Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Galakrond, the Scourge, and the Titans

There's a strange irony in Warcraft. Some of the most influential players in the cosmos are the Old Gods - beings inspired by HP Lovecraft that are continent-sized monsters with incredible psychic powers and that seem to exist in a strange state that is neither life nor death.

One of the catchphrases of the Faceless creations of the Old Gods is "they do not live, they do not die. They are outside the cycle."

Yet as mysterious as these beings are, we actually interact with them fairly directly relatively often. We've fought both C'Thun and Yogg-Saron, and even if we were only fighting their heads - one projection on a much larger body, we do seem to have faced them down and beaten them in one way or another. These malevolent creatures, who even drove Neltharion to madness, are actually not the most difficult adversary to subdue indeed, it was Deathwing, once a repository of Titanic power, who seemed to have a much larger impact on the world than any of the Old Gods accomplished on their own.

If you want awe-inspiring mystery, look to the "good" guys, the Titans. We've heard tons and tons about them, and we've seen evidence of their works from Storm Peaks to Uldum to the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, but we still haven't seen one and we've never been able to talk to them about just what they mean to do with us.

I always thought it was interesting that an Orc shaman who had been transformed by the Fel magics of an Eredar demon would become so affiliated with ice and undeath. The Lich King is a strange creature, and despite the well-known origins of the Scourge, there are a few things that don't really add up. Was the Lich King truly Ner'zhul, and then Arthas? (And then Bolvar?) Why did the Lich King suddenly gain powers over the dead, unlike, say, simply summoning a ton of demons to Northrend or calling down fel fire from the sky?

I've often put forth that somehow, the Lich King drew on a separate source of power, fusing the demonic fel magic with, perhaps, the power of Yogg-Saron to become a wholly new entity. The Lich King may have been defeated, but the Scourge remains, and even though the army of the damned is a relatively recent thing on Azeroth, it's already become so ingrained that it can no longer be destroyed - only controlled and leashed by the Jailor of the Damned (which is a hell of a thing to put on a resume, Bolvar.) Much as the Titans felt they couldn't kill the Old Gods (stuff like the Sha being the result,) we are warned after killing Arthas that there still has to be someone to take on the Crown of Domination, lest the Scourge become even worse that it otherwise would be.

There's something odd about Northrend that seems to make the dead come back to life.

The Scourge, at this point in-game, is only a little over a decade old, yet thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago, when the War of the Ancients was still in the distant future, there was Galakrond.

We only heard a bit about Galakrond in Wrath - we knew he was the father of all dragons, and that the aspects were somehow derived or descended from him. He was also the biggest dragon or proto-dragon to exist.

We knew that the Scourge was trying to raise him, but I imagine most people simply wrote that off as the fact that the Scourge would obviously want the largest Frostwyrm they could get their hands on.

But in the recent series, Dawn of the Aspects (which I should note here that I have not actually read,) we learn some interesting things. Kalecgos has found a mysterious artifact from Northrend that allows him to see far into the past through the eyes of Malygos. The events Kalec witnesses are from before the aspects were aspects, and Malygos was still a proto-dragon.

Galakrond was not the benevolent father figure to the original dragons - he was an immense beast, eating his fellow dragonkin and, far more horrifically, his victims were coming back from the dead.

Why would the Titans select such a monster on which to base their key protectors?

Let's talk about another thing: the Curse of Flesh.

We're first introduced to the concept of the Curse of Flesh in Borean Tundra, where the gnomes get the first evidence that they were descended from essentially Titan-build robots. This curse explains what happened to make the Earthen turn into the Dwarves, likewise the early origins of the humans, tol'vir, and even the mogu.

Yet there's someone else who talks about the Curse of Flesh - Lady Deathwhisper in Icecrown Citadel. The Lady offers to free her subjects from the curse by turning them into the undead. No longer bound by mortality, the Scourge is allowed to function as a single-minded machine. Kind of like the creations of the Titans...

Meanwhile, we see the Mogu have been pretty successful at re-activating Titan technology, like the construct machine in Mogu'shan Vaults. The line between living and artificial Mogu is a very blurred one, and the Mogu are also masters of trading out bodies and spirits - living forever through a kind of spirit-transfer that, when you think about it, is actually pretty much just necromancy.

The Titans are strange beings with unknowable minds. We've projected benevolent psychologies onto them, but we have very little evidence to support what we think their motives are. The Titans create order, almost like machines. What if they are, in some way, machine-like themselves? They may see organic life as simply a chemical and mechanical process. But think about this: what if that catchphrase from before isn't talking about the Old Gods, and it isn't talking about the Scourge?

What if it's the Titans? They do not live, they do not die - they are immortal and ageless, but exist on a level so far removed from what we think of as life that, perhaps, they do not comprehend it in the way that we do. They are outside the cycle. What cycle? The cycle of life and death? Of corruption and redemption? Of creation and destruction?

Whatever cycle we're talking about, clearly the Titans saw something in Galakrond that they wished to recreate. Perhaps it was not Yogg-Saron's power that caused Ner'zhul to become something utterly different than what the Burning Legion represented, but rather it was Titanic power that gave him the ability to reshape and recreate life.

Perhaps the Titans are the ultimate necromancers?

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