Silence of the Titans

Azeroth is filled with heroes. From Eastern Kingdoms to Kalimdor to Pandaria, the world is brimming with people who are all about saving the world. Their motivations may differ - indeed, to some, "saving" the world is a prelude to conquering it - but ultimately, any character we roll in World of Warcraft is going to be a paragon of virtue at best to a self-interested anti-hero at worst.

But these heroes arise because of great evils. The Orcs are only on Azeroth because of the machinations of the Burning Legion. The Forsaken are a byproduct of the Scourge, and the original Druids of the Pack were founded to fight the Legion, and only brought back out of the Emerald Dream in order to employ the Worgen against the undead.

Azeroth is full of heroes, but only because heroes are needed. It is a dangerous, chaotic world. Eldritch Horrors reach out from below its surface while a demonic army lays siege from other worlds.  Your average adventurer has fought swarms of undead, raging elementals, mindless religious zealots, mutated troglodytes, sinister mer-people, other mindless religious zealots (these ones dedicated to a nihilistic cult,) all manner of rat-people, bear-people, pig-people, hyena-people, and fish-people.

What of the higher powers, then? The side of evil has demons and Old Gods. On the side of good, there are also multiple factions at play - the Naaru, the Ancients, whatever the hell Elune is.

But the greatest champions of good we can name are almost undoubtedly the Titans. The Titans shaped the world, created many sentient races, and attempted to protect Azeroth from the hideous threats that endangered it.

And they haven't done a thing for Azeroth in at least ten thousand years.

All of Azeroth's land was once part of a massive super-continent that was called Kalimdor. We use that name for one of its continents, but before the War of the Ancients, the places we now consider the Eastern Kingdoms, Northrend, and Pandaria were all just other parts of Kalimdor. At the center of the old Kalimdor was the Well of Eternity - a font of incredible arcane energy. When the Well was destroyed in order to cut the Burning Legion off from Azeroth, the result was a catastrophe called the Sundering, which sunk most of Kalimdor beneath the waves, leaving only the four remaining continents as its fragmented remnants.

Did the Titans know about this? Surely, something as enormous as this would rouse their interests. Theoretically, it might have been the role of Loken, the Prime Designate, to call upon them, but Loken was driven mad by Yogg-Saron, the Old God imprisoned within Ulduar. It was only his death that triggered a signal that called forth Algalon the Observer, who was there to evaluate whether Azeroth should be salvaged or totally re-started.

Yet Algalon is not a Titan. Indeed, more so even than the Keepers, Algalon is more like a sentient automated system. Algalon had seen many worlds, and in many of those cases had dispassionately chosen to re-originate. Our fight against him made him realize that we were not merely cogs in a machine, ready to be recycled, but sentient beings who did not wish to die.

The image I'm trying to paint here is that the workings of the Titans are like a long-running machine. It's a machine that has been running for millennia, and there has been essentially no maintenance.

The given explanation for why this is is that the Titans are traveling throughout the universe. They might be on a planet in another galaxy, creating life and order there, and Azeroth is so far away that they would have no way of knowing what had happened there for tens of thousands of years.

But I am beginning to suspect something different, something darker. The only Titan any mortal still alive has interacted with is Sargeras, and as lord of the Burning Legion, he can hardly be considered to be among the Pantheon anymore.

During the legendary chain in Pandaria, Wrathion eats the heart of the Thunder King - the ruler of the one Titanic race that was able to reverse the curse of flesh. When he does, his voice changes, and he says the following ominous words: "We have fallen," and "We must rebuild the final titan."

Perhaps the Titans are not out there in the universe, spreading order and creating life.

Perhaps the Titans are all dead.

Suddenly, their enigmatic nature is explained - they do not make themselves known because they cannot. Their systems on Azeroth have broken down in tremendous ways because they cannot return to set them back on course.

And that leaves us, the mortal heroes of Azeroth, as the first and last line of defense against he forces of darkness. We must carry on the Titans' legacy.