Stormwind and Boralus.
I recently sat down with Commander Connor Pickens of the Proudmoore security unit, serving from the Proudmoore barracks in Boralus, and Private Joaseph Faulkson of the Stormwind Army, stationed in Stormwind City as a guardsman. The purpose of the interview was to untangle the story of the so-called Tirassian Nationalist Army, a violent cell whose activities have, in recent weeks, become tangled in a wider snarl involving the raid on the Pig and Whistle, false guards, hired criminals, and a city increasingly uncertain whether it is watching law enforcement, vigilantism, or some expensive theatrical performance with uniforms.
The names of several suspects have been omitted at the request of Private Faulkson, who stressed that the case has not yet gone to trial. A reasonable request, given that even the worst accused are still entitled to due process, which remains one of those inconvenient principles worth hanging on to.
The First Signs
When asked where the story began, both men hesitated slightly, because in their telling there are two beginnings.
There is the beginning of the attacks.
Then there is the beginning of the radicalisation.
Commander Pickens framed the wider matter as rooted in “wounds in Kul Tiras” caused by its relationship with the Alliance, and worsened by actions taken by Stormwind and Alliance personnel visiting the isles. The Tirassian Nationalist Army, he said, was “essentially a reaction to those.”
Private Faulkson placed the visible start of the case between the beginning and middle of the April.
The first major turning point came on the fifteenth day of April, when Captain J. Lawrence of the Stormwind City Brigade approached Pickens concerning a flier outlining the beliefs of the TNA. According to Pickens, the flier had been found with a bomb beneath a bench in Lion’s Rest earlier that day.
The bomb was disarmed, the manifesto, however, had already done its job.
“What made these attacks different,” Faulkson explained, “was the presence of the manifesto. Suggesting a more organised approach, and that this was a group.”
That distinction matters. Stormwind, as any resident with ears and/or eyes can confirm, is not unfamiliar with explosive devices. Usually, however, such incidents are the work of lone malcontents, private vendettas, would-be serial killers and just straight up madmen who should never have been allowed near black powder in the first place.
This was different. This had a name, a message, and an apparent cause.
From Association to Army
One of the documents provided during the interview was a manifesto of the Tirassian Nationalist Army. Another was an older manifesto from the Tirassian Nationalist Association.
The older Association document reads like a hardline cultural preservation statement. It speaks of Kul Tiran identity, self-reliance, faith in the Tides, local justice, and the protection of history. Its final declaration states that the group does “not stand in opposition to others,” but instead commits to preserving Kul Tiran history, culture, and traditions.
The newer Army manifesto is something else entirely and it calls the Alliance a “hollow pact of convenience.” It accuses Stormwind and the Alliance of betrayal, occupation, zealotry, corruption, and interference in Kul Tiran sovereignty. It names Jaina Proudmoore as a daughter of Kul Tiras turned servant of the Alliance. It ends not with preservation, but with violence:
“The only language they understand is force so we will speak it.”
The name change from “Association” to “Army” is the difference between a debating society with strong opinions and a man in a camo-green tabard leaving explosives under benches. The camo-green tabards, according to Faulkson, appear to have served as the closest thing the TNA had to a uniform.
Commander Pickens said he investigated groups in the Isles that might have links to the TNA. A soup kitchen in Boralus came up in connection with the homeless population, but a search of the place found nothing suspicious. Its funding was accounted for, including donations, food, blankets, and ordinary charitable supplies.
The working belief, according to Pickens, was that both the manifesto and related material were being distributed among vagrants who used the soup kitchen, as well as by orphans hired to spread the material in Stormwind.
One such publication was the Tuna Post, a crude newsletter presenting itself as independent journalism while warning Kul Tirans against Stormwind authorities. One issue claimed that Kul Tiran nationals had been profiled, apprehended, and thrown out of Stormwind. Another accused the Stormwind Guard of working alongside criminals and suggested the House of Nobles were sending hit squads after those asking questions.
The Association and the Splinter
Pickens’ investigation led him to the Tirassian Nationalist Association, which he described as a more benign group concerned with preserving culture and history. It had links to a retinue of Lord Sallow, a Drustvari lord who was funding them.
Pickens interviewed several members. According to him, they either knew nothing of the violence or described certain radical members without knowledge of any active plot themselves.
A bank account connected to the group was frozen as a precaution. Pickens said most expenses were accounted for, including books, food, and community building repairs. There was one spending discrepancy leading to a Stormwind bank account, but the broader picture painted was not of an entire Association turned terrorist, but of a splinter.
In other words, the Tirassian Nationalist Army appears to have taken the older Association’s language of preservation and sharpened it into something that could draw blood.
Faulkson was clear that cooperation between Stormwind and the Admiralty was crucial.
“Without Commander Pickens’ efforts on the isles in aiding our investigation,” he said, “this whole situation may have gone on for much longer.”
Pickens, for his part, stressed that Stormwind had to treat the case carefully. Mishandling it, he warned, could fuel the TNA’s own narrative and prove the very point its propaganda was trying to make.
There were, both men suggested, instances where mishandling did exactly that, but neither man wanted to go into details about it and I did not press the topic.
Bombs, Arrests, and a Pause
The first major arrest was that of the cell’s explosives expert. Following his apprehension, the bombings stopped for a time.
Faulkson was cautious when discussing numbers and details, but the broad outline given was that several devices had been placed, at least one had exploded, and later devices were less well constructed once the expert was no longer free to build them.
For around two weeks, the city had something like quiet, unfortunately, quiet in Stormwind is often less the end of a crisis and more the moment between the floorboard creaking and the ghoul coming through the wall. And ghouls were coming.
A comrade of the detained explosives expert began abducting guardsmen and women. At first, Faulkson said, authorities believed they were dealing with an assassin after a body was found between the Dwarven District and Old Town bearing a note:
“One a day, while Jones is away.”
“Jones” is not the real name. As noted earlier, this article will not be using the real names of several suspects while the matter awaits trial.
It later became apparent that victims were being abducted by a man on gryphonback, then dropped from a great height to their deaths.
“As many as ten serving men and women within the ranks lost their lives as the result of his actions,” Faulkson said.
He did not speak of this lightly. The strain was clear and he described each day without progress as another day his colleagues remained at risk, while also stressing that the answer could not be to simply give in to terrorist demands.
That is the uncomfortable thing about procedure. It moves slower than vengeance. It is also one of the few things keeping vengeance from becoming a solution. Justice is good and solid, vengeance never is.
The Cathedral Attack and the False Guards
After the pause in bombings, the cell struck again.
According to Faulkson, there was an attempted attack on the Cathedral. The device was flimsier than earlier bombs and set the altar aflame rather than exploding outright. Another device was taken toward the nearby guard station.
This occurred on the normally harmless occasion known as Volunteer Guard Day, a holiday which, until recently, was chiefly notable for giving civilians a chance to briefly wear authority without immediately being mistaken for terrorists.
Two members of the cell allegedly used that opportunity to procure uniforms and pose as guards. This allowed them to get close to the station under the pretence of being colleagues.
The second device initially failed to detonate. One member of the cell then fired a shot at it to force an explosion. The resulting blast killed a female accomplice.
The surviving attacker was apprehended that night.
Later the same evening, Faulkson recognised another man who had previously approached him off duty on the night of the explosives expert’s arrest. This man was speaking with Pickens at the time. Pickens had already met him before and had been given his name, which allowed a background check to be prepared quickly.
Pickens said the man expressed a personal grievance against Lord Tyler Stansfield, or Stansford, the name being one of those noble names that seems to change slightly depending on who and when you ask. The Lord’s name, Faulkson added, was commonly raised as a grievance both by members of the cell and by supporters on the isles. Neither guard suggested that the lord was involved in the cell’s actions, only that his name had become a recurring grievance among its members and sympathisers.
At this stage, the authorities had three men in custody and one woman dead.
They also had eyes on a property above Stormwind Harbour believed to be used as a base of operations.
What they wanted, Faulkson explained, was a raid. What they did not want was to scare the remaining cell members into scattering, regrouping, or recruiting more and restraint appears to have been useful.
The Gryphon Rider
Around this time, investigators learned the identity of the gryphon rider responsible for abducting and murdering guards.
The breakthrough came after one of his victims was hung from a tower of the Stormwind Embassy. The body was accompanied by a list of fallen Kul Tiran soldiers who had died fighting for the Alliance, stretching from recent wars back to older conflicts.
One name had been underlined.
On investigation, that name turned out to belong to the suspect’s mother.
As a professional journalist and part-time observer of astonishing criminal stupidity, I asked the obvious question: why underline it?
Faulkson said the answer remains unclear. The suspect himself denies doing so. One possibility, he suggested, is that somebody wanted him caught, perhaps another member of the cell who disapproved of his methods.
That, in turn, revealed something important about the TNA cell. It was not a neat army in the traditional sense. Its members shared grievances, but not always methods. Some were vocal. Some were violent. Some had never met one another.
Pickens described it as decentralised, with little communication to pursue.
This made the investigation harder, but it also suggests the “Army” was less a disciplined military body and more a cluster of radicalised individuals orbiting the same resentment.
The rider was identified as Matthews, again not his real name, was a former squallrunner for the Proudmoore Admiralty. His skill with a gryphon was therefore no mystery. Pickens clarified that Matthews had not kept a military gryphon, but had later acquired one through the Outriggers.
The arrest came after a stroke of luck, or the sort of grim fortune that only looks fortunate once everyone survives it.
An infected man was placed in the same cell as the detained explosives expert, requiring the prisoner to be moved for his own safety and to prevent the spread of disease. Since the suspect was a Kul Tiran native, arrangements were made to extradite him to Boralus while the cell was cleansed.
Through the grapevine, authorities heard that Matthews had learned of the prisoner transport and was planning a rescue attempt.
They prepared for it and when Matthews attempted to scoop up the prisoner and flee, guards were ready. Faulkson credited the efforts of his comrades with knocking the rider from his mount and taking him into custody.
Pickens dated Matthews’s arrest to the sixth of May.
The Harbour Raid
With Matthews detained, the authorities judged that they had the closest thing the cell possessed to a ringleader. The next day, having obtained a warrant, they raided the property above Stormwind Harbour before the remaining operatives could learn of Matthews’ arrest.
Inside, according to Faulkson and Pickens, they found manifestos, camo-green tabards used as makeshift uniforms, materials for amateur explosives, backpacks similar to those used to transport devices, plans for a bomb drop, instructions for making simpler explosives, and a workstation used to produce propaganda pamphlets.
They also found forensic material and when magically inclined advisors completed testing, the material matched all four men in custody, as well as the woman killed by the cell’s own explosive. Evidence also pointed to one more unidentified woman. After further questioning of the prisoners, her identity and description were obtained, and she was apprehended the following day.
When asked if authorities believed they had captured the whole cell, Pickens answered carefully.
As far as known members went, yes.
“As far as we know, that’s all of them,” he said, adding the obvious caveat that they are not psychic.
Faulkson likewise distinguished between that particular cell and the wider ideology. Those sharing similar sentiments, he said, are another matter entirely. Such views are not unknown among natives of Kul Tiras, and further radicalisation remains possible.
That is perhaps the most important sentence in the entire interview, the cell may be broken but the anger that created it is not.
Trials and Sentences
No trials have yet taken place. Faulkson said they are expected in the coming weeks.
The accused will be tried in Stormwind, where the crimes took place, after some discussion between Stormwind and Kul Tiran authorities. Pickens stated that the Admiralty is offering its full support to the sentencing decisions.
Faulkson said he is confident in conviction, describing the evidence as “fairly damning,” though he also noted that the severity of each person’s involvement varies heavily.
The most serious offenders, he said, could face anything from life imprisonment to the death penalty.
The Pig and Whistle Shadow
This case did not remain neatly contained.
By the time the wider public became tangled in the raid on the Pig and Whistle, false guards, hired criminals, and claims of private investigations, much of the TNA case had already been brought under control.
The gryphon rider had been arrested on the sixth day of May. The harbour property had been raided. The cell was, by the account of both men, largely “sewn up” within about a month.
This is where the story spills into the other mess now familiar to many readers.
Third parties, apparently believing the matter unresolved, began their own efforts. Pickens said that instead of reaching out to the authorities, people hired criminals to gather information. This led, according to him, to threats against Faulkson and to Pickens himself being tortured at knife point for information.
That information, he said, later appeared to be repeated back by those who had hired the criminals.
Faulkson said he almost understands the impulse. There have been failures in handling recent situations, and vigilantism has risen in the city. But he made clear he wants to see it curbed.
Pickens put it more sharply. In his view, some authorities and actors seemed to respond to the TNA manifesto by doing more of the very things the manifesto accused them of doing.
Such conduct, he warned, would only stoke the same sentiments further, resulting in more unrest and bloodshed.
This is the point where the reader may wish to pause, take a sip of something strong (I recommend coffee), and ask whether Stormwind has recently considered the radical notion of not making every fire larger by throwing jurisdictional oil onto it.
The Deeper Wound
By the end of the interview, both men returned to the same broader issue: sovereignty.
Faulkson described much of this as the result of people threatening the sovereignty of allied nations and operating outside their jurisdiction. It is why, he said, he has been speaking so often back home about proper procedure in investigations and convictions.
Pickens agreed.
“If they can do it in Stormwind, then they can come anywhere, and do it,” he said, warning against bypassing local law enforcement and calling it Alliance order.
The TNA’s crimes should not be softened. Bombs under benches, attacks on places of worship, the murder of guards, and the use of propaganda to recruit or inflame the vulnerable are not expressions of patriotism. They are violence draped in a flag.
But neither should the existence of such violence become an excuse for every uniform, noble, mercenary, private investigator, and enthusiastic fool with a warrant-shaped imagination to trample the very laws they claim to defend.
The investigation into the Tirassian Nationalist Army appears to have succeeded because Stormwind and Boralus cooperated. It advanced because information was shared. It reached arrests because evidence was gathered, suspects were tracked, and warrants were obtained.
It was endangered, by the accounts given, when outsiders decided that procedure was optional and there is a lesson there, though I am painfully aware Stormwind has a long and proud history of looking directly at lessons, nodding gravely, and then walking into the same garden rake from a different angle. Repeatedly.
For now, the known TNA cell appears to be in custody or dead. Trials are expected. Sentences will likely be severe, and the Admiralty and Stormwind authorities appear aligned on prosecution.