Although the big angry dragon has been center-stage in Cataclysm, expansion 3 has been, more than any other expansion so far, about the Old Gods. The more we've explored the World of Warcraft, the more we come to realize how big an influence the Old Gods have had in the shaping of Azeroth. The sequence of events are not entirely clear (as far as I know,) but they employed the Elemental Lords in their various conflicts, they inflicted the Curse of Flesh on the races the Titans had created (probably,) they corrupted Neltharion, created the Faceless Ones, they took Sargeras' sloppy seconds and transformed many of the Highborne into the Naga, and they have basically spent all of known history driving people insane (and they're probably insane themselves, if sanity is an applicable quality for an Eldritch Abomination.)
But the Old Gods are not the only ultimate force of ultimate evil out there. You see, the Titans were going around, essentially terraforming planets to fit their ideals of what a good world ought to look like. The problem is that there's a lot of bad stuff in the universe, and one of the Titans, a fellow by the name of Sargeras, had a dark epiphany: what if the entire idea of order was a fool's errand, and that the Titans had only arbitrarily determined that their way was good. Perhaps the only reason that the demons of the Twisting Nether (who he spent a lot of time fighting) were considered "evil" was because of the tyrannical definition of "good" that the Titans had imposed on the universe.
WoW Insider's "Know Your Lore" articles have a designation called "TFH," or "tin-foil hat." What this means is that there's a lot of speculation, not necessarily definitively proven by the existing content Blizzard has published, but something that might be the case. Please put your tin-foil hats on now.
Demons, in Warcraft, are beings of the Twisting Nether. They're not really from the physical realm, but exist in a plane of pure magic. Yet at the same time, we know that many types of demon - the Eredar, for example - were originally mortals that were transformed into demons by corruption via Fel energy, itself a kind of warped version of arcane magic. Arguably, Sargeras himself, as a Dark Titan, falls under this same category (even if he's hardly a mortal.)
So what is the origin of demons in Warcraft? We know that the Naaru go through a cycle of light and darkness. The ones we've encountered tend to be light - beings of Holy energy. Yet given certain circumstances, such as the case of Mu'ru, the dark Naaru take on the form of a Voidwalker. Unlike other demons, who seem fairly fleshy, Voidwalkers are beings of pure shadow - practically "shadow elementals" (in fact, the standard Voidwalker and Fire Elemental models are simply recolored versions of each other.) We don't know exactly where the Naaru come from, but we do know that the Draenei encountered them while traveling through the Twisting Nether. Perhaps this is where they are from - and consequently, so are the Voidwalkers.
So what if the Voidwalkers are the original demons - beings of pure, unadulterated malevolence, literally made of evil? Well, it gives us an origin for demons, and it also allows us to look at both Fel and Holy magic as the two sort of "polarizations" of the arcane.
So let's take a look at Sargeras again. We don't know exactly when Sargeras turned evil (I do not think he was "corrupted" in a magical mind-control sort of way, if for no other reason than it's less interesting for the story and it's also just a bigger Deathwing,) but suppose he fought the Old Gods - helped wrestle them into submission and chain them up beneath Azeroth. He was the Titan's muscle, so it stands to reason that he would be their go-to Old God wrangler.
But let's say he has a difference in opinion. The other Titans want to preserve Azeroth. The Old Gods are chained up, and they figure (erroneously, it turns out) that they've been dealt with. Sargeras says no. He's in favor of killing them. But the other Titans won't let him. They forbid him. So Sargeras storms off, enraged at the Pantheon's folly.
They won't let him kill the Old Gods for fear of harming Azeroth. So Sargeras decides he'll take matters into his own hands, and he goes out into the universe looking for the right weapon to kill the Old Gods once and for all.
And he finds it. Fel magic.
In Wrath of the Lich King, up in Northrend, Storm Peaks is going crazy with Yogg-Saron's corruption. Loken was turned first, long ago, and he's managed to at least temporarily indoctrinate Thorim, Mimiron, Freya and Hodir (still waiting to figure out what happened to Tyr.) Yogg-Saron's driven the Furbolgs of Grizzly Hills crazy too. You know who he's had exactly zero effect on? The Scourge.
Icecrown is one enormous Saronite fortress - towers and castles the size of skyscrapers are built with the Old God's congealed blood (gross,) but the undead shrug off its influence like it's no big deal, even cursing the name of the "God of Death" down in the Wintergarde mines. The Scourge, let us remember, was created by Fel magic. And Fel magic seems to burn (or in this case freeze) away any influence the Old Gods have over mortals and immortals alike. If you go into the Saronite mine in Ymirheim, the Val'kyr and the big Ymirjar warrior there are doing just fine, even with good old Darkspeaker R'khem standing right there, but the Argent Crusade prisoners are going totally nuts - many diving down a bottomless pit to their deaths with manic glee as soon as you let them go.
It looks like Sargeras did find the perfect weapon to fight of the Old Gods. But, much like nuclear weapons, Fel magic is a double-edged sword, trading eldritch corruption for demonic corruption. Sargeras was always a fighter, and having found the ultimate weapon, he's realized that he can kill just about anything in his way. The purpose of the killing is no longer important - he just wants to kill, desecrate, and destroy. Sargeras has dedicated himself so much to destroying his enemies that he's willing to destroy the very world he was meant to save. And if we don't stop him, that's exactly what he'll do.
But there is one note of hope. Just as the Voidwalkers can, presumably, return to their Naaru forms, perhaps Fel magic is not the only thing that can destroy the Old Gods once and for all. One day, we're going to have to deal with both the Old Gods and the Burning Legion. We might want to have some Holy magic on our side.
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