There are going to be spoilers here for the end of the Ny'alotha raid, which I have not yet entered (though I'm going to make an effort to actually do it at least on LFR this time, having more or less skipped Dazar'alor and definitely not having done any of the Eternal Palace, which I feel weirdly guilty about.)
The final raid of BFA, Ny'alotha is the alternate-universe created by N'zoth that he wishes to basically overlay onto ours, completing the corruption of Azeroth in one fell swoop. Meanwhile, we've recalibrated the Forge of Reorigination to fire as a weapon, targeting N'zoth himself.
SPOILERS AHOY (likely for the last time - we'll have the old Spoilers Ahead warning for Shadowlands.)
The N'zoth fight ends a bit like the Lich King, with N'zoth fully corrupting us and beginning to draw us in to consume us and thus make the connection with Azeroth's world-soul complete. However, after Magni makes one last plea for us to resist, we do so, and use the Heart of Azeroth as the beacon required to focus the Forge's power to deal the final deathblow to N'zoth.
What follows is a controversial in-game cutscene (allowing our character to star in it) followed by a more-controversially brief prerendered cinematic in which N'zoth is destroyed, and the nightmarish city of Ny'alotha is purged with the light of the Titan's power.
With N'zoth destroyed, and the entire plane of existence on which he had situated himself erased (we make it out ok,) it seems as if Azeroth has finally, after all this time, been purged of its Old God corruption.
So what now?
Well, we know that the next crisis/expansion is going to begin with Sylvanas tearing a hole between our reality and the afterlife, and that will certainly demand the attention of us heroes.
Breaking the barrier between the material plane and the Shadowlands is surely not going to be good for Azeroth, but it's also not clear that this danger is specifically tied to the World Soul (in fact, I suspect it's not, even though the blue/orange color scheme of the rift does recall the blue/gold Azerite color scheme.)
Still, one wonders: Are the Old Gods truly defeated?
Clearly, the Old Gods were not limited to Azeroth. We know that Telongrus was saturated with them, which is why Sargeras cut the world in half. And K'aresh is consumed by void, which likely looks not too dissimilar to Ny'alotha (if not even crazier.)
But on Azeroth, there were four we knew about. Aman'thul killed Y'shaarj and nearly killed the world in doing so. We killed C'thun and Yogg-Saron, but there was always something of an ambiguity over what we had actually accomplished.
First off, we were warned that killing the Old Gods could destroy Azeroth, but perhaps we did so in a way the Titans didn't conceive of - rather than yank the whole thing from the surface of the planet, we went in and struck at Yogg-Saron's brain. And C'thun's... stomach (I don't think they were considering all the profound implications of what it means for the Old Gods to be beings of void or whatever when AQ40 came out.)
I'd be willing to believe that we had at least neutralized those Old Gods and maybe "killed" them in a way that still left a lot of their corruption around, but without an intelligence to direct that corruption. N'zoth, however, left Azeroth on his own accord to run the whole Ny'alotha play, and that means that we could purge the hell out of him with relative safety.
But with all four Old Gods dead, does that mean Azeroth is safe?
Naturally, this is all comic book rules, so they're gone as long as they don't have a cool hook to bring them back. The Old Gods could be a bit like, to look to another long-running fantasy game, the Phyrexians (the sort of biomechanical body-horror monsters from Magic: the Gathering, who corrupted an entire world growing from a drop of oil), in that as long as they're a little bit of them left, they could come back. On the other hand, we know the Void Lords created them, and could theoretically create more.
I suspect we're not going to be worrying too much about the World Soul in particular for a while. But I do think there are some loose threads:
Xal'atath, freed from the Blade of the Black Empire (which was destroyed, I guess, in breaking open N'zoth's carapace?) is now walking around in a stolen blood elf body (which conveniently looks like a Void Elf now.) Where she is, I have absolutely no idea. What she wants, I have absolutely no idea. But she seemed to be happy to have made her deal with N'zoth and gotten out.
The Infinite Dragonflight remains a big old question mark. Yes, we killed Murozond, but A: that was in a cancelled timeline and B: he's a time-traveler, which means that there's plenty of stuff that the Murozond we killed had already done that we have yet to see him do. Is it possible that the Infinites are N'zoth's major contingency plan? To go back and change the past to prevent his defeat? They have been shockingly absent since 4.3 (other than a mention in War Crimes - working for Wrathion, no less) and I was baffled that we didn't see them at all in Warlords of Draenor, you know, the expansion about an alternate timeline?
Finally, in N'zoth's boss fight, he claims that he's the only one who can save Azeroth from the coming darkness. That would seem to refer to the events of Shadowlands, but what, exactly, could he do? Was he just bluffing, or is N'zoth's death - crucially important though it was given the circumstances - going to deprive us of some key thing we will need when the Shadowlands get broken?
With no 8.3.5 on the horizon, I wonder how we'll see this plot wrapped up.
Again, I'm going to just note here that I wish that we had gotten enough time to really focus on the N'zoth plot as much as we did on the war campaign - either in BFA or as a subsequent expansion. While I didn't like being forced into another faction conflict, I thought the actual storytelling of the War Campaign was quite well-done.
We've been building up to a fight with N'zoth since Cataclysm, which is now ten years. While I really like a lot of the concepts they've introduced in 8.3, and yes, N'zoth has been part of this expansion since the Crucible of Storms raid (well, and hinted at since 8.0,) the focus on the War Campaign has made it feel like N'zoth has gotten short shrift.
Furthermore, I would have totally bought it if N'zoth had been the one manipulating the faction into this conflict to distract from (or put into effect) his plan, so it is very strange that, in fact, someone has been doing that, but it's this other guy we haven't ever heard of before - the Jailor.
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