Eyes of Blue

Eye color in Warcraft is significant. Thrall's blue eyes seemed to signal his significance as a person of destiny. Illidan's golden eyes did the same. When the High Elves began to take on Fel energy to satiate their thirst for magic, their eyes turned from blue to green (in fact, the only visible different between High Elves and Blood Elves is eye color) and later, after years in which the Sunwell was suffused with Holy energy, some Blood Elves began to get golden eyes.

The most striking visual distinction for Death Knights is that their eyes glow blue. Naturally, I had to play a Draenei character whose eyes do that anyway, so it's less distinctive for him, but anyone from Human to Goblin to Blood Elf has blue eyes.

In Wrath of the Lich King's opening cinematic, Arthas' glowing blue eyes opening were an icon of the necromantic power running through him. Frostmourne lights up blue as he prepares to raise Sindragosa, and the shot of the hundreds of thousands if not millions of zombies and skeletons watching him raising this most powerful of Frostwyrms was punctuated by their bodies lighting up with the icy blue necromantic magic.

Blue is kind of an important color for the Scourge.

And that made it so visually interesting that when Bolvar was crowned as Lich King, the fiery orange/red that had been infused into him by the breath of the red dragons shone through the helmet. When he became the Lich King, that glow burst forth from the helmet, and even the blue gem on the forehead changed colors.

This, it seemed, was indicative of the profound change that was Bolvar taking the crown from Arthas. Perhaps Bolvar's fire could melt Arthas' ice, and we would see the Lich King turned from an apocalyptic menace into a gatekeeper holding the tide of death at bay.

So, why, then, are his eyes blue now?

The hope in crowning Bolvar way back then (about ten years ago, actually) was that this pillar of will power, who had held out against the Lich King's personal attention for a full year without falling to his corruption, could then take up the task of running the Scourge in a way that did not threaten all life on Azeroth.

And so far, so good. Mostly.

In Legion, we saw Bolvar more active than he's been since taking on the crown. Empowering the Deathlord and allying with the Ebon Blade, player Death Knights went about recruiting a new Four Horsemen to serve as his champions. And while there were some ironies, like how the Ebon Blade saw raising Sally Whitemane as a Death Knight was actually a kind of redemption for her after her role in the Scarlet Crusade, the Ebon Blade also committed some terrible crimes empowering the Lich King. They struck at Light's Hope Chapel to raise Tirion Fordring - and even if Bolvar had planned it as a way to get Darion Mograine as his replacement from the beginning, it still meant the deaths of several paladins at the hands of their supposed allies.

Later, the Lich King raised the corpse of a red dragon to serve as the Deathlord's mount, but in the process, sent them to the Ruby Dragonshrine where they were likely to slay many benevolent dragons in their search for the information they needed.

Bolvar in life was the epitome of a lawful good paladin - honorable, brave, and skilled in battle. But at the very best, he can only be considered neutral now in terms of morality.

We're really now just at a point where we're hoping he remains Lawful Neutral - holding to his task of keeping the dead at bay. The fear, then, is that he might descend into Lawful Evil and revive the Scourge as the apocalyptic threat that it initially was.

Bolvar's red motif was based on the fire of the Red Dragons. Because the Red dragonflight in Warcraft lore are the guardians of Life, their fire is infused with the power of life. Red and Black dragons both breathe fire, but Black's is the more traditional destructive flame. When the red dragons burned the area in front of the Wrath Gate, not only was the Forsaken Blight burned away, but flowers and plants began to grow up from the ground.

Initially, we assumed that Bolvar's death to the Blight simply meant that his body was burned away in the fires - a cleansing fire, but also one that returned his body to the elements.

Instead, as was heavily implied in 3.1 but confirmed in 3.3, Bolvar was brought back to some strange semblance of light - a charred and blackened body that still glowed with the fire of the dragons, but that could not seem to die.

It made sense, then, for Bolvar to take the Helm of Domination, rather than Tirion Fordring, who was ready to do so. Bolvar was no longer really human anymore, and returning to a normal life in Stormwind was hardly a realistic scenario.

One wonders, then, what it means that in that screenshot - which by now is basically confirmed to be real - his eyes have gone blue. Notably, the rest of his body, and even his amazingly badass looking maul weapon, still glow with red flame. But the eyes are typically what count.

And it's not like this isn't new - as recently as BFA, we've met with the Lich King and he remained frozen within the Frozen Throne, his eyes continuing to burn with red dragonfire.

While I don't necessarily want to endorse it, the most straightforward theory is that this signifies the end of Bolvar as "Jailor of the Damned" and his full transformation into the Lich King. He held out longer than most would, but the Scourge and the Lich King have a purpose, and it is to scour the world of the living.

Obviously, the other point that is so obvious that one forgets to mention it: Bolvar is out.

Arthas spent all the time between the Frozen Throne WCIII expansion and Wrath of the Lich King frozen into the throne - we see the ice begin to crack during the Wrath cinematic. Bolvar, upon his coronation, coated himself in ice, entombing himself in the Frozen Throne, and for all of his activity in recent years, he never left that spot.

But the image depicts Bolvar out, wearing new armor, and wielding a massive new weapon.

Regardless of whether this means he has fallen to evil or if he has come to save us all, Bolvar has, for the first time in a decade, stood up and emerged from his throne. That has got to mean big things are afoot.

It's a really tantalizing mystery. I'm glad that we have less than a week to wait before we get some answers, but damn if it isn't good to have some hard evidence to speculate on.