First opened up in earnest in BC (they've existed since vanilla, but there were no dungeons there then,) the Caverns of Time are the biggest dungeon/raid hub in the game (though Blackrock Mountain is up there too, with one more raid but two fewer dungeons.) They're uniquely potent as a setting for instances, as they have the whole "it only looks that way because your mortal mind cannot perceive it as it truly is" thing going for it. Despite being underground, you can see out into some kind of cosmic expanse down there. New caverns opened up in 3.0 and 4.3, but there was no retconning at work (though technically speaking Hour of Twilight and Dragon Soul took place in the present,) as they had established from the beginning that new pathways could open up.
The Caverns of Time have mostly been opportunities to show us moments from Warcraft history, sometimes conforming closely with the RTS games. The Battle of Mount Hyjal raid was a WoW-ification of the final mission in Warcraft III Reign of Chaos - indeed, all the trash were Undead units from that game. Similarly, the Culling of Stratholme was a somewhat more liberally adapted version of the WCIII mission "The Culling."
One of the major appeals of the Caverns of Time is that they allow us to go see important events from Warcraft history. We witnessed the opening of the Dark Portal (defending a Sargeras-possessed Medivh to ensure that history - disastrous as it was - went the way it was supposed to.) We helped Thrall escape from Durnholde Keep and we stole the Dragon Soul from right before the moment it was corrupted into the Demon Soul during the War of the Ancients (and helped win the war sort of by accident along the way.)
The instance I actually find the most fascinating, though, is End Time, which takes place in a post-apocalyptic future where Deathwing succeeded. This future did not come to pass, yet it was accessible nonetheless.
This of course, sets up Kairoz' ability to open up the alternate Draenor that we're going to in this expansion, yet the Bronze and Infinite Dragonflights are, as of yet, unseen in Draenor (with the exception of the duplicitous Kairoz himself.)
One would think that the Caverns of Time would be a DEFCON 1 with the invasion of the Iron Horde. It's not so much the Iron Horde itself that is the problem (that might not even concern the Keepers of Time at all,) but the fact that one reality was bleeding into another. Granted, for all we know, they are freaking out lore-wise, and it's just not in game for the same reason the Exodar isn't fully repaired and hovering over Azuremyst Isle yet.
We killed Murozond in Cataclysm, but there are a number of reasons why we shouldn't consider that the end of the Infinite Dragonflight. First, it was in a timeline that we effectively erased (which does create something of a paradox... maybe.) Second, as Murozond was a time traveler in a distant future, there's still plenty of time for the Infinites to become a threat. Hell, they haven't even gotten started yet, what with the fact that Nozdormu is still Nozdormu and has not become Murozond yet. Third, the whole "one single timeline" thing has been exposed as a lie, or at least a misleading truth. There are absolutely other parallel universes out there, because we're currently being invaded by one of them. Are the Infinites truly from the future? Or are they from an alternate timeline? Nozdormu certainly thinks that he'll become Murozond one day - that's the vision that Aman-thul gave him, but given that it doesn't seem that even the Dragon Aspects actually met face-to-face with the Titans, it's possible that Nozdormu has had it wrong all these eons. Perhaps it's not so much that he is supposed to only believe in a single timeline, but that for this particular universe, the timeline needs to be kept a certain way. Why? Oh I wouldn't even pretend to have any idea.
I'll buy that the initial issues on Draenor are going to be dealing with these ghosts of the past. The Iron Horde has the viciousness of the original Horde with the technology to pose a threat to us, and the Shadow Council is far stronger on Draenor than it is on modern Azeroth. Still, those threats (yes, even the alterna-Legion,) might be just a part of the big picture. If you thought the original Dark Portal, which bridged a vast expanse of space between two planets, was bad, just imagine the kind of damage that a Dark Portal linking two different universes across an expanse of 35 years as well might do.
It's possible that Kairoz had simple motivations. Perhaps he wanted, like Wrathion, a force strong enough to stand up against the Burning Legion - something he didn't think the divided Alliance and Horde were capable of doing. Or perhaps he was just a standard power-hungry jerk who had dreams of a massive army of Orcs at his command. He's dead, so we may never know the full truth of it. On the other hand, he was a Bronze Dragon. If there's anyone we might be able to find despite being already dead, it's a time-traveler. And given that it was a group of Infinite Dragons who aided in Garrosh's escape, I think that there's something really, really bad going on, and that the Iron Horde is just a distraction.
No comments:
Post a Comment