Do We Win the Battle for Azeroth?

It's pretty obvious that the title of the current WoW expansion is a play on words. Yes, the Alliance and Horde are fighting for supremacy on the world of Azeroth, but the true battle is for the fate of the Titan Azeroth, and whether she survives the damage she has sustained since Sargeras plunged his sword into her.

As a side note: I know that not every character can be a master schemer - this isn't Dune - but I do sort of wish/hope that Sargeras was cleverer. Legion was my favorite WoW expansion (it's been close to a year since Legion ended but it still feels weird to say that after considering Wrath the hands-down best for so long) but I do feel somewhat cheated out of a full-on fight with Sargeras himself, and frustrated that he only appeared in his full glory during the post-final-boss cinematic. That Sargeras stabbing the planet would just serve the Old Gods' purpose is... I don't know, maybe it's ok. Sargeras is allergic to thinking things through anyway.

I think the Alliance/Horde war is a distraction, ultimately. Even with full-on warfare going, we're already seeing even figures like Jaina, who post-Theramore (really post-Divine Bell incident) has been on the hawk side of the Alliance, deciding that they're going to need to end this conflict and find some peaceful balance given the bigger threats.

It seems that the real question is what will happen to Azeroth, the Titan.

(Other side note: while coming up with my homebrew D&D setting, I decided that the world the players lived on was actually the physical body of one of the proto-god creators of that universe - this was not long before Chronicle Volume 1 came out, so I guess that the folks at Blizzard and I were having similar ideas. Also, we both renamed the Shadowfell the Shadowlands.)

Now, we've been told that empowering the Heart of Azeroth is how we're going to save her, but at the end of the Eternal Palace, we find that instead, it has been used to unlock the seals on N'zoth's prison. Magni has been mislead.

One wonders - was the Heart of Azeroth ever going to help fix the world? And then one has darker worries - has Magni simply been hearing N'zoth whispering to him the whole time?

I'd argue that he probably has been hearing the real Azeroth at least some of the time, given that he shows a similar ability to hear Argus (another critique for Legion - we never really understood exactly what Antorus did for the Legion.)

But what we've been doing this expansion is clearly not entirely good and healthy for Azeroth.

The Titan is dying. Sargeras' sword caused a life-threatening wound. Now, maybe that's been fixed for the most part, but now we have another problem to deal with - for the first time since the Titans ordered the planet, an Old God is loose upon the world.

Now, the Old Gods were not sent there to kill Azeroth. That was Sargeras' initial plan, and while he clearly flirted with the idea of instead converting her to his cause, his final act before his imprisonment looks like a last-ditch effort to kill Azeroth like he did Telongrus (which I'm assuming would also be the name of the Titan who was so thoroughly void-corrupted... it's where Void Elves have their little home base, on fragments of the world destroyed by Sargeras)

The Old Gods are supposed to pump the Titan full of void in the hopes of creating a Void Titan that would spread their madness across the cosmos.

With N'zoth loose, he is probably better-suited than ever to accomplish that goal.

Which raises an interesting question:

What if we don't save Azeroth?

What if we kill her?

Sargeras wanted to destroy all of creation (though mission-creep might have changed his goals to more of a vision of an intergalactic empire of demons) to deprive the void of things to corrupt. What if we realize that we're going to have to do a far more limited version of that.

If Azeroth is corrupted, we might have to destroy her.

And if the World-Soul at the heart of a planet is dead, what does that then mean?

There are a lot of foreshadowing hints that the Shadowlands will play a major role in the next expansion, possibly even be its setting.

If a World-Soul dies, but the world is intact, could that manifest as a massive explosion of death energy? Might we see the Shadowlands become far more powerful, and might we see the undead raging across the world?

And could that be Sylvanas' plan all along?

Sylvanas has decided at this point that she wants to convert all of humanity into the undead. She's started making undead Night Elves as well. If she wants everything united (preferably under her control) as undead, might she even want Azeroth herself to be undead?