The final "Afterlives" short is now upon us. The whole thing takes the form of a missive that Sire Denathrius is dictating to his scribe, to be distributed to his Venthyr. He laments the anima drought and also mentions that he's taken to "conserving" anima, drawing it from the remaining souls in his realm as well as his own venthyr.
Perhaps the biggest revelation here is that it looks like Garrosh has wound up in Revendreth, and is one of the souls that is being constantly drained for anima. Garrosh turned into a total monster by the end of his life, but earlier in his appearances, he showed some trepidation about the kind of acts he feared (rightly) that he was capable of, and thus I think that he's a perfect Revendreth candidate. I haven't seen him there in the beta yet, but whether we see him or not, he's a fitting "inmate" for Revendreth as a correctional facility.
The point of the short is more to point out the hypocrisy of Denathrius and his elite - we see essentially a stratified class system form as the "poor" (in anima) venthyr are forced to give their wealth up, but the rich happily indulge in decadence, living large on the donations that have been made. As the short ends, we see how one poor venthyr who tried to sneak away from the collection of anima is condemned to what we find in-game is called the Ember Ward - where a breach that allows the Light into the Shadowlands burns venthyr, killing them or driving them mad with agony.
All in all, I think Bastion still had the biggest lore impact of the four shorts, and Ardenweald was the most emotionally devastating. I'll be curious to see how this one gets picked apart for clues and hints.
The release of this fourth short, though, I think makes the release of 9.0 this Tuesday all the more likely. That should give us a little over a month of pre-patch before the expansion proper lands (which I'll try to use to get used to the class changes, particularly to Enhancement Shamans.)
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