The Shal'dorei Reckoning

Before we begin, let's take a look at this little fun fact: Elves on Azeroth have an interesting naming convention, which is to have a prefix followed by the suffix "dorei," meaning "child of," which is how they name the different races of elves. Kaldorei, the Elvish (technically Darnassian, which I think we can assume is a dialect of some greater elvish language or language group) word for Night Elves, literally means "Children of the Stars." Quel'dorei is the term for High Elves, and literally translates to "Children of the High" (I believe.) Sin'dorei means "Children of Blood." The upcoming Void Elves are called Ren'dorei, which I'd assume means "Children of the Void" (with Ren perhaps being related to the English word rend, like a rend in the fabric of space.)

Shal'dorei is the term for the Nightborne, introduced in Legion. It's not immediately obvious what the prefix Shal means. One potential definition could be "night," which would make the Nightborne the "Children of the Night," which sounds about right. The irony here, of course, is that Night Elves really ought to be called Star Elves, and we could then just call the Nightborne Night Elves, which they sort of are (then again, all elves are sort of Night Elves. And all Night Elves are sort of trolls.)

We actually see the "Shal" prefix in a lot of places. Shal'aran is the hidden facility that Thalyssra and her Nightfallen rebellion use as a headquarters. Shaladrassil is the world tree that served as a prison for the Satyrs after the War of the Satyr (the first major conflict to follow the War of the Ancients) and thus became the focal point for the Emerald Nightmare (which actually could explain how N'zoth usurped the Nightmare from Yogg-Saron, who had started it in Grizzly Hills.)

But let's talk about the Nightborne.

The Nightborne will be joining the Horde in Battle for Azeroth - a move has raised quite a few Alliance eyebrows, given the efforts that individual Alliance heroes put in to freeing the Nightborne. Indeed, two of the major Broken Isles factions are going Horde, and unlike the Highmountain Tauren, who seemed inevitably likely to join their Mulgore-based brethren, the Nightborne seemed really appropriate to either side. From a meta-perspective, I think that they wanted to find a way to give the Alliance some form of High Elf (and while I think they're cool, I don't know if all the people waiting a decade for High Elves were really looking for something like the Void Elves) and so it made sense to give the Horde an equivalent to an Alliance race.

But there is some logic to it. The Nightborne were largely Highborne at the time of the War of the Ancients, when the mages there sealed the city away to escape the Burning Legion. Like the High Elves of Quel'thalas, the Nightborne of Suramar grew dependent on magic - though while the High Elves' connection to arcane magic was more of a choice and even status symbol, in the case of the Nightborne, it was pure survival. The city was sealed away with no farmland or wilds to hunt. Other than the vineyards and perhaps the city canals, they would literally starve to death if they could not sustain themselves through magic.

Perhaps because Elves in general exist only because of the Arcane power of the Well of Eternity, they are highly susceptible to magic addiction (makes me wonder if something similar would happen if Tauren learned to be mages, as they have a similar origin.) And those who were cut off from the Arcwine in the city, perhaps through exile (I don't really know the timeline - whether they could push people out of the city without allowing anyone to get in or if all that exiling happened after Elisande sold out of Gul'dan,) would lead to a painful devolution first into Nightfallen and then Withered.

When the Scourge defiled the Sunwell, the High Elves suffered as well. The withdrawal from magic addiction after their source of arcane power was cut off led many High Elves to suffer a nearly identical fate, eventually devolving into the mindless Wretched. However, it was Illidan Stormrage who presented a solution - teaching the newly-named Blood Elves how to siphon Fel energy from the Twisting Nether to replace the arcane power of the Sunwell (this is what turned their eyes from blue to green.) It's not totally clear why High Elves like Vereesa Windrunner never went Wretched, but it could be that as her followers were largely rangers, they might have spent less time over their lives as permeated by Arcane magic, and thus might not have had the same level of addiction.

The Blood Elves and the Nightborne have a ton of common experiences, and so it actually makes plenty of sense that the former would recruit the latter for the Horde.

But there are issues to address:

First off, while many joined up in rebellion against Elisande and the Legion (even Elisande seemed contrite after we killed her, through some kind of post-mortem memory-echo,) one has to imagine that a ton of surviving Nightborne were totally on team Green, and they will need to answer for those crimes.

Likewise, with the conflict between Alliance and Horde building up to a fever pitch, the Nightborne are going to have to have some serious break with the Alliance. Even if they didn't have the same connection to the Kaldorei that they did with the Sin'dorei, the Alliance also put a ton of effort into helping Suramar free itself, and turning around and declaring war on them is a pretty nasty act of betrayal.

I wonder how this will be handled. Now, it is true that some Alliance and Horde races have gotten along fairly well individually - the Tauren and Night Elves have historically been rather friendly with one another, at least until they joined opposite factions. It's possible that the Nightborne will support the Horde, but not directly attack the Alliance except as part of larger Horde operations. It's also possible we'll see some event to set off greater animosity - perhaps some ill-advised aggressive move on the part of the Alliance.

In the end, we're going to wind up with way more playable elf races in WoW, which tend to be popular (but give me that updated Worgen model as soon as you can, Blizz.)