Shadowmourne...

"Shadowmourne... A great two-handed axe fit for a giant, born of sacred and corrupt powers, host of a thousand dead souls and able to be wielded only by the most stalwart armsmasters of Azeroth. Its creation seems nearly impossible; and yet, the rumors do not cease."

Shadowmourne, adj;
1. Aesadonna's biggest pipe dream.

For years, I have dreamed of building Shadowmourne. Naturally, every achievement-driven WoW player would like a legendary in their arsenal for the bragging rights, but the axe means more to me than that. Let me preface this by saying that Darion Mograine is my absolute favourite lore character. He was selfless enough to take his life as an attempt to try and save his father's soul (even if that did *cough* backfire on him). And although he is a Death Knight and too suffers from the affliction that drives our kind to kill to keep sane, he is still an honourable man.

...And he is the sole NPC involved in the creation of Shadowmourne. This is kind of dorky to admit, but in my head canon, Aesadonna has a big crush on Darion. She wants to do whatever it takes to impress her leader, including wielding the amazing axe that he built and she tempered.

A few months ago, when a former guildmate took a team into ICC 10 to get our Bloodbathed Frostbrood Vanquishers, I had just enough reputation with the Ashen Verdict to pick up the The Sacred and the Corrupt. Afterward, I immediately went out to Frostmourne Cavern and picked up Light's Vengeance. A 25 man ICC PUG with a friend of Beef's soon after netted me the acidic blood of Rotface and Festergut, since he was kind enough to master loot them to me. But, I didn't expect to progress any further than me owning said quest items for nostalgia.

...I was wrong.

Venat, another guildmate, has recently taken over where our former guildie left off and has been running Retro Raid Nights on Tuesdays as I've mentioned prior. As he, and we who run with him, are interested in achievements, he mentioned us working toward getting the guild The Ultimate Collection since Mindalen is halfway finished with the creation of Val'anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings and I have started Shadowmourne. I think the level of volume of my squee-ing itself was legendary.

To speed along the process, Beef pooled his Justice Points from a couple of his alts and bought me the remaining Primordial Saronite that I needed to finish up The Sacred and the Corrupt. From there, he swapped to his healer and we plugged away at A Feast of Souls, which thankfully was nerfed to 50 souls or we just might have spent all night in ICC, clearing the trash before BOOOOONEEEESTOOOORMMM Lord Marrowgar. It took about 30 minutes (rough estimate) for me to collect the souls using an un-runeforged, un-gemmed Shadow's Edge (in my 2h Frost PvP spec). After we finished that task, it was time to play the waiting game. Could we get enough interested guildies to help me do the next part of the chain? Just to think about it made me anxious; from this point on, we could only progress the chain in 25m ICC and the pool of people interested in Retro Raids is kind of small.

That Tuesday after Venat announced his plan, we had fifteen people accompany me to work on Unholy Infusion, Blood Infusion, and Frost Infusion! FIFTEEN! The biggest group I've seen up to that point was seven! I was shocked and thrilled to see my guildmates (and a guildmate's girlfriend!) band together like that to work toward an outdated legendary. It truly meant a lot to me and makes me proud to call Undying Resolution home.

As for working on the chain? Naturally, I had to go and derp kn00b it up! I've never driven an abomination before, so working on Unholy Infusion was a riot. Not! I was in panic mode the entire fight. The first three times, it was on heroic, and I was verbally freaking out to Beef the entire time! It was rough to both suck up the puddles and try to keep the bad ick away from everyone, which I ended up failing at because it was the bad ick caused us to wipe each time. Siiiigh. From there, it was switched to normal, and we finished the quest with very little problem.

Blood Infusion was totally easier than driving the abomination, but there was a trick to it since we didn't have the full 25 that's required for the mechanics. Naturally, we weren't lucky enough to have Blood Queen bite me first in any of our attempts, so by trial and error, we had whoever got bit first bit me... and then when it was time for them to bite another raid member, we let them get mind controlled by the boss and then we killed them so we'd have enough people for just me to bite. Brutal, but efficient.

Frost Infusion annoyed me greatly. Why? Because we probably had it right the very first time! But, I freaked out about the debuff "falling" off me at the fourth stack, so when I'd panicky mention that the debuff was gone, we'd wipe it up. I believe we did that three times before it was like "fuck it, let's kill her and see what happens." ...Annnnnd I got credit for the quest. *facepalm*

Since it's the UR way to derp everything, here's a bugged Sindragrosa attempt for your viewing pleasure. 

I also got my Feat of Strength for having over 9k acheesement points, wee! 
The hard part is over now. From here, it's just killing bosses, getting guildies achievement points / meta mounts, and begging the RNG gods to be kind enough to drop plentiful amounts of Shadowfrost Shards. And I couldn't have done it without the help of my wonderful guildmates. ♥