The Dead at War

This is going to be a post that is nearly 100% speculation about stuff that has only recently been datamined from the 8.1 PTR. So take it with a heaping helping of salt.

If you've been paying attention, you might notice that, despite being ostensibly about the faction conflict and with heavy, heavy hints toward Old God activity that started getting teased in Legion - to the extent that it almost seems inevitable that N'zoth will be Battle for Azeroth's final boss - there's also a whole lot of death-themed stuff.

In the Warcraft cosmos, Death is its own primordial force that is independent of Chaos (represented by Demons primarily, and associated with Fel magic) and Void (represented by the Void Lords and the Olds Gods and associated with Shadow magic.) The Scourge and the Lich King have been iconic villains for WoW, and the lingering effects of the Third War are still very much with us given the Forsaken, Death Knights, and a Scourge that was not so much eliminated as made dormant with a righteous man given the crown of the Lich King and making us all wonder how long someone as virtuous as Bolvar Fordragon could withstand the corrupting power of his position. But aside from the specific history of the Scourge, which we're all quite familiar with, we're just starting to scratch the surface of the other aspects of that primal force - its connection to the Shadowlands, and its ultimate role in the grand conflicts of the Warcraft universe.

SPOILERS AHOY... then a bunch of speculation.


So the only big spoiler we have is that there will be a scenario in 8.1 in which Bwonsamdi sends us to confront the Lich King. Given the names and objectives of the phases of this scenario, it looks like we barely make it out alive. That's about it.

So what does this mean?

Well, first, given the presence of Bwonsamdi, it seems possible this is a Horde-only scenario. While Bwonsamdi does linger at graveyards in place of spirit leaders to resurrect Alliance players on Zandalar just as he does with the Horde, we have very few interactions with him on team blue - at one point in the Alliance War Campaign we can approach him in the Necropolis, flanked by like 40 Horde soldiers, and he'll toss us into the air for annoying him (I did this on my Demon Hunter, so I could easily glide downward with no damage taken.)

Both Arthas and Bolvar have a certain thematic presence within BFA, both implied and explicit.

The biggest question we've always had since Tirion put the crown on Bolvar's head is this: Will he stay Bolvar?

Bolvar volunteered himself to be the "Jailor of the Damned" (which, incidentally, is the name of the scenario.) I almost saw this as an alternative title to Lich King. While the Lich King was in the business of amassing more individuals into his undead legions, intended to one day be the sovereign of all of Azeroth, Bolvar seemed to take this task not as a glorious one of great power, but a terrible job that nevertheless had to be done.The undead that Arthas and Ner'zhul before him had accrued would need a strong will to keep them from lashing out against the living.

Yet in Legion, Death Knights helped the Lich King empower himself, giving him a new Four Horsemen and generally shoring up his power. That bitter humility does not seem to be preventing Bolvar from drawing more strength to the Scourge.

Just about everything about the Scourge and the Lich King should be anathema to Bwonsamdi.

In D&D terms, Bwonsamdi would be a "Grave Domain" deity - yes, he's associated with death, but that's death full stop, not undeath. We do seem him sometimes call upon the spirits of the dead to assist him, but it's never a permanent thing - the dead are meant to stay in the realm of the dead, and Bwonsamdi is there to ensure that they get there. Does he make deals? Certainly, but someone remaining in the realm of the living past their appointed time needs to do something for him first.

The Scourge is the greatest expression of undeath we've seen in Warcraft. Its campaign across Lordaeron and Quel'thalas was like a snowball gathering mass the farther it rolled. Essentially, the undead never suffer pyrrhic victories - as long as they win, it doesn't matter how many of theirs fell, because they can just raise the defeated.

But furthermore, it's also an agent of stasis. When your leaders can be endlessly resurrected, and the natural removal of individuals through death never occurs, your organization has real staying power. For a "Grave Domain" entity like Bwonsamdi, or any being who believes in a natural cycle of renewal, this is the ultimate anathema.

So there is a bit of irony - spooky as hell though he is, if Bwonsamdi has been honest with us about what he values (and to be fair, there's definitely a lot he's not telling us,) he's in direct opposition to the spooky-as-hell Scourge - not to mention Sylvanas.

This is something we haven't really touched on - my Undead Rogue has done the quests in Nazmir, and when Bwonsamdi talks about how the Undead are walking heresies and such, it felt odd - like doing the Grizzly Hills quests on a Worgen and having some human guy screaming about whether or not I'd been bitten (to which I would respond: um, yeah, like a long time ago. Do you see how I'm a werewolf right now?)

But these quests were created fourteen years after Undead became, along with the other seven original races, a playable race. Where's that reckoning? How does Bwonsamdi feel about the Empire for whom he has more or less just become the patron deity being allies and arguably subordinates to the Banshee Queen?

But let's also talk Bolvar:

One of the big bombshells we got after the Pride of Kul Tiras quest chain is that Taelia, the spunky young squire who has been helping us through much of the Kul Tiras quests, is actually Taelia Fordragon, the daughter of Bolvar. She has no idea what has become of him, but I don't see any reason to think he's forgotten about her.

What of Bolvar remains?

He is obviously now doing things that he would never have done as a living paladin. His order to fight through Light's Hope Chapel to steal Tirion's body and the assault on the Red Dragonflight are both moral Rubicons that really put him at the very best into a morally compromised antihero (the Deathlord, player Death Knights, is complicit in this, by the way.)

But the question this raises is: to what end?

One possibility is that no one possessed of such strong will and integrity to resist the Lich King's corruption, and we've just got another undead menace lurking in Icecrown. That seems less likely, though.

Another is that he is doing bad things for what he believes is a good reason. In fact, according to Chronicle, Arthas actually felt he was saving Azeroth by expanding the Scourge - if everyone on Azeroth were under his sway, they'd be a united front against any and all threats.

There's a possibility that the corruption of undeath is less of the Old God-style madness, but a sort of practical expediency. Uniting the Alliance and Horde would be very hard indeed, and would not be guaranteed to last. But if they were all part of the Scourge... well, then there's no arguing needed.

I've often wondered about what exactly happened to Sylvanas after the Val'kyr raised her. Since dying she had never been a true "good guy," and the Forsaken had worked to produce the plagued Blight and killed plenty of innocent humans (the defunct pre-Cataclysm Bloodstone quest chain in Hillsbrad Foothills was an early hint at some dissent among the Forsaken,) but her primary wrath was reserved for the Scourge. And when she saw Bolvar on the Frozen Throne, she killed herself. It was only after she was raised by the Val'kyr that she took this whole "we have to ensure perpetual resurrections for all Forsaken, no matter who we have to kill to do so" stance.

Prior to this, she had been pretty negative on the whole undeath thing - one of her big quotes was "What joy is there in this curse?" But her brief experience of death seemed like one of horrific damnation, drifting in an endless dark void, and she changed her tune.

Or did she?

The Forsaken have become far more Scourge-like then they once were. Pre-Cataclysm, new Forsaken were not raised by Val'kyr. They merely awoke within a crypt and were greeted by quest givers who said "hey, so we have good news and bad news. The good is that you've got free will! The bad is that you're a rotting corpse, and there are both undead and living who want you dead because of that combination."

If we tin-foil hat this, is it possible that Bolvar pushed her to jump?

And is it possible that by raising her, Bolvar actually has control over her just as Ner'zhul lost it way back when?

When Darion Mograine fell in his second failed attempt to invade Light's Hope Chapel, we, the Deathlord, raised him using power lent to us from the Lich King. Darion took his father's old place as the leader of the Four Horsemen. But did we also just undo what had happened to him at the first battle of Light's Hope? Is he once again under the Lich King's direct control?

Is Bolvar getting the band back together?

But again, we must ask: for what purpose? If he does control Sylvanas, it seems unlikely he retains loyalty to the Alliance. But if we take her out of the equation, what if, perhaps, he does take a side in the current war?

Fordragon was regent of Stormwind for years. And if there's anyone who poses a pretty serious threat to Sylvanas on a basic magical level, it's the Lich King. Also, wouldn't an alliance with the Scourge be one hell of a dark move on the part of the Alliance? Pitting Bwonsamdi versus the Lich King seems like a really exciting thing to do, and I think there's another great potential in it:

It sets us up for the next expansion.

BFA has plenty of material to work with. We've got the faction conflict, we've got Azshara, who leads into but is separate from N'zoth. A Zuldazar-Naz'jatar-Ny'alotha trajectory for the expansion would make perfect sense and give us three raid "tiers" that mean the expansion has sufficient story fuel.

But there's so much death stuff under the surface that it feels like they must be building to something.

I don't think we're just going to fight Bolvar as a new Lich King like we did with Arthas. That's been done, and even if they had planned to originally, they ultimately decided not to have two Mr. G. Hellscream final bosses in a row with Mists and Warlords. It's been a long time since Wrath (the next expansion would be coming out twelve years after Wrath) and so they might feel less conflicted about a full-on Wrath 2.0, but I suspect the real intention is to delve deeper.

What if the conflict between Bwonsamdi and Bolvar isn't the plot of an expansion, but more a kick-off? There's this whole Shadowlands place, and as the name implies, it could be multiple "lands." Perhaps we've seen some of these before: Helheim, Thros, maybe even the Halls of Valor (the Val'kyr there do, after all, say that they "dwell in the Shadowlands" despite the fact that we never see them elsewhere.)

Of course we don't know the context of the scenario or the quests surrounding it, but just seeing the Lich King explicitly included in BFA makes me pretty damned excited.