Friday, August 31, 2018

Questions about Ahn'Qiraj and Ahn'Kahet

The Old Gods were first explicitly introduced in World of Warcraft, though there were strong hints to their presence in The Frozen Throne, when Arthas fought through Azjol-Nerub and encountered what was likely some appendage of Yogg-Saron or one of the monstrous growths like we see in Twilight Highlands and during the Dragon Soul raid. But our first bona fide Old God introduced in any Warcraft game was C'thun (interestingly, there's a Stephen King story involving a similarly Lovecraftian entity known as C'thun, both clearly being references to the most famous of Lovecraft's creations, Cthulhu.)

Silithus was basically C'thun's front yard, and there were some suitably eerie elements there - I particularly liked the obelisk-like structures that began to break down and float the closer you got to Ahn'qiraj. Ahn'qiraj appears as a desert ruin with elements of Egyptian and Mesopotamian architecture that plays well into the Lovecraftian vibe - even if Cthulhu's lair was in an underwater city that occasionally rose from the depths, the idea of stretching back to the oldest known civilizations and the desert-like environments they sprang from to place your eldritch horrors is something he played with. Indeed, the author of his in-universe book that details all these strange creatures, the Necronomicon, is Abdul Alhazred, the "Mad Arab" (and that's very mild on the scale of racist things Lovecraft said, sadly.)

The character of Alhazred actually fits pretty well into a kind of Twilight's Hammer context for WoW - he went into the desert and started worshipping these beings and eventually wrote a book called "Al Aziz," translated theoretically as the buzzing sound of insects, but also as sort of ghostly whispers - the story being that he didn't so much write the Necronomicon (the later title for Al Aziz) as record the whispers he was hearing.

Anyway, it wasn't until Chronicle Vol. 1 that we really got details about what it was like when the Old Gods ruled over Azeroth. This "Black Empire," actually saw massive cities built around the enormous forms of the Old Gods. Given that they are implanted into the very crust of the world, it stands to reason that these cities must have been where we find the Old Gods today. To be fair, given my interpretation that the Old Gods are nearly the size of continents, it's possible that they could manifest their "heads" in different locations - I don't really know much about Old God anatomy.

Still, I think the most logical interpretation is that wherever we've found Old Gods, that was also where their cities stood.

Chronicle also said that each of the Old Gods was trapped in a Titan facility, suggesting these were built up around the Old Gods where they were. Ulduar is very obviously titanic in nature, and its function as both prison and command center for the whole planet (which, um, Titans, was that such a good idea?) makes it one of the clearest repositories of Titan knowledge and demonstrations of Titan (and Titanforged) activities on the planet.

Beneath Northrend, however, we see Azjol-Nerub (sadly not as much as they had originally brainstormed - it was meant to be a whole zone, but I think they had trouble figuring out the whole underground aspect of it.) Azjol-Nerub is the realm of the Nerubians, who are one of the Aqir races created by the Old Gods. Ironically, we actually meet some Nerubians who wish us to defeat the Faceless Ones inhabiting their Old City - Azjol-Nerub, the dungeon, is entirely held by the Scourge under Anub'arak, while Ahn-Kahet, the Old Kingdom, is a mix of Scourge to start and then Twilight's Hammer and Faceless Ones further in.

It seems unlikely that Nerubians, an Aqir race who were supposedly born from the Old Gods directly, would turn against the Faceless (or "N'raqi") who had the same origin. I do have a vague and underdeveloped theory that the insectoid Aqir races were born of Y'Shaarj and C'thun while the cephalopod-like N'raqi were born of Yogg-Saron and N'zoth, but who knows? The Old Gods do love conflict, after all, so it could be as simple as that.

Anyway, one thing I wonder about is the the name Ahn'Kahet. Clearly, this follows a similar naming convention to Ahn'Qiraj. We're told Ahn'Kahet is the "Old Kingdom," which perhaps distinguishes it from Azjol-Nerub.

Chronicle suggested that Ahn'Qiraj was another Titan facility meant to imprison C'thun. But first off, Titan facilities seem to always be "Uld"-something (the dying Titanforged watcher in the Heart Chamber where you get the Heart of Azeroth seems to be aware of containment breaches in many Uld-locations, including the ones we've seen like Uldaman, Ulduar, Uldum, and soon Uldir, but also some others (though I think one of them, maybe Uldaz, is actually just another part of Storm Peaks.)

Now that we know the term "Black Empire," and we've seen images of it in both Chronicle and in the Warbringers: Azshara short, I'm beginning to suspect that Ahn'qiraj is actually a preserved portion of that Empire.

C'thun is locked behind the Scarab Wall along with his empire, and so perhaps the idea was simply to wall them off. I believe that if you work out the internal structure of the raid with the outdoor version of it, there's a giant domed building which ought to house C'thun's "head." Perhaps before the Titans defeated him, C'thun once rose high above this spot to survey its vast territories.

That could suggest that Ahn'Qiraj was basically "C'thun Town" at the time of the Black Empire.

Furthermore, perhaps Ahn'Kahet was "Yogg-Saron Town." But one thing that's strange about that is that Ahn'Kahet is about half a continent away from where we know Yogg-Saron's "head" to be. It is of course possible that not every "Ahn" city was built around an Old God's... most important protrusion above ground is the best way I can describe it. Alternatively, maybe Yogg-Saron was just that ridiculously huge, or perhaps the Titans really kind of moved him/it when imprisoning the Fiend with a Thousand Faces.

If Y'Shaarj had an "Ahn" city, it's likely that it was destroyed when the God of Seven Heads was torn out of the planet. But whatever might have been left of it would likely have been built over by the Dark Trolls before their transformation into the Night Elves.

This raises an interesting question, then: if, as I have theorized, we're going to be going to see N'zoth this expansion, what exactly will we find in its vicinity?

N'zoth presumably inhabits Ny'alotha, but this follows neither the Uld- nor the Ahn'- nomenclature we've seen affiliated with Old Gods. N'zoth is the schemer of the Old Gods, and so it's possible that it/he/whatever has somehow altered the environment into something totally new. Does N'zoth even have an Aqir-like race to serve him? It would seem that the Mantid served Y'shaarj, the Nerubians maybe served Yogg-Saron, and the Qiraji served C'thun. But rather than an Aqir race, N'zoth seems to have made his servants from the Elves, creating the Naga. Might we then find some place called "Ahn'Naga?"

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