Chronicle, and then the Legion expansion, gave us a shockingly concise "unified historical theory" on the Warcraft cosmos.
There was Light and Void, and there were Titans. And Azeroth was a world that had formed around a nascent Titan world-soul, destined to one day arise as a Titan herself.
We know that the Void wished to see the material plane corrupted and turned into more Void, and saw in the Titans a great potential to create a being that was powerful enough to bring about this vision of madness and darkness. The thing is, the Titans are godlike on their own, and a mature Titan could not be corrupted in this way, apparently.
So they send the Old Gods - massive clumps of shadowy void energy made flesh, which then crashed into various worlds and burrowed into them, infecting and spreading like a malignant growth.
We know that the Old Gods - not the four we're familiar with, but presumably beings of similar power and evil - corrupted the world of Telongrus, which itself had a world-soul within it. Telongrus was fated to be the first Void Titan, until Sargeras took it upon himself to slash the planet it half, killing Telongrus and leaving only a shattered world saturated in void that would, eons later, become the home territory of the Alliance's Void Elves.
Azeroth, however, is apparently, potentially, more powerful than any previous Titan, and so it was something of the ultimate prize for the Void. But the Pantheon discovered in before the corruption could be completed. Though the Old Gods had defeated and enslaved the Elemental Lords upon their first invasion, the Titans were able to destroy the Black Empire and contain the Old Gods - though they discovered that removing them was untenable after Aman'thul tore Y'shaarj out of the planet's surface. The destruction wrought by this nearly killed Azeroth, and only by channeling the power of Azeroth's blood back into itself and creating the Well of Eternity was the World-Soul saved.
Sargeras, however, was unconvinced that such half measures were enough to prevent a Void Titan, and instead embraced the chaotic power of the Fel, unleashing the demons he had fought for eons to serve as his army, intending to leave the universe a scorched ruin, perhaps the only thing surviving being his demonic Legion. The Demons seemed to be immune to the power of the Void (though it had been a group of demonic Nathrezim whose dalliances with the Void had led him to Telongrus in the first place) and he felt it was the only option to prevent the universe from succumbing to eldritch madness.
In the cosmic chart at the beginning of Chronicle, there are six Primal Forces, arranged in opposition to one another. From the top, and going clockwise, there's Light, Disorder, Death, Void, Order, and Life. While I don't know if these are all supposed to be equal in power and importance - notably, Light and Void are at the top and bottom - it is curious that Death is at least on the same tier as Disorder (represented by Demons and the Fel.)
There's plenty of undead to be found in World of Warcraft, but the most iconic example is the Scourge. The thing is, the Scourge was created like a weapon - not unlike the Horde, in fact - to be used to invade and weaken Azeroth in order to prepare it for a full scale demonic invasion by the Burning Legion.
Canonically, the Lich King - which is really the font from which the Scourge is poured - was simply a creation by Kil'jaeden, one of Sargeras' two top lieutenants, and a former mortal Eredar who allowed his race to be corrupted into the Man'ari. The Lich King was the spirit of the Orc shaman Ner'zhul - once the wise spiritual leader of the Orcs on Draenor.
What has always bothered me about this is that there's no real primal force at play here - it's just one mortal-turned-demon who took the spirit of an orc he had just killed and stuffed it in a suit of armor. Now, sure, from a human perspective, Kil'jaeden is profoundly ancient. Very generously you could say that human history goes back something like 5000 years (I think the earliest writing is 5300 years old) and Kil'jaeden became a demon five times that much longer ago. But on the other hand, with long-lived races - particularly the Draenei, who either don't really suffer the effects of aging or just have an absurdly long lifespan - personally remember stuff that happened that long ago. Your Draenei character might even remember Kil'jaeden as the charismatic new leader when he first came to power in Mac'aree. And so it maybe takes a bit of the mystery out of him, which subsequently makes the Lich King a less mythic figure.
However, in the expansions since Wrath - and particularly in Legion - we were introduced to Helya and Odyn. Given how profound an impact she had on Azeroth's history, and how cool a villain she was, it was a shame that we killed her just one patch after she was introduced. However, in BFA, you can get a quest from island expeditions that reveal that Helya is doing fine - sure, she no longer has Odyn trapped in the Halls of Valor, but it appears that that is literally all we were able to accomplish in that raid.
However, while Helya feels like a pretty cool ancient exemplar of Death as a power, she's not really at the top of that list.
Instead, there's a mystery regarding Helya's creation. We know that Odyn, annoyed that Tyr had placed the power of the Titans in the dragons to serve as guardians of Azeroth, and did not reserve that power only for the Titanforged, sought to find his own way to create a different sort of guardian for the world. Seeking to undo the Curse of Flesh, Odyn journeyed to the Shadowlands and met with...
Something.
Much like his Norse mythology counterpart, he gave his eye for knowledge - in this case, the knowledge needed to create beings that could retrieve souls from the Shadowlands and put them into new bodies - bodies of metal that were free from the Curse of Flesh.
Odyn, being an arrogant, egotistical dick, forced Helya to become the first of these beings - the first Val'kyr - basically killing someone who had thought of him as her adoptive father. Her eventual rebellion would lead Odyn to be trapped in the Halls of Valor for thousands of years (though apparently he could project himself around Stormheim?) unleash the Kvaldir upon the world, and generally mess things up.
The thing is, while that set the stage for the drama we played through in Legion across Stormheim through two dungeons and a raid, it left one tantalizing question:
What the hell did Odyn meet with? Who has his eye?
The most prominent theory is that it is Mueh'zalla, a being that the Trolls of Zul'farrak revere and fear, and whose name is listed along with two other Loa that we then saw on Zandalar (RIP Shadra.)
Could Mueh'zalla be the death entity that was behind all of this?
It's certainly possible, but it kind of begs the question. All we really know of Mueh'zalla is that he's called the Father of Sleep and seems to be a god of death.
While the Loa are generally just a subset of Wild Gods - which also includes the Ancients revered by the Night Elves like Malorne and Ursoc, as well as the Celestials of Pandaria, like Yu'lon and Xuen - it's clear that not all Loa are the same sort of animal-god beings. Bwonsamdi looks like an undead troll, and might even have once been a mortal troll who ascended to being a Loa. The trolls have even referred to Night Elf wisps as Loa before, which suggests that the term Loa is actually a very broad one.
Which then leaves us to wonder: What even is Mueh'zalla?
Furthermore, we think of the Shadowlands - the likely setting of the next expansion - as being the deathly reflection of the Emerald Dream. But even the Dream is not very well understood, despite an entire class being connected to it. We don't know, for example, if Freya actually created the Dream, or opened a way into it (we should ask her - she's still around.)
But we know way more about the Emerald Dream than we know the Shadowlands.
To step outside the narrative for a moment: I'm sure that the reason these things are so mysterious is that there's new lore Blizzard is developing for the story. Any ongoing franchise like this is going to need to bring about new backstory, sometimes retconning things a bit to make them more interesting.
Still, with the Burning Legion decisively crippled, the danger was that the only really big supernatural threats left would be the Old Gods. Mind you, I like the Old Gods as villains (though I've usually been a little underwhelmed by their use in-game) and I know a lot of people were hoping that 9.0 would be a big Black Empire expansion. That could very well happen at some point, but I'm actually very excited to explore a different cosmic force, and one that I feel Blizzard has generally done a good job with.
I think there's another post to be written here about the tone and themes I'd like to see explored in a Shadowlands expansion, which I might write tomorrow.
But the thing that's funny is that, with the exception of Helya, we haven't really seen Death and Undeath make a huge impact on Azeroth's history in the same way that the Old Gods or the Legion have.
That being said, there's potential. There's a lot of story about stuff that happened over ten thousand years ago, with stuff like the Night Elf Empire, the Trolls fighting the Aqir, and the Pandaren overthrowing the Mogu.
But between the War of the Ancients (maybe the War of the Satyr a little after then) and the First War, there are some yawning chasms of history that have not been explored.
The Drust practiced some kind of necromancy in their fight against the early Kul Tirans, and while it seems as if that story was resolved in the zone, dungeon, and the final quests about Jaina in 8.0, the fact that the Drust were clearly a group of Vrykul makes an interesting connection to the Titans.
I wonder - were there really no powerful necromancers to arise in the early days of the human kingdoms? Also, in Stormheim, there's a side quest involving pirates who have been converted into vampires by an ancient Vrykul vampire. Previously, the only vampires in WoW were the San'layn, created by the Lich King from the Blood Elves who accompanied Illidan to attack Icecrown. As a staple of fantasy fiction (if, admittedly, the fantasy that skews more gothic in nature) I, for one, wouldn't mind seeing more vampire villains in WoW.
We will, of course, be getting the general gist of the new expansion on Friday - major features like new classes and such, as well as a location and general theme. I'm also relatively confident that we'll see the new expansion's cinematic (which used to come much closer to the launch - I think Legion was the first where we got the cinematic at or around the same time as the announcement) given the 99.9% confirmed screenshot of Bolvar.
But I think these lore details are the sort of thing we'll have to wait at least until the Beta goes live to get fine details about.
I'm getting pretty excited, folks.
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