tent in an attempt to make the perfect snow-silhouette.A dozen initiates had clawed trenches through the deeper snowdrifts, leaping out of their tunnels to drag in anyone who came too close. Even more had united in a great show of cooperation to pile snow up against the boundary wall, with the ultimate aim of spying on the Warden camp downhill. On the far side they found the younger watchers doing exactly the same thing, and the two groups had now reached something of an impasse.Salesh was now attempting to sculpt the dwarves from snow. Given that they didn’t burn with magic, the sculpture consisted of a large rectangle topped by a smaller rectangle.He wasn’t the only one drawn to the dwarves. The Illidari very rarely had visitors for most folk were too unnerved by their fearsome appearance. Thus the expedition rapidly became the centre of attention, surrounded by dozens of curious demon hunters who plucked at their woollen hats and the blankets they’d carried up. Izal hissed at them for blocking the road and leaped over the expedition. Sally waved at her as she trotted over, the tiny goblin chef stirring something that smelled delicious.“Izal! You look frozen, come in next to the grill.”The tiny goblin was an absolute menace, but she made excellent tea in cups that a person could carry with them, and all kinds of other hot things that she claimed to be goblin delicacies. Thinly sliced mushrooms on cheese bread, salty fried meats that left her gasping for water, nuts with a crispy coating of honey and cinnamon.But today Izal was drawn to the saucepan.“What is that?”“Ah!” Sally said in the tone that meant she was about to launch into a sales pitch. “Why nothing more than the finest chocolate, straight from my troll Horde-brothers and their cocoa groves! A little taste of home for your Sin’dorei siblings-”Izal stuck her tongue out to taste the steam. The scent of sugar coated the roof of her mouth immediately and she coughed. That was even sweeter than the honey-strawberries she used to gorge herself on in the summer. She loved it. Sally cackled.“I’ll pour you two.”