Saturday, December 26, 2020

The Runecarver, the Jailer, and the Burning Legion

 The Jailer is new lore for the Warcraft cosmos, but so far, the whole deal of Shadowlands is the awesome kind of new lore that opens doors to interesting possibilities for the future.

I'd always hoped that there was something more than just Kil'jaeden wielding demonic magic to make the Lich King, and this expansion has revealed that there is - that the Helm of Domination as well as Frostmourne (possibly the rest of the Lich King armor, but I think mainly those two) were created by the Runecarver, who has been imprisoned by the Jailer, all his memories drained from him.

Who the Runecarver is remains something of a mystery, though a popular theory (which I think is mostly based on narrative efficiency) is that he might be the Primus, the eternal one who is the rightful ruler of Maldraxxus.

Upon giving the Runecarver a certain number of memories (which we use to allow him to make us legendary items) we get a cutscene - one that, sadly, for me had a checkered box where I think the Helm of Domination was supposed to be. (And given that these memories are account-wide, I don't know that I'll be able to see it again, at least in-game.)

In it, the Jailer mentions that he has made a crown fit for the King of the Damned, as well as the finest of his "Mourneblades." Surely, then, that implies that Frostmourne is of a certain type of weapon (what does this mean for Shadowmourne, then, the legendary two-handed axe that Warriors, Paladins, and Death Knights could get in Icecrown Citadel, made as a sort of safer-to-use equivalent to Frostmourne?)

The massive lore-expansion coming with this game expansion is very cool. But I'm always curious to see how this stuff gets tied back into the existing lore.

After all, we do know that the Lich King's artifacts were taken by the Burning Legion and bent to their use.

Kil'jaeden was the one to put Ner'zhul's soul into the armor and make him the first Lich King. But I believe more recent lore suggests that it was the Nathrezim (aka Dreadlords) who retrieved them for him.

Now, the Nathrezim are complicated.

Following the BC-era ret-con, in which it was the Dreadlords rather than the Eredar whose depravity drove Sargeras to madness (thus allowing the Eredar to exist in their uncorrupted form as Draenei, rather than just being demons from the get-go) we later got in Chronicle that the Nathrezim had particularly perturbed Sargeras by channeling the power of the Void and seeming to work with the Old Gods on a different planet with a World Soul. Sargeras destroyed that world (that I'll refer to as Telogrus, as it's more or less stated that the broken world where the Void Elves were transformed was the one that Sargeras destroyed) and then embarked on his Burning Crusade.

Found in-game somewhere in Revendreth, there's a series of missives that seem to link Sire Denathrius with the Dreadlords - as if the Dreadlords, far from being loyal to the Legion, or the Old Gods, or even the Light (specifically Lothraxion) that instead, they are all actually working for the Sire, and the force of Death (and thus probably the Jailer.)

That the Nathrezim could be connected to Sire Denathrius seems quite possible - they look a bit like Venthyr and Stoneborn, and of course their names share some distinctive syllables. The missives that were found (I don't know exactly where in-game) I believe was found in both the beta and the live game. We also have what counts for subtle lines in WoW like the Accuser telling Denathrius that he "was once the lord of dread," which cannot have been phrased that way accidentally.

But at this point, people have completed the Castle Nathria raid, and while the Sire is not entirely gone at the end of it, there haven't been any huge reveals regarding the Nathrezim.

Given that the past few expansions have hinted at major themes and powers coming next, I think the only thing I've really noticed in Shadowlands is the incursions of Light and Void into the Shadowlands - the Void attacked Bastion, which you can witness in a little side quest chain, and the Light, of course, scours the Ember Ward of Revendreth - we even rescue one of the Naaru who took part in the attack from the Sanguine Depths dungeon.

I think Legion was too recent an expansion for us to jump right back in to them as major foes, but I do really wonder when, exactly, we're going to learn more about the connection between the Burning Legion and the forces of the Maw.

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