Shadowlands brings in a massive expansion to the lore of the Warcraft cosmos. Not just a realm of darkness akin to D&D's Shadowfell, the Shadowlands are the vast and eternal plane of the afterlife - where all mortal souls, good or bad, go after they die.
(Note, some spoilers are contained within here, related to what we see in the leveling experience. I'll put a cut here just in case.)
And thus, the Shadowlands aren't an inherently evil place - indeed, they seem to mostly be a good place, where most people wind up with an afterlife that finds a role for them to play according to their personality in life. The really bad people are sent to Revendreth, where they undergo a sort of penance and atonement that is managed by the Venthyr before they are evaluated and assigned one of three fates: to be sent back to the Arbiter and assigned a new afterlife realm, to remain in Revendreth and become one of the Venthyr, or, should they fail to atone and remain just as cruel and vicious as they had been in life, they are tossed into the Maw, where evil is to be sealed away forever.
While undead, or at least formerly undead individuals also seem to go through this process (we find that Alexandros Mograine, aka The Ashbringer, went to Maldraxxus and became one of the Barons of the House of the Chosen, along with Draka) what we haven't gotten any confirmation on is how it works for demons.
Demons, after all, don't die when you kill them in the material world. Instead, their soul travels back to the Twisting Nether to await rebirth (I don't know if we ever got a really explicit explanation for what Antorus does, but I assume it accelerated this process significantly.)
But a demon killed in the Nether or some place that is so saturated with Fel Energy that it might as well be there will die permanently. We saw this happen with Kil'jaeden above Argus, and I believe we're meant to understand that Archimonde also died this way (though you only kill him truly in the Nether if you do so on Mythic, so... they have wiggle room.)
What, then, happens to their soul?
I think one possibility is that they simply cease to exist - that the fel magic, while granting them a kind of immortality, does so at the cost of their immortal soul. Warcraft does have ways in which souls themselves can be destroyed, and Fel magic is often generated by destroying souls, which is part of what makes it so evil. If Fel magic is associated with destroying souls, it could be that a demonic soul has nowhere to go if the individual is slain in the Nether, and it's just lost forever.
There's a place that this gets very complicated, though - Warlords basically introduced some really mind-bending time-travel/alternate universe concepts that never got super fleshed out. For instance, we're told that demons transcend all the different realities, but that makes the existence of someone like Socrethar, who became a demon in both timelines, a really odd anomaly. If one version of you becomes a Demon, shouldn't that mean that every version does? Or if not, if you turn into one after another version of you did in another timeline, do you suddenly gain awareness of that other experience?
We're told that Kil'jaeden created the Armor of Domination and Frostmourne before binding Ner'zhul's soul to it to make him the original Lich King. Now we know that the runes on Frostmourne come from the Maw - a realm from which nothing is supposed to have ever escaped. Our existence as a Maw Walker in Shadowlands seems to be unprecedented, yet we know that something was able to leave the Maw before us.
How did Kil'jaeden do it? How did he get into the Maw and out with the Armor and Frostmourne?
I wonder if it has something to do with the Nathrezim.
The Nathrezim are one of the oldest demonic races in the Warcraft cosmos. They predate the Man'ari Eredar, and the Burning Legion itself. It was their dabbling with Void magic, going to the world that was probably called Telogrus and communing with that world's local Old Gods (who had corrupted its Titanic World Soul) that convinced Sargeras he needed to slaughter all of existence to save it from corruption by the Void.
Interestingly, we first saw the Nathrezim in Warcraft III, when Mal'ganis was commanding the Scourge in Lordaeron. He, and later other Dreadlords like Varimathras, Balnzaar, and Mephistroph, would lead the Scourge forces in much of the Third War, all under the direction of Tichondrius, who seemed to basically be their leader.
Despite their very important role in bringing about the Burning Legion, the Dreadlords weren't at the top run of the Legion ladder - the Eredar were chosen instead to fill that role. But I also think it's noteworthy that the Nathrezim seem to be employed the most when the Legion wishes to use necromancy.
Not only were they the ones holding the Scourge's leash during the Third War (to the extent that Ner'zhul sent Arthas to Kalimdor in order to tell Illidan how to destroy Tichondrius and thus free the Scourge from Legion domination) but we've also seen them taking over the Scarlet Crusade (and eventually slaughtering them and raising them as the "Risen,") as well as raising the spirits of Lord Ravencrest and his forces to war against the living in Val'sharah.
Despite an early connection with Void Magic, it seems like the Nathrezim are particularly gifted at Necromancy.
Now, in Shadowlands, we travel to the realm of Revendreth, and we notice a few glaring things:
Sire Denathrius, the eternal who is in charge of this realm, shares some similarities with the Nathrezim - the pale skin, horns, and cloven hooves. Also, he's got the "nath" syllable right in the middle of his name (likewise his Castle Nathria.)
Add to that the fact that the Nathrezim have historically been described as vampiric in nature, and the Venthyr of Revendreth are kind of vampiric as well, capable of sucking the anima out of souls.
Now, the Natrezim are presumably from the world Nathreza, which is referenced during the Portal Keeper Hasabel fight in Antorus, and while it could all just be a big coincidence, I'm leaning toward there being some kind of connection there.
Kil'jaeden got something out of the Maw, and then, notably, he and Archimonde put the Nathrezim in charge of handling the Scourge.
Is it possible that the Nathrezim were also in charge of attaining the materials - the Armor of Domination and Frostmourne - from the Maw? And could it be the reason that they were able to do that was because they were, already, beings from the Shadowlands?
We know that most demonic species began as something else. Man'ari Eredar were originally just Eredar (i.e. physiologically the same as Draenei.) Satyrs were originally Night Elves. What if there weren't any original "pure demons," but only other beings that were transformed by the Fel into something else?
And in that case, are Nathrezim just fel-corrupted Venthyr?
I'll grant there's one individual that puts a bit of a nail in the tire here, and that's Lothraxion. We know that the Light makes Venthyr run out of energy and go mad. But Lothraxion became imbued with the Light and on the contrary, it empowered him to become basically a paladin.
On the other hand, given that the Fel changes things pretty profoundly (and is more related to the Light than I think either would want to admit) it's possible that being a demon for however long he was kind of inoculated him against those effects of the Light.
There's no mention of Nathrezim as far as I know in Revendreth (and given the current low XP gains, I've done nearly all the quests in Revendreth and still haven't even hit level 59) but I'm really curious to hear if there were any escapees or defectors way, way back in the day.
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