Clayscale Hornstrider
Find a character at the top of the page to see whether your account has this mount, and where that character stands on what it asks for.
Look it up on WowheadHow to get it
A rare find at The Big Dig: Traitor's Rest, the Azerothian Archives' hourly event in the south-west of The Azure Span. It can be in any of the tomes handed out there (one for every 1,000 pages the players dig up together) and on Doomshadow, the boss that flies in when the nine minutes of digging are over. The dig can be repeated every hour with no lockout.
Chance 2.7% per try, so about 37 tries on average — Worked out for one dig, not read as such. Read from Wowhead's item page (2026-10-11): Doomshadow 151 mounts in 21,877 loots (0.69%, the tooltip's figure), and nine kinds of tome, 968 mounts in 190,248 opened, 0.51% a tome taken together: Immaculate Tome 406 in 27,334 (1.49%), Preserved Isles 139 in 26,459, Preserved Djaradin 121 in 25,858, Preserved Dragonkin 119 in 26,846 (0.44-0.53%), Dusty Djaradin 50 in 19,753, Dusty Centaur 42 in 19,694, Dusty Niffen 36 in 14,766, Dusty Drakonid 29 in 14,563, Dusty Dracthyr 26 in 14,975 (0.17-0.25%). A dig gives Doomshadow's roll and a number of tomes that depends on how many players dig; with four, the middle of wow.gg's unsourced '3-5 tomes per event', 1 - (1 - 0.0069) x (1 - 0.00509)^4 = 2.7%. With two tomes it is 1.7%, with five 3.2%; the boss alone is 0.69%
Time there about 12 min a visit
Guides Wowhead: Azerothian Archives - World Event in Dragonflight Patch 10.2.5 · wow.gg: Clayscale Hornstrider
Before you go
- Azerothian Archives introduced, once on the account: the quest To the Archives! (level 70, from the flyers in Valdrakken), which leads to the Archives' tower north of Algeth'ar Academy in Thaldraszus · about 1 h
In all: about 1 h of play, starting from nothing.
Getting there
/way The Azure Span 27 46.5 - Take the portal from Stormwind to Bel'ameth*
- Fly the rest of the way
- Take the portal from Orgrimmar to Valdrakken*
- Fly the rest of the way
/way is for the TomTom addon. Travel times are estimates: flying at 55 yards a second in a straight
line and 30 seconds for a portal. A star marks a portal that needs a quest or other unlock done first.
Notes and sources
The journal and Wowhead's tooltip say only 'Drop: Azerothian Archives'. Wowhead's item page lists Doomshadow under dropped-by and nine tomes under contained-in; the wiki's page for the mount (edited 2025) names the tomes and Doomshadow's corpse too, and adds the Meticulous Archivist's Index, which Wowhead does not list. wow.gg's per-tome percentages (guide updated 2026) are Wowhead's counts worked out.
The dig runs every hour at half past at Traitor's Rest, between the Azure Archives and Iskaara. The players together recover 1,000 pages to fill the bar, each bar filled is another tome, the timed part lasts nine minutes, and then Doomshadow has to be killed, which is worth another 1,000 pages (wiki, edited 2025). The time on the spot is the nine minutes and the boss. Eadweard Dalyngrigge stands at the dig (The Azure Span 27.0, 46.5, wiki) and at the Archives (Thaldraszus 61.6, 31.3); wow.gg has the dig at 27.0, 46.2.
No lockout: Wowhead's guide says 'no lockout, can try as many times as you want', 2024 comments say the same, and one of 2024 had it from Doomshadow on a third or fourth dig of the week on one character, at Archives rank 2 of 5. The weekly quest of the same name only limits its own 5,000 Mysterious Fragments.
The chance for a whole dig rests on the number of tomes, which nothing measures for today: Wowhead's counts hold 8.7 tomes for every Doomshadow loot, from the months when the event was crowded, and tomes may have been counted from other sources too. wow.gg reckons 50 to 200 tomes opened for the mount; that is the guide's own estimate.
On what has to be done first the sources differ:
- Wowhead's guide has the weekly Big Dig quest offered as soon as To the Archives! is handed in and says the unlock is account-wide
- wow.gg says the Algeth'ar Academy introduction chain has to be finished
- a 2025 Wowhead comment tells of killing Doomshadow in passing and looting the mount without knowing of the event, which suggests the boss can be looted with nothing done
A 2024 reply found the mount in the mailbox, sent on after a missed loot. Added in patch 10.2.5.
Confidence in this entry: medium. Looked up in 2026.
Sources