Have We Seen the Shadowlands? And If So, How Many?

In Warcraft Chronicle, we can read that when Helya rebelled against Odyn, there were some Val'kyr who did not take her side. Obviously, Eyir and her loyalists remain true to him, but there were apparently a group of them who decided not to side with Helya but also not to return to Odyn's service, and instead chose to dedicate themselves to reviving champions that could help defend Azeroth.

They're Spirit Healers.

This revelation - that there's now a real story explanation for us going into ghost form and recovering our bodies - was kind of incredible. What had always been just a way to handle death in an MMO in a way that punished players but not too harshly now had the backing of canon.

But it also introduced an interesting notion: that the mysterious Shadowlands are actually the other plane of existence that WoW players are most familiar with.

The Emerald Dream is said to be a parallel to our reality, but one in which humanoid civilization never reshaped the earth. The Emerald Dream is an Azeroth free of Old Gods as well as any people - it's Azeroth as pure nature would have had it. This was part of the horror of the Nightmare - corrupting that which was meant to be incorruptible. But it's especially dangerous if the Dream serves the purpose we've long suspected - as essentially Azeroth's back-up disk should the Halls of Origination be activated.

Indeed, a popular theory (that this blogger subscribes to) is that the purpose of the Emerald Nightmare was to corrupt the back-up as, essentially, a backdoor to establish total Old God corruption of Azeroth.

What's interesting, then, is that Ny'alotha seems to be a very similar concept - a version of Azeroth where the Old Gods are triumphant, to be overlaid onto the real Azeroth.

So where is Ny'alotha?

To be fair, the oft-whispered Ny'alotha could just be its own thing. But I also wonder if it's of a piece with a few other locations we've encountered.

In Legion, we journeyed to Helheim, the realm of Helya, which is a dead and haunted realm of the drowned, and the source of the Kvaldir (and how freaking cool was it to finally get an explanation for the Kvaldir?) In BFA, Alliance players at least got to visit Thros, a realm to which the spirits of the Drust had retreated after the Kul Tirans had conquered the land (and, obviously, intermarried with those Drust who weren't so hardline. To be clear, Drust are Vrykul, and Kul Tirans are so big and burly because they are part Vrykul. We all agree on this, right?)

We know so little of the Shadowlands - on one hand, it seems to be where our ghosts go while we're dead, and at various times in Wrath of the Lich King we journeyed to the Shadowlands as part of quests involving the Lich King - though that realm was never identified in those exact words.

I have a couple theories on the Shadowlands.

One is that it has both overlay zones and its own special areas. Thros, to be fair, looks just like Drustvar only... darker. Helheim has no direct equivalent in Azeroth, unless it exists under the waves - which to be fair is totally possible.

So what is Ny'alotha then?

Here's my theory, and yes this is a bit tin-foil hat-y: I think that while N'zoth was working on the Emerald Nightmare, he was doing the same thing in the Shadowlands. We don't know what purpose the Shadowlands serve for Azeroth, but perhaps it is in its own way a sort of back-up alternative for the world. Or maybe it's a kind of "working document" or maybe something totally different.

But maybe while N'zoth was corrupting the Dream to make the Nightmare, he was also corrupting the Shadowlands in order to make Ny'alotha.

In other words: like Helheim or Thros, Ny'alotha might be one of the Shadowlands.

Now, the Shadowlands might simply be one large plane that's all interconnected. But borrowing some D&D lore (the 5th Edition version, to be clear,) it's possible that beyond the Shadowfell proper (in WoW's case the Shadowlands,) there might also be several demiplanes. In the Ravenloft D&D setting you find the various Demiplanes of Dread, the most famous of which is Barovia, the home of Count Strahd von Zarovich, a powerful vampire lord. Is it possible that the Shadowlands have demiplanes, such as Ny'alotha, that kind of bud off from it?

Given the very convincing leak that came out earlier today (see previous post) we might be about to learn a whole lot more about the Shadowlands very soon.