Denizens of the Shadowlands

If you've been reading this blog roughly since World of Warcraft Chronicle Volume 1 came out, you'll probably already know that I'm obsessed with one of the realms of existence mentioned early in the book: the Shadowlands.

The Shadowlands are the opposite of the Emerald Dream - they're not the Nightmare, which is a corruption of the Emerald Dream, but still on "that side" of reality. Instead, while the Dream is a reflection of the natural world and the home of the Wild Gods, the Shadowlands are a realm of death.

We know very little about the Shadowlands, and while there are several elements in-game that seem connected to it (that this post will attempt to list,) there are actually two explicit places where the word is mentioned:

The Val'kyr within Skyhold, the part of the Halls of Valor that serves as the Warrior class hall, mention that they live in the Shadowlands. We get far more detail about how they were created in Chronicle. Keeper Odyn traveled to the Shadowlands and sacrificed one of his eyes to a powerful, as-yet-unnamed entity there for the knowledge of how to create the Val'kyr. He transformed Helya into the first of them against her will, which ultimately led to her alliance with the corrupted Loken and her rebellion against Odyn.

The description of benevolent rogue Val'kyr - those who decided not to serve Helya even though Odyn was trapped within his Halls - perfectly lines up with that of the Spirit Healers, and their mission to resurrect any heroes who might help safeguard Azeroth lines up perfectly with their in-game purpose, which to me suggests that the ghostly world we find ourselves in within the game if we die is the Shadowlands, full stop. It's a clever lore-justification for a mechanic that has been in game from the start, but it has never been 100% unambiguously confirmed by Blizzard.

And that's true for basically everything else we know about the Shadowlands. Aside from the Val'kyr traveling there to rescue the souls of the valorous, the only other confirmed mention of them in-game is the Death Knight ability, Wraith Walk.

But while the specific word "Shadowlands" is used very rarely, we've heard about the Realm of Shadows and the Death Realm plenty of times, and there are places we've gone that seem closely tied to the Shadowlands even if we never heard the word used.

One thing to wonder about is whether the Shadowlands have anything to do with the Void.

While it's certainly up for debate, I tend to come down firmly on the "no" side of that question. While the types of dark magic within the Warcraft cosmos are often used in tandem with one another, the truth is that there are really three specific kinds: Void/Shadow Magic is tied directly to a kind of cosmic non-existence, the hungering nothingness that is home to the Void Lords, who themselves gave form to the Old Gods. Fel Magic is literally the magic of chaos, and is hardly "dark" because it's actually extremely exothermic and fiery in nature - a kind of corruption of the Light (actually the result of Light and Void annihilating each other) that is like the nuclear fallout to the Light's warm summer day. Necromancy is death magic, and while we've typically seen in practiced by either adherents of the Void (like Ner'zhul on Draenor B - his universe A version is more complicated: see below) or demonic adherents of the Fel (like Balnazzar raising the dead Scarlet Crusaders to serve as his Risen,) it is apparently a type of magic unto itself, not reliant on Void or Fel.

The Shadowlands, thus, seem to be the perfect realm for Death and Necromancy, where Fel has the Twisting Nether and Shadow magic has the Void.

But what is in there? Other than some Spirit Healers, Death Knights who want to move faster, and a big vortex in the sky everywhere, what does one find in the Shadowlands? Let's get this speculative list:

Helheim:

Given the description of the place as a land of the dead, Helya's realm, in which she resurrects dead Vrykul, turning them into Kvaldir, seems like a pretty obvious spot within it. While generally, the Shadowlands and the Emerald Dream are a reflection of the physical world, we know the Dream has some locations that are not found in the real world (like the Dreamways that Druids gain access to or the Heart of the Dream that we see after defeating Xaivus,) and so it would stand to reason that Helheim is one of those parts of the Shadowlands that has no physical counterpart within the prime reality.

The Drust:

We know that Drustvar, the southwest part of Kul Tiras, will be plagued by witches using Death Magic. In an interview, we found that there was a population there known as the Drust, whom the early human settlers killed. The Drust didn't just go away, though, and instead stepped into the Death Realm, from which they have been corrupting humans and turning them into foul witches to plague the humans in the area.

Bwonsamdi:

Most Loa are Wild Gods, tied to the Emerald Dream - basically, what Trolls call Loa, the Night Elves call Ancients, and the Pandaren call Celestials. But Bwonsamdi, the patron of the Darkspear tribe, first off, looks like a Troll rather than some animal, and secondly, is very clearly died to death as a force (his real-world counterpart, Baron Samedi, is also connected to death.) It seems highly likely that Bwonsamdi has some connection to the Shadowlands as well.

The Lich King and the Scourge:

During quests for Alliance in Howling Fjord and Horde in Dragonblight, we cross over into the realm of death, where we see the Lich King, who informs us that he has total dominion over this "spirit realm." If the spirit realm is the land of the dead, it makes sense for a being like the Lich King to have a great deal of power there, and given that Death Knight have an ability tied to it (and they also seem to get their Acherus Deathchargers there,) it seems inevitable that the Lich King, probably the most powerful necromantic force on Azeroth, has got a very strong connection to the Shadowlands (my favorite tin-foil hat theory is that the Lich King, maybe under a different name, existed long before Ner'zhul, Arthas, or Bolvar, and that this entity is what Odyn traded his eye to.)

Azuregos:

This is mostly just silly, but when you quest through the post-Cataclysm version of Azshara, you discover that Azuregos, pissed at all the adventurers who attacked him during vanilla (something you can do again during the 13th anniversary event!) hid away in the spirit realm, and he's currently dating a Spirit Healer. (Given that both Val'kyr and Dragons are Titan-empowered beings, maybe that's not all that weird?)

The Val'kyr:

These we know the most explicitly, which ties into Helheim, mentioned above. Not much more to be said about these guys, except that we know that the Lich King also employs Val'kyr. When we first encountered them in Wrath, I think most of us just assumed that Val'kyr were a special type of female undead Vrykul that Arthas had invented. Instead, he seems to have co-opted a whole ceremony, replacing the Valarjar with his Ymirjar. But maybe we've got it backwards - if the Lich King is what Odyn gave his eye to, then perhaps it is Odyn copying the Lich King's ceremony (perhaps unwittingly.)

Yogg-Saron:

I know I said that I didn't think the Shadowlands was related to the Void, but I could be wrong. Yogg-Saron is referred to as the Old God of Death, even though there's no clear connection that he holds to that aspect of the cosmos more than the other Old Gods. We know that it was his infection of the Emerald Dream that created the Nightmare (which somehow N'zoth usurped,) but if he was connected to the Dream, was he perhaps also connected to - or even the creator of - the Shadowlands? If we assume that Helya and Helheim are within the Shadowlands, could this explain why a Vrykul-turned-Val'kyr has a whole bunch of tentacles? I mean, yeah, she's kind of Ursulla from the Little Mermaid, but what if her form mutated due to corruption from Yogg-Saron (we know she teamed up with Loken to lock Odyn away, and Loken's mind had been totally poisoned by Yogg-Saron.) Is it possible that the being Odyn gave his eye to was actually an Old God - the very Old God over whom Odyn had been meant to watch? And damn, if Yogg-Saron is the Old God of Death, that means his defeat in Ulduar might be, wait for it, only a setback (and a minor one at that.) We did, after all, see Old God minions appear within the facility right at the beginning of Legion.