What is Thros?

If the word in the title is unfamiliar, I'll just say we're going to be talked about datamined stuff from the BFA beta. This isn't accessible in the beta yet, as far as I know, and appears to be part of the campaign quests that you'll complete at 120.

I'll also warn you that if you're sick of me talking about the Shadowlands, this is going to be one of those posts.

So let's start with what we know, and we'll put it behind the spoiler cut just in case.


Here's what we know:

Jaina, following her exiling/imprisonment after arriving in Boralus with us at the start of the expansion, is trapped in a place called Thros, the Blighted Land.

The map we have of Thros is actually a modified map of Drustvar, which shows the Crimson Woods (a later part of the zone where the Heartsbane Coven is strongest) with the rest of the zone darkened and clearly de-emphasized.

There appears to be a scenario in which Jaina is confronted with figures of her past who torment her with her past decisions - it looks like possibly Daelin, Rhonin, and Varian - all claiming that she let them die in one way or another.

We appear to be sent in there to rescue her and to fight a Herald of Gorak Tul, who is the boss of Waycrest Manor and the big bad of Drustvar, and it ends with some kind of reconciliation with Katherine, and even has her naming Jaina as the new Lord Admiral (which... I'm going to withhold judgment on that move until I see the whole story, because that seems like a big jump, even if Jaina would be Daelin's natural heir.)

So those are the facts. This is all datamined and in a Beta, so take it with a grain of salt, as this could all change and we certainly don't have all the context.

But let's talk about what the hell Thros is.

First off,  this is not part of the Drustvar main quests unless there's a huge revamp coming (with the expansion coming out in 3 months, I doubt that.) So I would think that this will be level-cap content. That makes the "Herald of Gorak Tul" kind of an odd "boss" given that we'd likely have already defeated him while leveling up. Granted, they play these games with dungeon bosses all the time, so they could just assume you do the dungeon after this.

On the other hand, Gorak Tul is said to be a practitioner of Death Magic, which he has taught the witches to use so that they can serve him. That means that killing him could easily mean he's not out of our hair yet. I realize this might be one of those Skyreach situations where I would love to have a Drust raid but might be out of luck, but the notion that Gorak Tul could stick around to plague us farther is really not outside the range of possibility.

If Thros shares geography with Drustvar, it also seems very possible that we could be looking at, oh, let's say "a realm that shares a lot with the Emerald Dream." The Dream is generally a sort of copy of the existing physical world. If the Shadowlands are the deathly mirror of the Dream, it would make sense that they are also a copy of the physical world, which could mean that Thros is just the Shadowlands equivalent of Drustvar.

If we make this logical leap (and I don't think it's a huge one,) the presence of dark spirits assailing Jaina might give us some insight into the Shadowlands. As I've said before, there's precious few explicit references to the Shadowlands in-game - basically just the DK ability Wraith Walk and the Val'kyr at Skyhold. But there's also a great deal of evidence to suggest that we see the Shadowlands plenty - any time we're in ghost form, for example, and on several Death Knight-related quests, not to mention places like Helheim.

While I could see Daelin expressing horror and disappointment in his daughter's turning a blind eye to his death, I don't imagine Rhonin or Varian would have much reason to fault her - Varian didn't seem to be playing the blame game in his last moments, just being a badass who died so his people could live. Rhonin, similarly didn't blame Jaina for the destruction of Theramore - it caught everyone off guard.

So what we might be seeing here is less the actual spirits than some kind of doubt made manifest.

We don't really know how the Shadowlands came to be, though we know that they existed at least early enough for Odyn to have gone there to learn how to create Val'kyr from some entity within.

The Emerald Dream has two conflicting origin stories within the same chapter of Chronicle, which say that it might have been created by the Keeper Freya, or she might have simply tapped into the existing Dream. All things on Azeroth are fundamentally Titanic, given that Azeroth herself is a nascent Titan, meaning that one way or another, the Dream is of Titanic origin.

But what of the Shadowlands?

There's certainly a possibility that the Shadowlands are the product of the Old Gods. Shadow magic, of course, is the purview of these beings of the Void. Might the entity that Odyn spoke to to gain his knowledge of necromancy (because let's not beat around the bush - pretty as it might be, the Stormforged are ultimately an undead legion) have been an Old God? Maybe Yogg-Saron, who calls itself the God of Death?

But there are problems with that.

Let's look at the Old Gods and other realms - inner planes, if you will - and specifically Yogg-Saron, who would be prime candidate to be involved in Death Magic. Yogg-Saron specifically was the one to first corrupt the Emerald Dream and for the Nightmare. But the Nightmare and the Shadowlands are not one and the same. The Nightmare is very specifically a corruption within the Dream. We never see anything like it in our (admittedly sporadic, not counting any time we die, which is anything but sporadic) interactions with the Shadowlands.

Why would the Old Gods create a whole realm for themselves rather than do as they're meant to - corrupt the existing planes?

And let's also note that Odyn learned Necromancy from the Shadowlands entity. The big chart in Chronicle says that Necromancy is an independent form of magic, separate from both Fel and Void magic. Now sure, we do see both demons and Void-affiliated beings raising the dead. The Lich King, loathe as I am to abandon my big pet theory, was created by a demon. But if there is a font of necromantic power the way that the Twisting Nether is for Fel magic and the Void is for Shadow magic, might that place be the Shadowlands?

Let's propose that the Shadowlands' name is sort of coincidental - it isn't a place of Shadow with a capital S magic, but rather dark magic in the form of Necromancy. That puts a much-needed third player in Warcraft's triad of evil, needed more-so now that the Demons have basically been swept off the board. If it's not, we're basically stuck with fighting Old Gods or Old-God-affiliated antagonists until Blizzard pulls a comic-book resurrection for the Burning Legion, which seems like it ought not to happen for a very long time, if ever.

While the headlining conflict of BFA is very Horde versus Alliance oriented, it's clear that the Old Gods are going to play a huge role in the expansion, and I'm pretty confident in N'zoth as its final boss (then again, I was sure Warlords would end with us fighting Gul'dan.) We know that Blizzard is getting really into this "hint at the next expansion" pattern, with the Legion becoming more and more relevant over the course of Warlords, Old God stuff popping up throughout Legion, and now we're getting stuff that - again, never explicitly - seems to be pushing us further and further into the Shadowlands.

So I think Thros, the Blighted Land, is one of the stops along that path.