I realize this is a topic that I come back to quite frequently, but I'm somewhat obsessed with the cosmic chart at the beginning of each volume of Chronicle.
Mainly, the thing that strikes me is the position of Death and its associated Necromancy magic on equal footing with Chaos/Fel and possible Void/Shadow.
In Warcraft, we've seen the undead arise from many sources - anywhere from the Scourge to simply unhappy spirits who have lingered due to unfinished business.
For each of the major cosmic forces, there seems to be a primary manifestation or representative. The Old Gods embody void (along with the Void Lords, who are arguably purer a representation.) Chaos has demons, Order, interestingly, has Titans. Life has the Wild Gods, and the Light has the Naaru.
But for Death, we simply have "undead," which is a pretty broad category.
One of the vexing things about the undead in Warcraft lore is that they often seem to come from other sources.
The Scourge, despite having a very different feel from the greater Burning Legion, is ultimately an off-shoot of Fel power. I had hoped to see new information introduced about the creation of the Lich King in Chronicle Volume III, but unfortunately, it looks as if we've simply gotten the old explanation - that the Lich King is just the undead creation of Kil'Jaeden, who started with Ner'zhul's spirit.
That the Lich King could be so recently created and yet seemingly be irrevocably tied to Azeroth's fate seemed to me to suggest there was something else going on. At this point we've permanently killed Kil'jaeden and yet the Lich King has persisted even after the death of Arthas. If the Lich King is only about fifteen years old in-world, why, then, must there "always be a Lich King"?
In Warlords of Draenor, we saw Ner'zhul turn to Void magic, but much of this actually wound up manifesting as control over the undead. Is it not odd that both users of Fel magic and that of Void should call upon the undead?
The other question is whether we've seen any "pure necromancers" - i.e. spellcasters who only use Death Magic.
Granted, I'd be willing to believe that the Scourge is, in fact, an example of this. We know that the Legion did, paradoxically, use Void magic, and so it's not so crazy that Kil'jaeden might have simply been trying out a different school of magic when he created the Lich King. But if we set aside the Scourge as "tainted" by its connection to the Legion, what do we have left?
The only clear example I can think of is Helya.
To recap the story: Odyn is an arrogant jerk, and when Tyr suggested imbuing the dragons - a non-Titanforged form of life - with titanic power, Odyn preferred instead to find a way to further empower the Vrykul. He wanted a way to create deathless champions, and so he traveled to the Shadowlands and made a deal with "an entity."
Giving his eye for the knowledge, Odyn learned how to create the Val'kyr, and then turned on his adoptive daughter, transforming her into one of these undead beings capable of bringing people back after they died.
We still don't know what this Shadowlands entity was. I had, for a time, thought it could be the true identity of the Lich King - something that Kil'jaeden hadn't created, but simply harnessed. This explanation is looking less likely as time goes by, though, unfortunately.
But what I find interesting is that this entity seems very unlikely to be either demonic or eldritch (Fel or Void) in nature. To be certain, Odyn being fooled by Yogg-Saron or some other Old God is far from outside the realm of plausibility, but one imagines that any gift from an Old God would come with its own clearly corruptive influence. We didn't see Odyn turn out like Loken or Deathwing, so I doubt that he's got Old God corruption. And we've never seen the Legion's influence in the Shadowlands - indeed, this probably happened before the War of the Ancients, which is, I believe, the first time demons ever showed up on Azeroth.
So I think we can make the assumption that this Shadowlands entity is a being of pure necromantic nature.
What else do we know about it?
There are of course possible connections to known entities. If I'm actually right, it could be that there's a lot more to the Lich King than we previously knew. Bwonsmadi, the death Loa worshipped by the Darkspear, is also in a position to be a major cosmic player.
It's also quite possible that we simply haven't encountered it yet.
The question, then, is where it fits into the great cosmic struggle.
The Legion has been, if not destroyed, then neutralized. This would seem to be a win for both life and good guys as well as the Void. Other than us, is there anything the Void could fear?
In a recent comic, the three Windrunner sisters reunite to clear some monsters out of their old family home. Naturally, each has taken a seriously different path in life, and there's friction. What's interesting is that we find that Alleria, with her connection to the Void, is constantly hearing whispers from the Void, compelling her to violence. Having mastered it, of course, she does not act on these whispers, but what's interesting is that when she sees her sister Sylvanas, the whispers say "she is the servant of the true enemy."
True enemy?
Now granted, this could be feeding on Alleria's own thoughts, but with Sylvanas as Warchief, it's not clear to whom she would be a servant.
But if we can align Sylvanas with any cosmic force, it's clear Death (if we place Scourge and ex-Scourge outside of the Fel context.) Indeed, Sylvanas' main strategy now appears to be something like a slightly-less-totalitarian Scourge. She wants to kill all humans (and probably all Alliance) and raise them as Forsaken, seeing this as the only path to peace.
It's pretty crazy (especially when events in Before the Storm suggest that at least some Forsaken and Humans would be happy to simply be reunited now, despite their differences.) One wonders if there's something that's really hoping for the undead to take over. Sylvanas changed her whole outlook after being raised by the Val'kyr following her suicide at the Frozen Throne. Is it possible that something got into her mind?
So why might the Void fear the undead?
Well, let's talk about one of my favorite unstated plot threads in Wrath of the Lich King.
I'll certainly allow that there are alternate interpretations of what was going on in Icecrown - that, perhaps, the whole "there must always be a Lich King" thing was a ploy by the Old Gods. But my interpretation has always been the opposite.
Why did the Lich King build his fortress out of Saronite? Why the hell would you surround yourself with void-saturated metal that drives people insane unless you had already been corrupted by it yourself?
Because the undead are immune to the void.
Yogg-Saron wasn't the final boss of Wrath, and sure, the order in which we beat things is not always an indicator of their in-universe power (Archimonde was definitely more powerful than Gul'dan) but I think that the fact that we could fight Yogg-Saron before we faced Arthas was actually correct, lorewise.
The threat of the Lich King and the Scourge is that it's new and powerful. Seriously powerful.
Remember how I was talking about how odd it is that the Lich King is already, after only a decade or two, seemingly inextricably entrenched on Azeroth? What that means is that we really don't know how powerful the undead are going to get.
To genre-shift, think about the idea of the AI singularity - once computers get smarter than we are (and in a lot of ways they already are,) and once they can improve themselves, the world could, theoretically, start to shift in very sudden and unexpected ways. All of a sudden, the old dynamics could be gone, and we'd be dealing with threats that dwarf the ones we previously worried about.
That's the power of death.
Short of eliminating every last Scourge entity, we can't be sure the Scourge will ever be gone. In fact, we don't even trust ourselves to try that. And it doesn't look like the Old Gods can do anything to them.
Consider the fact that the Icecrown's fortifications were built of Saronite - literally the congealed blood of Yogg-Saron. Yet there was no madness among the undead. You didn't see abominations or zombies or ghouls suddenly sprouting tentacles (ok, Putricide did, but it didn't seem to change his personality.)
Consider the Saronite mine in Ymirheim within Icecrown. The mine is run by the Ymirjar - the Lich King's sort of icy, necromancy-fueled equivalent to Odyn's Valarjar - and several Val'kyr. These figures appear entirely unaffected by spending all their time in a mine full of Saronite with an actual Faceless One (Darkspeaker R'khem) right there. The miners - captured slaves of the mortal races - however, are going totally insane.
Hell, R'khem's an actual quest giver, who asks you to free him. Have you ever seen a N'raqi imprisoned before? Generally not, as they tend to drive their captors insane. But not the Scourge.
So if you think that the construction of Icecrown's fortifications from Saronite was a means to allow Yogg-Saron to corrupt the Scourge, let me make a counterargument: The Lich King was demonstrating his mastery of the world and his superiority to the Old Gods.
In many ways, the Lich King is the New God. Yogg-Saron was theoretically the Old God of Death, but it wasn't him that the Vrykul were pledging themselves to when they raised the banners of the Death God.
The Void is chaotic (even if the Fel is technically the manifestation of Chaos,) while Undeath is anything but. Is it possible that the Undead - maybe as something larger than even the Scourge, incorporating all manifestations of necromancy everywhere, would be a force to rival the Void? The Void imagines all possibilities to be true, and yet the undead put things in stasis, marching toward one conclusion - a world in which there is no distinction between the living or the dead, where all things are eternal and changeless.
The force of death comes suddenly, but it also marches on with inevitability.
And now one of the major player factions is run by an undead woman who wants to spread this "gift."
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