The Sword of Sargeras

Even in an expansion that so effectively closes a major chapter in WoW lore, Legion holds to the pattern established in Mists of Pandaria, pushing the story forward and onto the next expansion.

After defeating the Titan Argus in the end of the Antorus raid, the other Titans are freed to use their power to bind Sargeras, forcing him back into the Seat of the Pantheon where they, aided by Illidan Stormrage, will presumably attempt to keep Sargeras imprisoned for all eternity.

Yet as they bound the Dark Titan, Sargeras instantiated his sword, plunging it into Azeroth as a parting blow before his long imprisonment.

With that, the Legion was defeated and the mass demonic threat apparently resolved at last.

Yet we were presented with a new problem: the sword.

Not only was the sword the source of a massive and life-threatening wound in Azeroth - threatening to destroy the nascent Titan before she could reach maturity and emerge - but the sword continued to pour deadly fel energy into Azeroth, poisoning her along with the physical damage. (Side note: interesting how the Fel magic Sargeras uses tends toward the blood-red, rather than the typical green. Is super-concentrated Fel red, or is it something to do with Sargeras' Titanic power? The red is actually more traditionally demonic in appearance.)

We've managed to solve that problem by soaking the power of the sword into our artifact weapons, which, until Tuesday, means a steady increase in artifact levels to an absurd degree (I believe we're at the quadrillions in artifact power at this point.) The downside is that this ultimately burns them out, reducing our great weapons to merely mundane equipment.

Still, a lot of questions surround the sword.

My big question is how deliberate Sargeras was in his strike. While it would seem perfectly logical for him to simply lash out and hit anything he could, we're also talking about a Titan here, who would seem to have the mental capacity even in such a brief instant to try to strike somewhere strategically.

Where it lands is Silithus, and that, to me, is pretty meaningful.

The first Old God we ever encountered (not counting the Old One in Azjol-Nerub in Warcraft III, which is presumably in retrospect supposed to be some part of Yogg-Saron,) was C'thun, whom we discovered and fought in Ahn-Qiraj, the area adjacent to Silithus.

Given how enormous the Old Gods are meant to be, C'thun's body is presumably present in much of Silithus (and indeed most of Southern Kalimdor.) The "bindings" on these beings presumably isolates some key part of their anatomy in order to effectively imprison them. But C'thun's body almost certainly runs beneath most of Silithus, meaning that a stab through there would likely have been through C'thun.

Is it possible that Sargeras did this on purpose? He certainly didn't want to see Azeroth succumb to the Old Gods any more than we did, and perhaps he thought he might be able to kill C'thun or at least seriously damage it in what time he had.

One question this does raise, though, if we're to assume that Silithus has C'thun-body running all through it, is how the Azerite is getting up there.

One would assume that with Sargeras' sword going through that land, the first thing we'd see bubbling up would be the C'thun equivalent of Saronite - Old God blood.

Granted, Azeroth might have higher blood pressure or perhaps C'thun's body is dried out since we "killed" him back in vanilla.

Still, if you'll indulge a tinfoil hat moment here:

The fact that Magni hears whispers from Azeroth has always seemed a little troubling. Sure, it could be legitimate, and he's just a guy communing with the world as the Titan tablets told him to back before Cataclysm.

But if he's being manipulated by the Old Gods, we could have some trouble.

First off is the possibility that Azerite is actually some kind of creepy Old God gunk like Saronite. That would mean that gathering a bunch of it into the Heart of Azeroth like Magni's telling us to in BFA and then depositing it in the World Soul would be the perfect way for the Old Gods to corrupt the Titan once and for all.

Second is that it was Magni who told us to sacrifice our artifact weapons to de-power the Sword. If Magni's compromised, maybe the right move would actually have been to let it do its work. What if the sword wasn't harming Azeroth, but was actually killing (in a permanent way) C'thun? After all, we know that Aman'thul, in a similar position and relative scale to Azeroth as when Sargeras stabbed, was able to pluck Y'shaarj out of the planet and truly kill the Old God. It's not hard to imagine that while our efforts were like a lightly-powered surgical procedure, Sargeras might have actually had the capability of truly killing an Old God by stabbing it with his massive, ridiculously huge sword (seriously, take a moment to appreciate that gigantic thing.) By siphoning its power, did we just save C'thun?

And now, on top of that, we've got war breaking out again - something that the very chaotic, very evil Old Gods would probably be celebrating.

Sargeras was probably wrong in his overall philosophy - killing everything in the universe would seem to actualize the Void's ultimate goal, rather than frustrate that goal. But even though I worry for the Titan Azeroth, I'm not sure that Sargeras' stab was meant as a last parting shot of cruelty, but perhaps one last desperate attempt to stop the Old Gods.

And we may have just invalidated his efforts.