The Maw, Arthas, Sylvanas, and the Val'kyr

The Maw is a sort of black hole of the Shadowlands.

There are parts of the Shadowlands that appear very permeable. Ardenweald, for instance, is a place connected deeply to life. It's even described as being of a piece with the Emerald Dream - while the Dream is about growth and life, Ardenweald is about rest and preparing for rebirth. While the parts of Ardenweald showed off in the features trailer have a very Shadowmoon Valley (Draenor version,) Feywild feel, there's also areas of brown and dried decay, which suggests that the Drust could very easily have been interacting with this realm. Still, even with that, beings in Ardenweald don't even seem to be there permanently - it's more of a waiting room for reincarnation and rebirth, which is why Cenarius was able to come back in Cataclysm.

But the Maw appears to be a scary hell even for those in the "dark" Shadowlands zones like Maldraxxus and Revendreth. It's said nothing has ever escaped from it.

But that seems unlikely.

First off, there are rumors of the Jailor within the Maw, and it's not clear how such rumors would have gotten out if there wasn't some way for things to emerge from it.

One thing that's heavily implied but not confirmed is that the dark void that Sylvanas saw when she killed herself following Arthas' defeat might be the Maw. When Arthas says, in his dying moments, "I see only darkness before me," it's likely that he was seeing his soul being sent into this horrific place suitable only for the most irredeemable and wicked souls.

So, a couple things:

First off, I get that Arthas was prime material for the Maw. You could make the argument that before he lost his soul to Frostmourne, he was bad but not 100% evil, but if you consider his actions as Lich King, it's clear that he's one of the most evil people in the Warcraft cosmos - though again, you could make the argument that his actions once his soul was taken weren't strictly speaking his own.

Sylvanas was in an ambiguous moral place in that moment. She was certainly not free of sin. But if you compare things with, for example, Kael'thas, it seems maybe extra harsh for her, in that moment, to be sent to the Maw. Kael'thas had betrayed his own people and helped bring the Burning Legion to Azeroth, selling out his entire world for power. But he's gotten away with just going to Revendreth for some purgatorial rehabilitation.

Sylvanas' actions after her second death have, I think, made her another prime candidate for the Maw (Gul'dan has got to be there, right?) But had she really qualified the first time?

The official story for a while has been that she was rescued by some formerly Scourge-aligned Val'kyr, and that she has been using them to raise more Forsaken. As we're seeing in Shadowlands, that's not the whole story.

Now yes, this is a retcon, but I think one that is not necessarily undoing preexisting story. I think they've just decided there was more to it than previously thought.

It appears that she has been dealing with the Jailor since Cataclysm, which explains her turn toward the far more emphatically villainous. Did he send those Val'kyr to her?

We still haven't gotten a really clear look at the way the Lich King related to that veil between the Shadowlands and our reality.

I believe that the legendaries we'll be building with runes found in the Tower of the Damned are going to be crafted at the forge where Frostmourne and the Helm of Domination were created. Hopefully ours will be more resistant to shattering.

Initially, the story behind the Lich King was this: Kil'jaeden captured Ner'zhul as he tried to flee the crumbling world of Draenor as his portals were tearing the world apart and turning them into Outland. He then bound Ner'zhul's spirit into a suit of armor (and I guess also Frostmourne,) sealed them in an icy crystal and sent them to Azeroth to begin a plague of undeath that would take form as the Undead Scourge, all with the intent on devastating the world in order to clear the way for the Legion to invade.

At the time, we didn't really know about death itself as a separate cosmic power, and so it seemed the Scourge was really just an outgrowth of demonic fel magic. I've been saying for years (since Chronicle came out) that I hoped we'd get some lore giving the Scourge its own backing primal force, and now that's confirmed. (That being said, I did kind of like the idea that places like Naxxramas and the other ziggurat/pyramid structures they used were just appropriated Nerubian architecture, meaning that Naxxramas would have actually been an incredibly ancient Black Empire building. Instead, it appears that structures like the ones we've seen are actually drawn from Maldraxxus.)

That sets up an interesting pre-Scourge prologue story in which either Kil'jaeden or some of his minions must have gone to the Shadowlands and used the forge there to create the items that would empower the Lich King.

It appears that Demons and other non-mortals don't really go to the Shadowlands, so I'm very curious to see what it was like for someone like Kil'jaeden to come there (also, does it mean anything that he used to be a mortal? When he died at the end of Tomb of Sargeras, was he sent to the Arbiter or did his essence return to the Twisting Nether? Or, if we were strictly in the Nether when he died, does he just not exist in any way anymore?)

One big theme I'm sensing from Blizzcon is that Shadowlands is still in a relatively early stage of development - there are a lot of TBDs and systems they're still figuring out. I'm curious about to what extent that applies to the story.

The Warcraft cosmos is getting a massive expansion of its lore with Shadowlands, and I'm eager to see how it fits in with all the stuff we already know.