Is Shadowlands Heading For a Sharp Left Turn?

 Due to the cycles of WoW storytelling, it's rare that we get really big surprises. The first couple expansions were built around iconic figures we would face as final bosses, with Illidan (who got upstaged by Kil'jaeden when they realized that the final raid probably shouldn't come in the first patch,) Arthas (as always, I don't count Halion as Wrath's final boss, even if he was chronologically the last to be released in a 3.X patch,) and Deathwing. When Mists of Pandaria was announced in 2011, the details were very thin, but shortly before its release, we found out that Garrosh would be the final boss of the expansion, in the Siege of Orgrimmar.

That's the last time, though, that Blizzard has been totally up front about what an expansion's story is going to do. In Warlords, the fact that Archimonde would be our final boss was withheld. In Legion, we did find out we were going to Argus prior to 7.2's release, as a little quick teaser of 7.3 in that year's Blizzcon. And in Battle for Azeroth, N'zoth's status as final boss was intentionally obscured.

I'll confess that I'm not sure I love the way they've done this. Indeed, the presentation of the Jailer as a very clear final boss for Shadowlands was a bit refreshing - assuming that's actually the role he'll play.

At Blizzconline, many developers have hinted that the conclusion of the 9.1 raid, Sanctum of Domination, will be a massive lore development - one that they claim will shake the entire Warcraft cosmos. That's a pretty big deal.

But what does it mean?

In the past, most raids have had something of a pause between them. Looking at Castle Nathria, the conclusion to that raid is one of pretty unambiguous victory, where we capture Sire Denathrius within his sentient sword Remornia and imprison it within a tower under the watchful gaze of the Naaru Z'rali. Denathrius was apparently meant to die in Castle Nathria, but the developers loved the vocal performance by Ray Chase that they wanted to keep him on-hand - or at least that's the story they're telling.

In Legion, which I generally think is the expansion to beat for greatest ever (though Wrath is its rival - when judged within its own 2008-2010 context) the major "tier" raids ended with big events. The Nighthold saw the resurrection of Illidan Stormrage. The Tomb of Sargeras saw the opening of the gateway between Azeroth and Argus. And Antorus, the Burning Throne, saw the imprisonment of Sargeras along with the wounding of Azeroth.

Tomb of Sargeras in particular ended its events with a major crisis (engineered by Illidan to force a decisive conclusion to the endless conflict with the Burning Legion - because Illidan is hardcore Chaotic Neutral.)

Even though we knew we were going to Argus in 7.3, the reveal at the end of Tomb of Sargeras is a fantastic shocker - after we defeat Kil'jaeden as he flees back to Argus, Khadgar struggles to teleport everyone away before the Fel energy within the Deceiver destroys the ship everyone's on. Illidan uses the Sargerite Keystone that Demon Hunters helped him steal in the DH starting experience (meaning about a decade earlier, as that takes place during the Black Temple raid) to boost Khadgar's spell - or so it seems. So it's a great shock when Khadgar looks up and sees Argus in the sky above Azeroth, and the sense of horror at how much Illidan has just raised the stakes is palpable.

Ok, but enough recapping: what might we expect to happen in 9.1? Will the end of Sanctum of Domination be as jaw-droppingly crazy as the end of Tomb of Sargeras? And if we expect Shadowlands to have three major patches, can we afford to have such a major development at the end of what is effectively still Act One of Three?

Setting aside my worries that Shadowlands will only have two major content patches (it better have three or more! Surely Blizzard learned their lesson with Warlords?) let's talk about what might happen here.

The Maw has, seemingly, been set up as the ultimate final challenge to overcome, and is home to the expansion's Big Bad. While we've had Castle Nathria as a fairly substantial intro raid, it's a little surprising that we're getting to this so early. After all, we didn't go to Icecrown Citadel first in Wrath. Indeed, even if we were to compare it to Tomb of Sargeras, which was set up as what looked like the ultimate final raid for Legion, that one came as the second tier raid, or the third of four "big raids" (meaning with more than three bosses.)

Also, of note, is that not anywhere have they suggested that we have any meaningful encounter with the Jailer within Sanctum of Domination. While I had entertained the notion that Sylvanas might wish to try to usurp the Jailer's power, it really doesn't look like she has the opportunity or power to do so. Therefore, I think our confrontation with the Jailer must come later, and could very likely be the final boss fight of the expansion.

But that makes it weird that we're going to Torghast. After all, Torghast is essentially his castle within the Maw, which his his domain. To compare it with Wrath of the Lich King, it'd be like if we went into Icecrown Citadel first and fought Kel'thuzad, and that we had to go elsewhere to fight Arthas.

Our motivation to go there is, at least in part, to rescue Anduin. So, what is his fate?

It's clear from the cinematic trailer for 9.1 that Anduin is being controlled, rather than being corrupted. The Jailer speaks through him, and after he stabs the Archon, he has a moment of lucidity, in which he appears horrified at what he has done, before the runes on his armor flash and the Jailer's control is reasserted.

What's fascinating about Anduin's situation is the parallels with Arthas. When Arthas became a Death Knight, his skin was leeched of color, and he gained wrinkles that made him look like he hadn't slept in weeks, and his golden blonde hair turned white. All of these happen to Anduin as well while under the Jailer's control and with his illusions dispelled.

And this raises an interesting question: is this what Arthas was meant to be?

We know the Helm of Domination and Frostmourne were both created under duress by the Runecarver. Notably, when Arthas was first corrupted, it was only with Frostmourne, while the Helm of Domination (and the rest of the armor) remained within the Frozen Throne, inhabited by the spirit of Ner'zhul. Initially, Arthas acted as the Lich King's champion, and helped to decimate Lordaeron but also, notably, betrayed the Burning Legion and helped Illidan defeat Tichondrius. It wasn't until Illidan returned with his Blood Elf and Naga allies (coerced into this by Kil'jaeden) to assault the Frozen Throne that Arthas would become the Lich King himself.

But even the Lich King's intended role is now thrown into doubt. In the lore as originally received, Kil'jaeden created the Lich King by attaching Ner'zhul's soul to the armor (and Frostmourne, though I feel like this was a little inconsistent, even if Frostmourne was always implied to be brought to Azeroth within the Frozen Throne.) Kil'jaeden wanted to use the Lich King to create the Scourge as shock troops to soften up Azeroth for the Legion's invasion.

With the Jailer added to the lore - a figure who seems more on the scale of Sargeras than Kil'jaeden in terms of power level - the source of the helm and the sword is now shown to be something quite outside of the demonic forces of the Burning Legion. And it seems that he, too, meant for the Lich King to be his own champion within the world of the living.

The Lich King's rebellion against the Legion seemed to create a different, wholly independent faction on Azeroth - still a villainous one, but one that opposed another villain. Now, however, one wonders if Ner'zhul's decision to turn against the Legion was his own idea, or one programmed into the Helm of Domination itself. Not that the Scourge should be its own thing, but for it to be the vanguard for the Jailer, rather than for the Legion.

In that sense, the Lich King is not sovereign, but servant to the Jailer, who is the sort of Death Overlord.

Thus, it could be that Anduin is being compelled to act as the Lich King was meant to. Both Frostmourne and the Helm of Domination were shattered, and Bolvar proved that a Lich King could choose not to serve the cause of Death if one had a strong enough will. In Anduin's case, though, Lich King 2.0 now includes a system to prevent even the most righteously-minded, good-natured person from resisting the Jailer's direct control.

That we will eventually free Anduin from this is something I anticipate, though it remains to be seen whether we will accomplish that in 9.1.

What, then, would the big reveal be? What major development could happen?

The Jailer will not be there for us to fight in SoD. Sylvanas will, and I think she might wind up having a tragic end. She appears to be regretting her alliance with the Jailer, perhaps moved by Anduin's words, but if there's anyone who has dug herself too deep, it's Sylvanas Windrunner. Even if she wanted redemption (and I don't know even she thinks that's possible for herself) I don't think the world would be willing to give it to her. Maybe the Venthyr.

But there's a reason why Tyrande Whisperwind is currently in Torghast.

I think Sylvanas might make a move toward redemption, but Tyrande will cut it off - slaying Sylvanas before she has a chance to make things right.

Let's get back to Tyrande in a bit.

The Jailer is looking for "keys," one of which Anduin retrieves from the Archon (apparently not killing her, according to Blizzard.) What could these keys actually be for?

Given that the key he takes is a glowing rune in the shape of the Kyrian symbol, I suspect that there is one for each covenant. But I heard somewhere (and I really don't remember where) that there are five keys he's seeking.

And that reminds me of Il'gynoth, who has two quotes (one from Emerald Nightmare, one from Ny'alotha) referring to sets of five that will "open the way" or "light our path," one of which is keys. Sure, I had assumed these were the Pillars of Creation given their importance in Legion. But maybe this was something farther down the line.

But that raises a question: The Jailer seems to know what he's doing. We can tell because he's not telling us, and generally, the less we know about a villain's plan, the more likely it is that they'll succeed at it. But if that's the case, why would Il'gynoth, a creature of Void, be so eager for the Jailer, a creature of Death, to succeed?

Now let's get the Nathrezim involved.

There is a book one can find outdoors above Sinfall (it spawns sporadically) that reads as the account of an agent sent to infiltrate and manipulate the other major cosmic forces - Life, Light, Disorder, Void, and Order - on behalf of Death. There are many hints that the author is one of the Dreadlords, aka the Nathrezim. And much as been made of the fact that Nathrezim and Castle Nathira and Sire Denathrius all seem linguistically connected. Also, with his horns and hooved feet, pale skin and long ears, Sire Denathrius looks like he could be related to the Dreadlords (also the Accuser literally refers to him as "The Lord of Dread" - this is either a hell of a troll or some really major telegraphing).

Blizzard has actually said we're going to touch on the Nathrezim in 9.1, though we know almost nothing else about their role here. They did hint that someone might break Sire Denathrius out of his prison. Could be the Dreadlords do it?

And hey, if the Nathrezim really have succeeded in infiltrating the other cosmic forces, they have the perfect person to send: Lothraxion. While when he was first introduced, it looked like he had been redeemed by the Light, if the Nathrezim weren't even loyal to the Fel/Disorder in the first place, perhaps he's a triple agent, actually serving Death. But a light-redeemed demon might be the very thing that would cause someone like Z'rali to let her guard down.

All of this really rests on the following question: what does the Jailer actually intend to do?

In theory, the most obvious failure state for the heroes of the Warcraft cosmos is that when the Jailer takes over the Shadowlands, it turns the whole plane into the Maw, and all souls are destined for eternal torment. That is, naturally, a very bad thing that we should try to prevent.

But consider this: the Jailer rules the Maw, but he's also its main prisoner. He was cast down into it after some sort of fall from grace - like what might have happened to Sargeras had the rest of the Pantheon prevailed against him.

The Maw seems made in the Jailer's image, but perhaps Zovaal doesn't actually like it there. What if he's not looking to expand the Maw to make everything like it, but instead to absorb everything else?

Do the keys he's collecting allow him to escape simply the Maw and to enter the rest of the Shadowlands? Or is he planning instead on a total conquest of the cosmos entire?

Now, the "five keys to open the way" might suggest that these keys will allow the Void to be taken up by Zovaal, for him to absorb that power like a freaking infinity stone.

Ok, remember Tyrande?

For a long time, we had a sense that the Holy Light was good and the Void was evil. Given that the Naaru have generally helped us while the Old Gods are... terrifying, it made sense. Sure, we had weird edge cases like Sir Zeliek and the whole Scarlet Crusade, but these seemed to be cases in which the Light was being wielded in some remnant of goodness, just being kind of twisted by weird circumstances.

The first time we saw a real reversal of this narrative was actually in Spires of Arak. There, the Outcasts used shadow magic (which is Void magic) against the oppressive class that wielded the Light. While the source of that shadow was truly evil, it blurred the lines a bit.

However, never was there a bigger moment to rethink the Light than "The Gift Refused" cinematic, in which X'era tried to forcibly rewrite Illidan's being, replacing his Fel power with the Light. Illidan destroyed her for this, and I think it's notable that Velen, whose power is derived from the Light and who is a pretty unimpeachably good guy, basically said "yeah, man, I get it." Then, the introduction of the Void Elves suggested that perhaps the Void was not just evil, but misunderstood, and that inversely, the Light could be misused and harmful (which seems to be what happened on alt-Draenor, which saddens me dearly because I loved Yrel and hate that she seems to have become a villain.)

The Night Elves worship Elune, but while they seem to be unique among the people of Azeroth in that belief, we've now found that people on other worlds also worship her, like Therinax and Qadarin did in life.

Elune's precise nature, though, has been hard to pin down. She seems to have some connection to the Titans, as evidenced by the Tears of Elune, as well as Eonar's hideout on Elunaria, and even the fact that the Tomb of Sargeras, which had been the primary temple to Elune, was built over a Titan facility.

But she also seems to be connected to the Holy Light - Velen noted the similarities between the worship of Elune and that of the Naaru, and Khadgar believes that the Naaru were straight-up created by Elune.

And, of course, Elune has connections with Life. Cenarius is said to be the son of Elune and Malorne, the latter being a Wild God.

But hey, what about the Night Warrior?

The Night Warrior is a dark aspect of Elune. And generally, magically speaking, if we're talking about darkness on a cosmic scale, that could imply that the Night Warrior involves the power of the Void.

If Tyrande arrives to slay Sylvanas, which seems to me like a real possibility, she will do so with the power of the Night Warrior - a power that seems beyond what anyone else in Azeorth has wielded, except perhaps Sylvanas' use of the Jailer's magic.

Could she be, unwittingly, bringing him the power of the Void?

Now, one final thought:

If my theory is correct: that Zovaal the Jailer is trying to take the powers of the various cosmic forces... is he the first to attempt this?

Zovaal is referred to as the fallen brother by the other Eternal Ones. But the Winter Queen also, at one point, refers to Ysera as being her "sister's" pet. And the Winter Queen sure doesn't seem to show a lot of love in that reference.

What if Zovaal is trying to do what Elune had already done? What if Elune collected the various powers of reality to become a true Goddess, in a way that even the Titans never did?

If this is the direction the story is heading, it could mean that the Shadowlands expansion is going to soon become about something much larger even than the afterlives realms of Death.

Demons, Alternate Realities, and the Shadowlands

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.)

Sire Denathrius, Nathrezim, and the Origins of Demons

I'm not in the Shadowlands Alpha (hoping to maybe get an invite when it goes to beta, which I think is how things went down with BFA, though given my luck, I'll probably not get in at all like I didn't with Legion).

But I'm being my usual "I don't mind spoiler" self, and as such, I'm going to put most of this behind a spoiler cut, as there's stuff here that is spoilery, even if, being in alpha, things are bound to change (though what I've seen them show off has looked pretty damn polished for an alpha).

Ok: Spoiler time:

Eyes of Blue

Eye color in Warcraft is significant. Thrall's blue eyes seemed to signal his significance as a person of destiny. Illidan's golden eyes did the same. When the High Elves began to take on Fel energy to satiate their thirst for magic, their eyes turned from blue to green (in fact, the only visible different between High Elves and Blood Elves is eye color) and later, after years in which the Sunwell was suffused with Holy energy, some Blood Elves began to get golden eyes.

The most striking visual distinction for Death Knights is that their eyes glow blue. Naturally, I had to play a Draenei character whose eyes do that anyway, so it's less distinctive for him, but anyone from Human to Goblin to Blood Elf has blue eyes.

In Wrath of the Lich King's opening cinematic, Arthas' glowing blue eyes opening were an icon of the necromantic power running through him. Frostmourne lights up blue as he prepares to raise Sindragosa, and the shot of the hundreds of thousands if not millions of zombies and skeletons watching him raising this most powerful of Frostwyrms was punctuated by their bodies lighting up with the icy blue necromantic magic.

Blue is kind of an important color for the Scourge.

And that made it so visually interesting that when Bolvar was crowned as Lich King, the fiery orange/red that had been infused into him by the breath of the red dragons shone through the helmet. When he became the Lich King, that glow burst forth from the helmet, and even the blue gem on the forehead changed colors.

This, it seemed, was indicative of the profound change that was Bolvar taking the crown from Arthas. Perhaps Bolvar's fire could melt Arthas' ice, and we would see the Lich King turned from an apocalyptic menace into a gatekeeper holding the tide of death at bay.

So, why, then, are his eyes blue now?

The hope in crowning Bolvar way back then (about ten years ago, actually) was that this pillar of will power, who had held out against the Lich King's personal attention for a full year without falling to his corruption, could then take up the task of running the Scourge in a way that did not threaten all life on Azeroth.

And so far, so good. Mostly.

In Legion, we saw Bolvar more active than he's been since taking on the crown. Empowering the Deathlord and allying with the Ebon Blade, player Death Knights went about recruiting a new Four Horsemen to serve as his champions. And while there were some ironies, like how the Ebon Blade saw raising Sally Whitemane as a Death Knight was actually a kind of redemption for her after her role in the Scarlet Crusade, the Ebon Blade also committed some terrible crimes empowering the Lich King. They struck at Light's Hope Chapel to raise Tirion Fordring - and even if Bolvar had planned it as a way to get Darion Mograine as his replacement from the beginning, it still meant the deaths of several paladins at the hands of their supposed allies.

Later, the Lich King raised the corpse of a red dragon to serve as the Deathlord's mount, but in the process, sent them to the Ruby Dragonshrine where they were likely to slay many benevolent dragons in their search for the information they needed.

Bolvar in life was the epitome of a lawful good paladin - honorable, brave, and skilled in battle. But at the very best, he can only be considered neutral now in terms of morality.

We're really now just at a point where we're hoping he remains Lawful Neutral - holding to his task of keeping the dead at bay. The fear, then, is that he might descend into Lawful Evil and revive the Scourge as the apocalyptic threat that it initially was.

Bolvar's red motif was based on the fire of the Red Dragons. Because the Red dragonflight in Warcraft lore are the guardians of Life, their fire is infused with the power of life. Red and Black dragons both breathe fire, but Black's is the more traditional destructive flame. When the red dragons burned the area in front of the Wrath Gate, not only was the Forsaken Blight burned away, but flowers and plants began to grow up from the ground.

Initially, we assumed that Bolvar's death to the Blight simply meant that his body was burned away in the fires - a cleansing fire, but also one that returned his body to the elements.

Instead, as was heavily implied in 3.1 but confirmed in 3.3, Bolvar was brought back to some strange semblance of light - a charred and blackened body that still glowed with the fire of the dragons, but that could not seem to die.

It made sense, then, for Bolvar to take the Helm of Domination, rather than Tirion Fordring, who was ready to do so. Bolvar was no longer really human anymore, and returning to a normal life in Stormwind was hardly a realistic scenario.

One wonders, then, what it means that in that screenshot - which by now is basically confirmed to be real - his eyes have gone blue. Notably, the rest of his body, and even his amazingly badass looking maul weapon, still glow with red flame. But the eyes are typically what count.

And it's not like this isn't new - as recently as BFA, we've met with the Lich King and he remained frozen within the Frozen Throne, his eyes continuing to burn with red dragonfire.

While I don't necessarily want to endorse it, the most straightforward theory is that this signifies the end of Bolvar as "Jailor of the Damned" and his full transformation into the Lich King. He held out longer than most would, but the Scourge and the Lich King have a purpose, and it is to scour the world of the living.

Obviously, the other point that is so obvious that one forgets to mention it: Bolvar is out.

Arthas spent all the time between the Frozen Throne WCIII expansion and Wrath of the Lich King frozen into the throne - we see the ice begin to crack during the Wrath cinematic. Bolvar, upon his coronation, coated himself in ice, entombing himself in the Frozen Throne, and for all of his activity in recent years, he never left that spot.

But the image depicts Bolvar out, wearing new armor, and wielding a massive new weapon.

Regardless of whether this means he has fallen to evil or if he has come to save us all, Bolvar has, for the first time in a decade, stood up and emerged from his throne. That has got to mean big things are afoot.

It's a really tantalizing mystery. I'm glad that we have less than a week to wait before we get some answers, but damn if it isn't good to have some hard evidence to speculate on.

Have We Seen the Shadowlands? And If So, How Many?

In Warcraft Chronicle, we can read that when Helya rebelled against Odyn, there were some Val'kyr who did not take her side. Obviously, Eyir and her loyalists remain true to him, but there were apparently a group of them who decided not to side with Helya but also not to return to Odyn's service, and instead chose to dedicate themselves to reviving champions that could help defend Azeroth.

They're Spirit Healers.

This revelation - that there's now a real story explanation for us going into ghost form and recovering our bodies - was kind of incredible. What had always been just a way to handle death in an MMO in a way that punished players but not too harshly now had the backing of canon.

But it also introduced an interesting notion: that the mysterious Shadowlands are actually the other plane of existence that WoW players are most familiar with.

The Emerald Dream is said to be a parallel to our reality, but one in which humanoid civilization never reshaped the earth. The Emerald Dream is an Azeroth free of Old Gods as well as any people - it's Azeroth as pure nature would have had it. This was part of the horror of the Nightmare - corrupting that which was meant to be incorruptible. But it's especially dangerous if the Dream serves the purpose we've long suspected - as essentially Azeroth's back-up disk should the Halls of Origination be activated.

Indeed, a popular theory (that this blogger subscribes to) is that the purpose of the Emerald Nightmare was to corrupt the back-up as, essentially, a backdoor to establish total Old God corruption of Azeroth.

What's interesting, then, is that Ny'alotha seems to be a very similar concept - a version of Azeroth where the Old Gods are triumphant, to be overlaid onto the real Azeroth.

So where is Ny'alotha?

To be fair, the oft-whispered Ny'alotha could just be its own thing. But I also wonder if it's of a piece with a few other locations we've encountered.

In Legion, we journeyed to Helheim, the realm of Helya, which is a dead and haunted realm of the drowned, and the source of the Kvaldir (and how freaking cool was it to finally get an explanation for the Kvaldir?) In BFA, Alliance players at least got to visit Thros, a realm to which the spirits of the Drust had retreated after the Kul Tirans had conquered the land (and, obviously, intermarried with those Drust who weren't so hardline. To be clear, Drust are Vrykul, and Kul Tirans are so big and burly because they are part Vrykul. We all agree on this, right?)

We know so little of the Shadowlands - on one hand, it seems to be where our ghosts go while we're dead, and at various times in Wrath of the Lich King we journeyed to the Shadowlands as part of quests involving the Lich King - though that realm was never identified in those exact words.

I have a couple theories on the Shadowlands.

One is that it has both overlay zones and its own special areas. Thros, to be fair, looks just like Drustvar only... darker. Helheim has no direct equivalent in Azeroth, unless it exists under the waves - which to be fair is totally possible.

So what is Ny'alotha then?

Here's my theory, and yes this is a bit tin-foil hat-y: I think that while N'zoth was working on the Emerald Nightmare, he was doing the same thing in the Shadowlands. We don't know what purpose the Shadowlands serve for Azeroth, but perhaps it is in its own way a sort of back-up alternative for the world. Or maybe it's a kind of "working document" or maybe something totally different.

But maybe while N'zoth was corrupting the Dream to make the Nightmare, he was also corrupting the Shadowlands in order to make Ny'alotha.

In other words: like Helheim or Thros, Ny'alotha might be one of the Shadowlands.

Now, the Shadowlands might simply be one large plane that's all interconnected. But borrowing some D&D lore (the 5th Edition version, to be clear,) it's possible that beyond the Shadowfell proper (in WoW's case the Shadowlands,) there might also be several demiplanes. In the Ravenloft D&D setting you find the various Demiplanes of Dread, the most famous of which is Barovia, the home of Count Strahd von Zarovich, a powerful vampire lord. Is it possible that the Shadowlands have demiplanes, such as Ny'alotha, that kind of bud off from it?

Given the very convincing leak that came out earlier today (see previous post) we might be about to learn a whole lot more about the Shadowlands very soon.

Sylvanas in the Key Art for Blizzcon

Blizzard released the "key art" for Blizzcon - the splash of characters from their various franchises that they're there to talk about.

The Diablo barbarian is at the center, which either means potentially disappointing a ton of people (whether it's fair that they're disappointed or not I won't say) by simply talking Diablo Immortal, or driving people crazy in a good way by officially confirming Diablo IV.

But let's talk WoW, shall we?

The key art figure is Sylvanas.

Now, that's all the real news, to be honest. If you're here just for the facts (m'am,) we're done.

But let's look at what this could mean.

In 2017, the Blizzcon key art for World of Warcraft was Jaina - ironically in her old Dalaran Mage outfit, rather than her badass new Lord Admiral look. Still, while technically not telling us much, it did suggest rather strongly that we'd finally get to see Jaina's homeland and that she'd play a major role in the expansion's story.

To be fair, since the end of the Dazar'alor raid, in which she was the final boss, Jaina's role in BFA has somewhat lessened to more of a simple "main Alliance representative" state. I'm very eager to see how the whole Derek Proudmoore plotline goes (and hoping that Sylvanas made a miscalculation because she didn't know about Calia) but I think Jaina, with her quite compelling story in 8.0, has done most of what she was meant to do in BFA.

So what of Sylvanas?

Sylvanas is obviously a huge part of BFA. Always one of the most interesting and polarizing characters in WoW, her status as Warchief has put her destructive ways centerstage, no longer allowing her to hang out in the back as the Horde's own token evil team member. As an instigator, she's been much more prominent than her opposite number Anduin (one of the big reasons I wish we'd get more of a moral balance between the factions is that it might allow the Alliance to actually do something - and yes, I shouldn't ignore Dazar'alor, which was rather big and also rather ethically questionable - but far from obviously evil the way that, say, Teldrassil was.)

But her presence in the key art for Blizzcon 2019 suggests very strongly to me that Sylvanas' story is not going to be resolved in BFA.

I hear a lot of speculation that N'zoth is going to be saved for the next expansion at the earliest, but frankly, I don't think so. We were told that it'd be clear who the final boss of BFA was after the Eternal Palace raid, and I sure as hell didn't see Sylvanas unleashed from an ancient, millennia-old prison.

The reason I don't mind fighting N'zoth "prematurely" is that A: it's not premature. We've been waiting to fight this thing since he was first mentioned way back in Cataclysm - which came out nine years ago. And B: N'zoth is the master manipulator. While Blizzard might even sell it as if we decisively defeat him at the end of BFA, they have an infinite license for N'zoth to re-emerge in some form and simply reveal that dying at our hands wasn't even a setback - it was all part of the plan.

There's no datamining, no leaks, nothing like that to back this up except logical storytelling, but my theory (and I won't say it's my prediction exactly, as much as it's where I think the story logically needs to go) is that BFA ends with us killing N'zoth, but in so doing corrupting Azeroth (the Titan, to be specific.) And then, someone makes the hard decision - maybe it's Sylvanas, maybe not - that Azeroth needs to die. We can't risk a Void Titan emerging and destroying the universe. We did what we could to save her, but with the Old Gods finally triumphant, we need to do the unimaginable in order to prevent the worst.

But then, there's a loophole. Where do the souls of the dead go when they die? Bwonsamdi calls it the Other Side, but it's known more broadly as the Shadowlands.

And who has dedicated herself to understanding the dead and how to bring the dead back? Sylvanas Windrunner.

And what a nasty position we'd all find ourselves in. The Alliance rages against Sylvanas for her many terrible crimes against them. The Horde rages against her for her tyrannical rule. But it turns out we need her, because without her, the world soul is lost forever.

That's all totally speculative, of course. But Sylvanas' place in the key art suggests, to me, that she'll continue to be an important figure in the next expansion.

Now, to be fair, there is a pattern that could mean that Sylvanas is both this expansion's end boss and also continues to play a prominent role.

BFA doesn't have "tier sets" but it does have major raids versus minor ones, similar to how things would be broken down in other expansions. Legion had the Emerald Nightmare and Trial of Valor as "minor raids," while Nighthold, Tomb of Sargeras, and Antorus were the tier raids.

BFA could be broken down in a similar way. Uldir and Crucible of Storms are the minor raids, while Battle for Dazar'alor, the Eternal Palace, and whatever the last raid is will fill those "tier raid" roles.

And let's think about something: Dazar'alor and the Eternal Palace have two things in common regarding their final bosses. Neither died (or at least, didn't stay dead - it's unclear if Azshara was dead or unconscious before N'zoth woke her up.) And both were in the Warbringers shorts that came out prior to BFA.

There's one more character from those shorts: Syvlanas Windrunner. So might we actually see her as the final boss, and also see her survive the raid?

Now, granted, doing so would really raise some eyebrows given Blizzard's insistence that Sylvanas is not just Garrosh 2.0. Having her as the final boss of an expansion and then lead us into the next one is exactly what they did with Garrosh. But it would complete that pattern, and humans freaking love to see patterns.

Regardless of whether Sylvanas or N'zoth wind up being the final boss fight of BFA, I'm feeling quite confident that Sylvanas will be a major player in expansion eight. And to me, that suggests that the subtle death and death-magic theme of BFA will be far less subtle next expansion, much as Legion's Old God themes became far more prominent in BFA.

The Fate of Azshara

Spoilers for the end of the Eternal Palace Raid (though I guess the title is almost a spoiler itself... so sorry.)

When we fight our way (well, when heroes do - I must confess I haven't run Eternal Palace at all, and never did most of Battle for Dazar'alor...) up to Azshara and defeat her at the end of the current raid, her end is much more of an ellipsis than a period.

Whether she truly dies or not, upon defeat she collapses while her mission - unlocking N'zoth's prison - is a success. When the Old God's shadowy essence blasts its way out of the deep abyss below, it gathers Azshara and her eyes shoot open in a look of...

What is that? Terror? Shock?

Here's my take:

Azshara has convinced herself since first making the deal with N'zoth that she was getting the better end of the deal. Her ego is the largest in the entire Warcraft cosmos, such that she literally defined her society's hierarchy over who fawned over her the most. Yes, the physiological differences between the Night Elves and Blood Elves are actually the (somewhat indirect) result over whose ancestors sucked up more to Azshara.

Given that N'zoth is far older than Azshara's entire race (and I'm not even just talking about the Naga,) and that over that time he succeeded primarily by manipulating things behind the scenes, Azshara was probably an easy mark for his games. Again, my read on the Azshara Warbringers short is that the sly, scheming voice at the beginning is much closer to N'zoth's actual personality than the bellowing rage-god. (Though I'd have kind of loved it if they'd gone with a third option and had him sound like a totally reasonable and even concerned and caring voice in that moment - but that would undercut the point I'm about to make.) Letting Azshara think she had out-maneuvered him was all part of the pitch.

Given that take on Warbringers, my read on the expression on Azshara's face when N'zoth grabs her, possibly reviving her, is one of abject terror.

Now, what is the source of that terror?

Is it Azshara realizing that all this time she's been the pawn? That her inflated sense of importance is actually a lie? That she's second fiddle to literally anyone else?

Or perhaps, like Arthas as he drifted off into his nothingness of an afterlife, she had truly been dead and now saw that there was no grand rebirth, no glory for her. That she was, in the end, just a mortal?

Or there's a third possibility.

Azshara's actual endgame in her two biggest "betray the planet" schemes were always a little muddy. When she tried to bring Sargeras to Azeroth, she theoretically wanted Sargeras as her husband - the only being great enough to be worthy of her. And to be certain, Azshara was powerful - thought to be comparable to if not exceeding the power of Archimonde or Kil'jaeden (though that was never tested.) But one imagines that, had Sargeras' plans come to fruition, we'd have one of two scenarios. Either Sargeras would have made Azeroth another Fel Titan, in which case he'd probably have dropped any false interest in Azshara, perhaps deigning to let her become a powerful demon, or if Azeroth had been destroyed, he might have just killed Azshara in the process.

Because as powerful as Azshara was, I think the general consensus is that the only single entity more powerful than Sargeras is an Azeroth that makes it to adulthood. (Though get back to me if we ever figure out what the hell Elune is.)

Azshara might have hoped to rule a reborn Black Empire, but one really wonders if that was ever in the cards. Being Queen is still a secondary position when you've got a God right there.

But the point that I'm taking a long time to get to here is that Azshara understands arcane magic intrinsically (in D&D she'd definitely be a Sorcerer,) but the true, cosmic horror of what the Void represents is probably not something she's ever thought to reckon with. N'zoth is a means to an end, the end being the restoration to her proper place as Empress of the World.

And the Void has changed her, mutating her into this five-eyed aquatic monstrosity, but she still sees only her own beauty.

What if death forced her to see the Void for what it really is?

What if she has only just now realized the horrors her ego has bought her?

And for most of us, sure we've got the Curse of Flesh, and we're vulnerable to the Old Gods' corruption. But she has been stewing in it for ten thousand years. There is no hope whatsoever for her. And the ends the Old Gods are striving for?

The Black Empire was only ever a means, not an end. The Old Gods themselves are only a means, not an end. Even the Void Titan that they seek to make of Azeroth is only a means, and not an end.

The end is darkness everywhere - a universe of only Void. No empire. No subjects. No beauty. No power.

No Azshara.

And for ten thousand years, she has been working toward that end.

And perhaps in that moment, she realized it.

So what does she do now?

She is so deeply corrupted that it's not even clear she'll be able to exercise her free will. Sure, she's been given the illusion of agency for all the time that she was doing exactly what N'zoth wanted. But if you look at how batshit the Old Gods (and it's implied, specifically N'zoth) made Neltharion, to the point where his entire dragonflight is bombarded by whispers of the Void (even Ebonhorn, a theoretically cleansed Black Dragon, has to fight off those whispers - maybe it wasn't the best idea to live so close to where Dad went crazy for ten thousand years, Ebyssian?) you have got to imagine that N'zoth's installed a bunch of back doors to Azshara's programming to control everything she does.

So Azshara is screwed. Even if she realizes what she's done. But is it possible that she could do something - anything - to prevent the dark fate that she has contributed to? Might some glimmer of the real Azshara - not benevolent, not altruistic, but defiant - show through?

Or, if she realizes how screwed she is, will she find no reason to care? After all, is she is lost, then the whole world is lost, if she is the whole world.

Blizzard chose not to kill, or at least not permanently kill, Azshara for a reason. It may be a long time before we find out why, but it's a really interesting choice.

Do We Win the Battle for Azeroth?

It's pretty obvious that the title of the current WoW expansion is a play on words. Yes, the Alliance and Horde are fighting for supremacy on the world of Azeroth, but the true battle is for the fate of the Titan Azeroth, and whether she survives the damage she has sustained since Sargeras plunged his sword into her.

As a side note: I know that not every character can be a master schemer - this isn't Dune - but I do sort of wish/hope that Sargeras was cleverer. Legion was my favorite WoW expansion (it's been close to a year since Legion ended but it still feels weird to say that after considering Wrath the hands-down best for so long) but I do feel somewhat cheated out of a full-on fight with Sargeras himself, and frustrated that he only appeared in his full glory during the post-final-boss cinematic. That Sargeras stabbing the planet would just serve the Old Gods' purpose is... I don't know, maybe it's ok. Sargeras is allergic to thinking things through anyway.

I think the Alliance/Horde war is a distraction, ultimately. Even with full-on warfare going, we're already seeing even figures like Jaina, who post-Theramore (really post-Divine Bell incident) has been on the hawk side of the Alliance, deciding that they're going to need to end this conflict and find some peaceful balance given the bigger threats.

It seems that the real question is what will happen to Azeroth, the Titan.

(Other side note: while coming up with my homebrew D&D setting, I decided that the world the players lived on was actually the physical body of one of the proto-god creators of that universe - this was not long before Chronicle Volume 1 came out, so I guess that the folks at Blizzard and I were having similar ideas. Also, we both renamed the Shadowfell the Shadowlands.)

Now, we've been told that empowering the Heart of Azeroth is how we're going to save her, but at the end of the Eternal Palace, we find that instead, it has been used to unlock the seals on N'zoth's prison. Magni has been mislead.

One wonders - was the Heart of Azeroth ever going to help fix the world? And then one has darker worries - has Magni simply been hearing N'zoth whispering to him the whole time?

I'd argue that he probably has been hearing the real Azeroth at least some of the time, given that he shows a similar ability to hear Argus (another critique for Legion - we never really understood exactly what Antorus did for the Legion.)

But what we've been doing this expansion is clearly not entirely good and healthy for Azeroth.

The Titan is dying. Sargeras' sword caused a life-threatening wound. Now, maybe that's been fixed for the most part, but now we have another problem to deal with - for the first time since the Titans ordered the planet, an Old God is loose upon the world.

Now, the Old Gods were not sent there to kill Azeroth. That was Sargeras' initial plan, and while he clearly flirted with the idea of instead converting her to his cause, his final act before his imprisonment looks like a last-ditch effort to kill Azeroth like he did Telongrus (which I'm assuming would also be the name of the Titan who was so thoroughly void-corrupted... it's where Void Elves have their little home base, on fragments of the world destroyed by Sargeras)

The Old Gods are supposed to pump the Titan full of void in the hopes of creating a Void Titan that would spread their madness across the cosmos.

With N'zoth loose, he is probably better-suited than ever to accomplish that goal.

Which raises an interesting question:

What if we don't save Azeroth?

What if we kill her?

Sargeras wanted to destroy all of creation (though mission-creep might have changed his goals to more of a vision of an intergalactic empire of demons) to deprive the void of things to corrupt. What if we realize that we're going to have to do a far more limited version of that.

If Azeroth is corrupted, we might have to destroy her.

And if the World-Soul at the heart of a planet is dead, what does that then mean?

There are a lot of foreshadowing hints that the Shadowlands will play a major role in the next expansion, possibly even be its setting.

If a World-Soul dies, but the world is intact, could that manifest as a massive explosion of death energy? Might we see the Shadowlands become far more powerful, and might we see the undead raging across the world?

And could that be Sylvanas' plan all along?

Sylvanas has decided at this point that she wants to convert all of humanity into the undead. She's started making undead Night Elves as well. If she wants everything united (preferably under her control) as undead, might she even want Azeroth herself to be undead?

Who is Playing the Game Best?

In a lot of ways, I think the frustrations I have with the way the Alliance story is told is that they've made the entire faction into Ned Starks - capable in combat, but far too quick to trust, with no real schemers amongst them.

As it stands, I see three potential chessmasters at work in BFA: Azshara, N'zoth, and Sylvanas.

Let's start with Azshara, given that we're dealing with her right now:

Azshara is personally very powerful. She's generally considered the most powerful mage on Azeroth, making Jaina or Khadgar look like novices. On top of that, she's been in power for well over ten thousand years. Her people adore her, as they did when they were all Night Elves. It almost seems as if she has some magical ability to influence people beyond her personal charisma.

We know that 8.2 starts with Azshara drawing the Horde and Alliance fleets into a trap, wrecking them in the drained-for-now Nazjatar.

Azshara has been known to ally herself with powerful evil entities when it suits her - first she welcomed Sargeras, considering a Titan the only one worth to be her consort. But when Zin-Azshari, not to mention most of the world, began to flood, she made a deal with N'zoth, transforming her people into the Naga so that they could survive beneath the waves.

In Azshara's Warbringers short, the interaction seems like one in which she talks her way from drowning with her empire in ruins all around her to becoming the queen of a new empire and a new race. She makes a bold move, bluffing (or maybe just choosing death over servitude) N'zoth so that it will save her on her terms.

She has fiercely loyal subjects and a lot of arcane power at her disposal. But is she actually a master schemer?

See, I could be wrong, but my read of the Warbringers short is that N'zoth made her think she'd won the negotiation. We'll get to N'zoth, but particularly the moment when Azshara is underwater, smugly smirking, only for a look of panic to gradually grow on her face before N'zoth fulfills his end of the bargain and transforms her (in a manner that seems extremely painful.)

See, Azshara is defined by her arrogance. Yes, she's powerful. And one gets the sense that basically no one ever says no to her. Which means that, while she might be a brilliant mind at the arcane, she probably thinks she's smarter than she is.

Comparing Azshara to N'zoth, my money is on N'zoth being the one whose plan is deeper and ahead of everyone else.

Here's the thing: we know less about N'zoth. We barely every interact with him (it... I'm going to use male pronouns given that the game does and his voice actor is a man, even though Old Gods are very clearly something outside of what we understand as gender) but what we've heard about him suggests an entity that thinks in an extremely strategic manner.

N'zoth is famous for being the weakest of the Old Gods - but also for seeming to always come on top. By weakest, one wonders what we're actually saying. My sense is that he had the smallest armies and perhaps the least powerful control of raw magic. But N'zoth's ability to outmaneuver his more powerful brethren suggests a being with a remarkable ability to play the game.

The Old Gods are beings of madness, but they have all shown themselves capable of at least some manipulation. C'thun turned the Anubisath constructs to his purposes. Y'shaarj made of his death an intractable curse. Yogg-Saron created the Curse of Flesh and the Emerald Nightmare. And N'zoth created the Naga, was probably the one to corrupt Deathwing, and even usurped the Emerald Nightmare from Yogg-Saron.

And as old as Azshara is, the Old Gods are older, and insidiousness is their very nature.

It's disturbing that N'zoth seems to be treating us heroes as his allies, even as we strive to defy him. There's something he knows that we don't.

Now, Azshara and N'zoth are allies, but one imagines that Azshara can't really suffer any being, Titan or Old God, as her superior. Does she have a plan to take the reins of the Black Empire?

I imagine she does, but I also strongly suspect that if she does, N'zoth is counting on it, and ready to do whatever it takes to use that to his advantage. Remember, N'zoth played the weak one among the Old Gods - was it that he truly was weaker, or did it just suit his purposes to be beneath the other Old Gods' notice. Of the four of them, he's the one who hasn't ever been killed in any way (and yes, the jury's still out on how dead C'thun or Yogg-Saron are, but N'zoth isn't even partially dead.)

But then there's the wildcard: Sylvanas Windrunner.

Now, to be fair, you can always make someone seem to be running the most complex schemes by simply not telling us what they're doing. It's clear Sylvanas is doing something. We've seen her capable of deception and ambush - she successfully fooled the Alliance into sending troops south to Silithus before her attack on Darkshore. It's even starting to look like the entire coup in the Undercity in which Varimathras turned against her and tried to summon the Burning Legion might have, somehow, been her doing to purge disloyal members of the Forsaken and strengthen the Horde's investment in her people. She also arranged the entire Siege of Lordaeron as a trap to decapitate the Alliance - though in this case she might have failed to account for Jaina showing up.

Sylvanas has been up to a lot this expansion, though we're currently at a stage where nothing is explicitly working for her. But there are strong implications:

First, there's my theory that Sylvanas wanted Baine to break Derek out so as to make it appear that he was freed before his mind was conditioned. Then there are the assassins she sent after Thrall - which again, could be a failure, but do you really send just two assassins to kill a legendary shaman like him? Again, it's speculation, but I think she intended to draw Thrall into the whole fray. And we still don't know what the full terms of her deal with Helya was - a being who, according to a turn-in quest from Island Expeditions, is not nearly as dead as we might have thought.

Right now, Sylvanas has sent Nathanos with the Blade of the Black Empire (no longer Xal'atath, as that entity has left the blade) to the ocean, and the last the Horde sees of him, he's walking nonchalantly into the ocean wall (as a Forsaken, he doesn't need to breath. Though I doubt my Forsaken Rogue could just walk through that wall.)

Which means what? WHICH MEANS WHAT?

Nathanos has not simply failed his mission, and that leaves us to ask what that mission is, and what Sylvanas asked him to do?

So, to put the full tin-foil hat on, I think that the Blade of the Black Empire is going to be used to trap N'zoth - not entirely unlike Frostmourne, it'll be a soul-prison, and in this case it will be a prison for an Old God.

But there are other steps in that plan (if indeed that is the plan) that we don't know.

Sylvanas has to be reckoned with in some way this expansion. I can't imagine that the "faction conflict will be resolved" if Sylvanas remains Warchief, or unless we discover that she's been doing all her horrible deeds for some greater good - though even then, I imagine Tyrande and co are not going to be in a forgiving mood.

So here's my bet: I'm counting Azshara out of the "top manipulator" competition. I think she's powerful and important, but she's the Cersei of this story, and (spoiler alert! If you somehow don't know how Game of Thrones ends by this point and care!) that means that for all her plays, it's not going to save her in the end.

N'zoth is the champ to beat - an eldritch being of unspeakable nature. But Sylvanas is pulling some master moves here, to ends that we haven't been able to discern quite yet.

And here's the bigger tin-foil thing: She's also drawing on powers that we don't fully understand.

Now yes, the Void is the main Lovecraftian, unimaginable, horrible, eldritch force in Warcraft. The Old Gods are clearly beings of cosmic horror, and that genre is all about things that you can never really beat, and generally can't even really slow down - your best bet is to hide and hope they don't notice you.

But Sylvanas is drawing on the power of Death. And we've seen in the past that Death magic doesn't seem to even play by the rules the Old Gods follow. The Lich King built a massive citadel out of an Old God's blood - blood that drives mortal insane just by being around it. But the undead? Unaffected. You go to that mine in Ymirheim, and the Val'kyr there are doing fine. There's a Faceless N'raqi who actually asks us to help him because he can't escape - the Ymirjar captain there cannot be manipulated, even as the captured miners will attack there liberators or jump into a chasm to their deaths.

The powers of Death are the ones we know the least about - like who the hell Bwonsamdi's boss is. And we know that the whispers of the Void flooding Alleria's mind beg her to kill Sylvanas because she works for the "true enemy."

Is death powerful enough that even the Old Gods fear it?

And if Sylvanas is drawing on that power, might she be able to outplay even N'zoth?

Charting the Remainder of Battle for Azeroth and What is to Come Next

With the Battle for Dazar'alor now live (I have yet to try it out on LFR - I'm in a bit of a WoW lull these days) we've now had BFA's first major raid.

If we imagine that BFA will have a similar release pattern to Legion, we can expect Uldir to be the equivalent of the Emerald Nightmare, Crucible of Storms the equivalent of Trial of Valor (the order is slightly different, but they're still equivalent,) Dazar'alor is BFA's Nighthold, and then we'll have the Azshara raid as the Tomb of Sargeras equivalent.

So what is to be the Antorus of BFA? I think we can reasonably guess that we have only one more raid and one more major patch to anticipate in this expansion.

While the focus of the expansion has been on Alliance/Horde conflict, the hints we have been receiving throughout have been that N'zoth is most likely to figure prominently by the end.

It is, to be fair, possible that N'zoth will come later, but frankly to me it seems the trajectory of the expansion seems far more likely to have N'zoth as its final raid encounter. I could certainly imagine another Alliance/Horde-themed raid to end the expansion, but given how experimental Dazar'alor was, I doubt they would have had two in the pipeline already.

I'm not putting it at 100% certainty, but I believe that we're going to be transitioning to a heavily Old God-themed remainder to the expansion, starting with the Crucible of Storms.

We already know we're heading to Nazjatar in 8.2, with the raid on Azshara's palace as the capstone of that patch. So where, then, do we go to follow?

It seems to me that Ny'alotha must be the location of N'zoth. Whether it's a Titan facility (unlikely given it's not an Uld-something) or an ancient Black Empire city (I tend to think those are Ahn-something like Ahn'qiraj or Ahn'kahet - while they did at some point declare Ahn'qiraj a Titan facility as well, what we've seen of Black Empire architecture to me suggests that Ahn'qiraj is actually a preserved part of that era of Azeroth's history.)

Ny'alotha could be another zone with a raid inside or perhaps we'll find an Ahn-something city somewhere with a Ny'alotha raid. It seems most likely that N'zoth's prison is beneath the ocean, though with the waters opening up over Nazjatar, who knows?

One suggestion that I think someone at Blizzard Watch made was that we could have a zone in which N'zoth is actually fully visible and ridiculously enormous, and we only get to fight it once we enter the raid zone.

While a fight against the eldritch monstrosities of N'zoth seems like a great final act for the expansion, we have to consider how the other major plots will fit in:

In classic Warcraft fashion, it seems like we could see the Alliance and Horde setting aside their differences in order to fight this larger foe. The real question is how it would be different this time. We don't know exactly how the faction conflict will "resolve" this expansion, but it would feel pretty cheap if we had a Warlords-style lull in hostilities only for them to reignite again an expansion or two from now. The stakes were raised tremendously when Teldrassil and Undercity were destroyed, and that means that a simple truce ain't going to be a very satisfying conclusion to the story.

We also need to see what the Heart of Azeroth ultimately does. Azeroth the Titan is still theoretically dying or on life support. At what point do we imbue her with the power we've collected? Would that need to happen not at the end of this expansion's plot but rather at the beginning of the next one? Mechanically we need to hold on to the Heart of Azeroth until we're ready to move on to bigger and better things, but in theory we're supposed to give her her, you know, blood back once we have enough.

Finally, even if I could see the Zandalari and Kul Tirans finding some semblance of peace (though that's harder post-Dazar'alor, with the Horde side finally having better reason to be angry!) what we've seen of this war has only been escalation. The Alliance can't possibly trust Sylvanas to honor any peace they make with the Horde. To my mind, it feels as if Sylvanas cannot remain Warchief. But I also don't think she's going to die, because that would be played out.

The Death with a capital D stuff we've seen in BFA seems as if it has been hinting toward something massive in the future - likely the next expansion, much as the Old God hints seemed to be foreshadowing this one. I'm going to throw out an idea here that is a little more speculative than the other stuff I've had in this post:

Could the next expansion start with the hunt for Sylvanas Windrunner?

What if Sylvans goes AWOL, abandoning the Horde and evading the Alliance? The two factions might have different motives for finding her, but she is nevertheless Azeroth's most wanted.

WoW expansion tend to begin with some kind of big war - an invading army or devastating atrocity. But wouldn't it be cool if we had one where we initially think we're just tying up loose ends? We figure, ok, war is over and we've saved the world and killed an Old God. All we need to do is find Sylvanas and we can finally take a breather. But then we find out that Sylvanas has gone somewhere where a far greater threat lurks - like the Shadowlands.

The great thing is that Sylvanas isn't the villain here. She's searching for answers and attempting to retain her freedom, but when she sees what is waiting for us on, as Bwonsamdi would put it, "de other side," she realizes that she is going to need our help - the very people who want her dead.

I love the trope of being forced to work with odd bedfellows, and while that often applies any time the Alliance and Horde cooperate, it would be really cool to see Sylvanas - one of the least trustworthy people in the Warcraft cosmos - needing to earn our trust.

Speculation for 8.3, 9.0, and Even More!

With Blizzcon over, we've now gotten the big announcements done. Yes, there was some... shall we say controversy? While Diablo fans are perhaps feeling dramatically underwhelmed (I'd say we should actually see if Diablo Immortal is any good, but the fact that it's Mobile-only and won't even have a PC version like Hearthstone is a bit disheartening) I think those of us looking for WoW news mostly had our expectations met.

There wasn't anything particularly mind-shattering about the announcement that 7.2 would take us to Nazjatar - given Azshara's role in the expansion and the many hints that N'zoth and his favorite former Night Elf were behind a lot of the nasty stuff going on, the Naga capital seemed like a logical place to go, especially after last year's Blizzcon announced Azshara as a raid boss (admittedly one who was expected in 8.1 rather than 8.2, but that's not terribly far off.)

While it wasn't full of surprises (though both Warcraft III Reforged and Mechagon were pleasantly unexpected announcements) I can't say that I saw any reason for disappointment. BFA has of course gotten a mixed reception. I think that its worst flaw was one that it couldn't avoid: that it had to come after Legion, which I think is the best expansion they've put out (still love you, Wrath!) But its focus on a faction conflict that old-school fans might be into but that a lot of people who have kept up with the game feel is repetitive and kind of goes against the character development that they feel their heroes have earned, coupled with some mechanical experiments that have perhaps not proven as fun as Blizzard hoped (yes, this is my mention of Azerite armor,) might have left some WoW fans with the desire to see 8.2 entirely blow up the paradigm of the expansion.

To an extent it does, giving us a universal big bad to fight against, but if you were expecting them to bring back tier gear or something like that in the middle of the expansion, you (hypothetical straw man!) maybe didn't have realistic expectations. (For the record, I think that once we ditch azerite gear in the next expansion, we'll probably go back to tier sets.)

The point is: we now have connecting dots for most of BFA, assuming the traditional three-tier rollout of content. If Tides of Vengeance is the Return to Karazhan (the patch, not the dungeon) equivalent, opening up the first major raid and moving the story forward a bit, Rise of Azshara will be our Tomb of Sargeras equivalent (man, Legion's patch names were not very creative, come to think of it.)

What that leaves is the final, Fury of Argus (there we go!) equivalent in 8.3.

To be sure, we could go the Mists route and have more in-between patches. 5.1 and 5.3 gave us story development and world content without any major raids. It's possible that we could have an 8.3 that focuses primarily on building up the final confrontation with... I'm just assuming here that N'zoth will be the final boss... while also putting the Alliance versus Horde conflict into context around this Old God.

There are, as I see it, two major stories we have to resolve in BFA:

First is the threat to Azeroth's Titan World Soul, also named Azeroth.

Second is addressing the fate of the Horde and Sylvanas as its leader.

The first is, I think, simpler. The Old Gods exist to corrupt Azeroth, and N'zoth, while less overtly powerful than the other big four back in the Black Empire days, is clearly the most cunning and canny. While C'thun's and Yogg-Saron's official status (alive, dead, or "sleeping, Cthulhu style") is a little ambiguous, N'zoth has clearly never been harmed since his imprisonment, and seems to have the best shot at actually finishing their terrible work.

With Azeroth in such a vulnerable state, N'zoth is closer to his goal than ever before. So we've got a strong ticking clock and a fight against a villain who easily stands worthy as an expansion-ending boss. Indeed, it's bizarre that we've fought two Old Gods prior to this and neither has been the final boss of their given expansion/release period (even though with the removal of the old Naxxramas, C'thun sort of retroactively became the boss of vanilla.)

Having an 8.3 (or 8.4 - whatever is the last 8.x patch) in which we battle our way through the eldritch city of Ny'alotha and ultimately confront the unspeakable ancient evil that is N'zoth would be a perfectly appropriate and epic way to end the expansion. Maybe not shocking, but I think that a story that has sufficiently foreshadowed something like this so hard shouldn't swerve from it just for the sake of a twist.

But what of Sylvanas?

Sylvanas currently seems at risk of becoming Garrosh 2.0. Garrosh of course was a divisively aggressive Horde leader who ultimately became a tyrant, trying to kill dissenters and ultimately becoming too much of a threat to the Horde itself for its heroes to stand by and allow him to continue. The Alliance was forced somewhat to watch this plot from the sidelines while the Horde dealt with internal politics until it was time to attack.

Sylvanas was shown holding Xal'atath in a slide at the What's Next panel talking about story, and this in particular echoes Garrosh once again - Garrosh attempted to use the power of the dead Y'shaarj to empower himself against us. If Sylvanas is going for Old God magic, it feels very much like the same plot.

At some point, Sylvanas needs to zig where Garrosh zagged.

One area where there is a subtle difference is that Saurfang, who fits a similar role to Vol'jin's during Mists of Pandaria, has received some help from the Alliance. After Saurfang refused to return to the Horde during the mission to extract Zul and Talanji (man I bet the Zandalari wish that they'd left Zul) he has left the Stockades well aware that Anduin wants him out there - Anduin left the door open for him.

Does Anduin's permission inherently taint Saurfang? I'm sure some Horde players feel that way. The real question is whether that brings down any rebellion that Saurfang might lead against Sylvanas.

Generally speaking, Sylvanas has tended toward the ruthlessly pragmatic. The Burning of Teldrassil is something that players have debated a great deal since it happened. It's possible that Sylvanas acted rashly, but she might have been acting deliberately. Occupying Teldrassil might have been very costly in terms of resources and troops, and by wiping it off the map, she might have seen that as a way to severely dismantle Kaldorei resistance in the area, denying them a safe harbor.

She is also known to play things close to the vest - Horde adventurers were not really told what she was doing in Stormheim, and there are things like her deal with Helya that remain unexplained.

There is a possibility that her goals are ultimately advantageous to the people of Azeroth - one thing I've speculated about is whether she intends to use Xal'atath to trap N'zoth. If she is ultimately trying to save the world, she might find herself in a more Illidan-like position - performing evil deeds in the name of a good cause.

But she has also been somewhat mustache-twirlingly evil. Her taunting monologues in Lordaeron, while clearly a tactic to delay while the blight-bombs were set up, oozed with unrepentant malice. There's also a reasonable take on her actions at Teldrassil that the burning was ultimately a move of petty spite over Delaryn's compassion and recognition of the humanity (elfishness?) that Sylvanas lost.

There's a scenario here where Sylvanas is either evil and therefore siding with N'zoth in the name of power, or that she has been turned by N'zoth and is Old God crazy. Neither would be very satisfying.

The notion that she's actually playing a long con with N'zoth, or at least plans to strike at him, would be better, though I would worry about her getting let off the hook like Grommash - at the end of Warlords, Grommash recognized we were the good guys and decided to help us, but at no point did he actually answer for the crimes of the Iron Horde, which were numerous. I don't want everyone to simply laugh and shake hands just because Sylvanas plays a role in destroying N'zoth.

But let's take some tin foil and start speculating! (8.0 and 8.1 spoilers)

There are tons of references to the Death domain throughout BFA. We've got Sylvanas in a prominent role - an undead elf and former member of the Scourge. We've got the current Lich King's daughter, Taelia Fordragon, as a prominent new character. We've got Bwonsamdi playing a bigger role in Zandalari culture than ever before. We've got the Drust, who use death magic for their witchcraft. We've got Jaina, haunted by memories of many people, but notably Arthas. We've got some cinematic shots that are clearly drawing a line between Anduin and Arthas. And finally, we have a mysterious entity that whispered to Vol'jin as he was dying to name Sylvanas his successor whom three Shadowlands-affiliated entities - Bwonsamdi, the Lich King, and Eyir - all deny being.

I've held a certain headcanon, largely based on stuff that happened in Wrath of the Lich King, that the undead and necromancy seem to have a certain resistance and extra effectiveness against the Old Gods. It's actually a bit of a recurring element to the quests there (particularly the mine near Wintergarde Keep and the entirety of Icecrown) that suggests that the Scourge is more powerful than Yogg-Saron in myriad ways, but including a certain resistance to his mind-warping powers.

Could it be that Sylvanas has found a way to use necromancy to defeat N'zoth? We've seen her demonstrating more explicitly magical abilities than what she had before. Prior to BFA, she basically only empowered her shots with dark magic and happened to also be one of Azeroth's greatest hunters. But now, she seems to really have mastery over her banshee nature (remember that Sylvanas is basically a ghostly banshee who is possessing her own body, rather than a traditional Forsaken zombie-like person.) Has Sylvanas been working on these skills, and has she gone beyond the foremost Dark Ranger to become a full-on necromancer? Her ability to raise those skeletons at the Battle of Lordaeron without the assistance of any Val'kyr seems to imply that this is a big yes.

So Sylvanas employing a type of magic that works well against the Old Gods might force us - maybe even both Horde and Alliance - to follow her gameplan in the battle of Ny'alotha. And it might work, ultimately allowing us to kill N'zoth in a truly effective way, rather than what we all suspect were temporary setbacks for C'thun and Yogg-Saron.

But double-twist.

Sylvanas has convinced herself over and over - disregarding all evidence to the contrary, like the summit in Arathi Highlands from Before the Storm - that the living will never accept the Forsaken. Obviously this ignores the rest of the Horde's toleration for the Forsaken, and it also ignores the fact that the Alliance has Death Knights and often works with faction-neutral Forsaken like Alonsus Faol or Leonid Bartholmew. But it's a world view that she is fixated on, and she has said in novellas like A Good War that she ultimately seeks to convert every last human of Azeroth into Forsaken, expecting that only after Stormwind is as undead as Lordaeron that there can be peace.

We see in 8.1 that she has found a way to raise Night Elves from the dead as well. Delaryn, for example, becomes a Dark Ranger (again we need a little more clarification on how much mind control is going on because I really can't imagine her willingly turning against her people.)

Sylvanas' singular focus on humans seems to be expanding to the Alliance in general (and I'm sure some members of the Horde are beginning to worry that she won't stop there.)

But what if there's a much bigger game here?

The Old Gods seek to corrupt Azeroth and create a Void Titan. We know that Telongrus (whose husk the Void Elves have claimed for themselves) would have been such a thing if Sargeras hadn't sliced the world in half, and we've also seen Fel Titans like Aggramar, Argus, and obviously Sargeras.

What about a Death Titan?

Sylvanas has been accused of being in service of Death, and being undead, that might come naturally to her. Obviously we have heroic Undead characters like our own player characters (at least my Rogue is a True Neutral antihero, but I'm sure plenty of players think of their Forsaken toons as fully heroic good guys) but Sylvanas has been going down a path that is blurring the lines between the Banshee Queen and the Lich King a whole lot.

If Sylvanas is beginning to see a shared state of undeath as the only path to peace, might she seek to convert the World Soul itself into this undead state?

Wouldn't it be a great lead-in to the next expansion for us to, at a moment of triumph with N'zoth's destruction, find that the World Soul has become undead? Sylvanas, her mission complete, flees the scene, with us in pursuit.

And to where does she flee? The Shadowlands.

You think I'm done? Nope, get another role of tin foil because there's more!

Our mission is not just to capture Sylvanas. We've got a huge problem: Azeroth is undead. And that's going to have reverberations throughout both the Shadowlands and primary reality. Zombies everywhere, ghosts and spirits on the rise. It's everything we were warned would happen if the Scourge didn't have a Lich King but like a thousand times worse.

What we need is a way to cure Azeroth.

The Forsaken were first brought into the Horde by, of all people, the Tauren. The Tauren felt that there had to be a way to cure their condition and return the Forsaken to a state of living humanity.

Between them and the raising of Calia Menethil as some sort of light-touched undead, both factions would be desperately searching for a way to bring Azeroth back to life - a true, necromancy-free life.

We would fight through various threats from the Shadowlands - all spooky and undead. Maybe we'd even figure out where Mal'ganis was during Legion!

But the end result is that we find that the dark entity that rules the Shadowlands has been manipulating things behind the scenes, and we have to defeat them to save Azeroth's soul.

Now: the most fun part.

That mission to cure the Forsaken of undeath is a plot that one would be forgiven for simply assuming that Blizzard had dropped. But in this perhaps third layer of tin foil: what if defeating the lord of the Shadowlands actually allowed us to do that?

Imagine that the Forsaken could be cured.

But this does not mean they just go back to Stormwind as happy humans. See, with the Kul Tirans and the Zandalari Trolls, we now know that different members of the same race without any profound magical distinction (particularly when viewing the Kul Tirans) can still make a new playable race.

This cure, following the plot of this expansion, would lead to an allied race of sorts for the Horde that would be, essentially, Living Forsaken.

Just as the Kul Tirans are bigger and broader and stouter than your traditional human models, Living Forsaken could be gaunt, rail-thin but tall, with dark circles under the eyes and an extremely gothic look to them in terms of hairstyles and default armor. (Alternatively, it might involve the process that Nathanos underwent, leading to red eyes and such, but let me stay on track here.)

While cured of undeath these Living Forsaken would still resent the Alliance for abandoning them and they would continue their practices of necromancy plague-based alchemy. They're still Forsaken, culturally. But it would complicate matters to a far greater degree. The only real reason the Alliance had to claim that the Forsaken didn't have the rights to Lordaeron was that they were undead. These people would have no such challenge to their legitimacy.

Obviously, after a war in the Shadowlands and all this stuff surrounding Sylvanas (who could either be a raid boss or somehow find redemption and be allowed back into the Horde) would probably mean there were already a lot of complicated plot developments, so how important returning to Lordaeron would even be for the Forsaken might be an open question.

While Blizzcon 2018 made me far more confident in N'zoth as the final boss of BFA, I'll confess that while I think a Shadowlands, or at least Undead-based expansion is still likely to come next, I can't really say much beyond that. Still, this tin-foil hat theory (theories, really) has been a lot of fun to think about and I can only hope we get something along the same lines.

What the Hell is Sylvanas Doing with Xal'atath?

The following post has 8.1 spoilers. You have been warned.

At the What's Next panel today, Sylvanas, Saurfang, Jaina, and Anduin were featured in a slide about future stories for the remainder of BFA. But Sylvanas very interestingly had a very familiar dagger in hand. Holding Xal'atath, Blade of the Black Empire, it would seem that Sylvanas is drawing on the power of the void in some way.

Given that we're facing Azshara in 8.2 and heavily (ok, maybe technically subtly) implied to be going after N'zoth in 8.3, such a blade might raise a few eyebrows.

One thing that's a bit surprising about her wielding it is that in the past we've generally seen Sylvanas and undeath as an oppositional force to the Old Gods and the Void. The Lich King seemed to build Icecrown's fortifications out of Saronite as a kind of middle finger to the Old Gods, and his forces seemed immune to its corruption - like we saw in the Sarontie Mines of Ymirheim where we actually teamed up with a Faceless One to fight the Ymirjar.

In a recent comic, the mad void whispers that Alleria constantly hears warned her that Sylvanas served the "true enemy," so even if there has been some void-assisted necromancy in the past (like Ner'zhul B,) it seems as if these forces are somewhat in opposition to one another.

So is Sylvanas' journey into deep villainy actually being orchestrated by N'zoth? Has he cracked the code on the undead in order to gain some way of influencing them? That this war could be all at N'zoth's behest is something that has seemed quite plausible, but Sylvanas also doesn't need external corruption to be wicked the way she has been.

If BFA is heading for a big confrontation in Ny'alotha, might we pursue Sylvanas there? And what is her intention?

Having her get corrupted by N'zoth would be, I think, a bit of a let-down.

But let's think about why she might have that dagger.

In 8.1, in the quests that lead up to the Crucible of Storms raid, Xal'atath appears not as a dagger, but in a humanoid form of a Void Elf. It is heavily implied that she was actually a fifth Old God, or perhaps a lesser entity of the same nature. Like Lovecraft's Nyarlathotep, Xal'atath takes on a humanoid form. But if she is in this form, does that mean the knife was only ever her prison, imposed on her by N'zoth?

Let me toss some tin foil on my head and start the speculation engine a-running.

If the dagger itself is a prison rather than the Old God herself, and the dagger is now empty, could it contain the essence of a different Old God?

Sylvanas is merciless and cruel, but she does believe in one reasonably admirable value: survival. And the Old Gods are a huge threat to that.

What if Sylvanas is trying to trap N'zoth in the dagger?

I'm hesitant to give Sylvanas benign motivations. Whatever her end goals, she has done some horrific things, particularly in recent months. Making her a "secret good guy" could really ask too much of players' forgiveness. Much as Grom in Warlords never seemed to pay for his rather horrendous crimes, I don't want to see Sylvanas let off the hook just because she was working on a project that would help Azeroth as a whole.

But it would make things more complicated. We only found out in Legion that Illidan's actions in Burning Crusade had noble intentions - and I suspect that this was really more of a retcon than something they had been planning all along. Imagine, for example, that Saurfang has captured the hearts and minds of the Horde and that both factions are racing to bring Sylvanas to justice... only for her to warn us that we really don't want to stop her - at least not yet.

Like Y'Shaarj, there's a good chance that killing N'zoth outright would lead to catastrophic problems for the planet. Azeroth is already practically on life support right now, so the violent death of one of her horrible parasites could put her in an apocalyptic state of shock. Maybe we need to follow Sylvanas' plan if we are to prevent Azeroth's death - forcing us to delay the course of justice in the name of saving the world.

Sylvanas might be busy in her endeavor, but she'll almost certainly use this delay to ensure her eventual safety.

But given how important her work would be, we wouldn't really have a choice but to help her.

How Far Back Have the Infinites Gone?

We killed Murozond in the 5-player dungeon End Time way back in the last patch of Cataclysm. That's four expansions ago, and while there have been some out-of-game references to the Infinite Dragonflight, they've largely dried up as a visible threat. Even in the alternate-universe/time-travel expansion, we barely heard a peep from them - the only reference to them was that Kairozdormu seemed to be on the way to becoming such a dragon had Garrosh not killed him.

Indeed, I've got on record saying that I think Warlords' biggest mistake was shying away from the complicated time-travel aspects of the expansion - we didn't see a single person encounter their 35-year-younger doppelganger, for example. Velen died, but it wasn't our Velen, who then got to play an important role in Legion.

Warcraft usually has big threats function as a pretty top-down organization. The Qiraji ceased to be much of anything once we killed C'thun. The Legion seems like it's unlikely to ever be nearly as big of a threat as it was prior to Sargeras' capture.

So it would stand to reason that people might feel that Murozond's death meant the Infinites were no longer a problem.

But you never know with a time traveler.

See, time travel narratives mean that we don't all necessarily have the same sequence of events, and causality can be messed up. We first learned of the Infinites in Burning Crusade, and fought them for three expansions, which in story terms comes out to maybe three years. But Nozdormu is still Nozdormu at the point in time where we are. Sure, given that we've seen at least one alternate timeline (not to mention the End Time, which was a cancelled future where Deathwing had enacted the Hour of Twilight, is certainly "alternate,") it could be that Murozond is not actually "our" Nozdormu. Still, Nozdormu at least seems to think that that's his fate, and is in the very difficult position of having to plan for his own descent into madness and chaos - plans that his future, corrupted self, will have full awareness of.

We have his corruption to look forward to, though we don't know how long from now that will be.

But there's another problem to worry about as well:

How far back to they go?

Again, they're time travelers, which means that even if the Infinite Dragonflight hasn't even been created yet, our past is presumably already infested with them. We've seen them pop up in several points already (the early Caverns of Time dungeons,) but who knows? Maybe there were Infinite Dragons visiting the Black Empire. Maybe they fought against the early Troll empires. They could have set plots in motion eons ago and then caught up with them far later without having to wait.

Here's a tin-foil hat, sort of cribbed from folks like Bellular Gaming and other WoW commentators.

There is apparently a separate Loa of death than Bwonsamdi - possibly his "boss," and also someone who has been put forth as a potential candidate for the Shadowlands entity that took Odyn's eye and taught him how to make the Val'kyr.

This loa is named Mueh'zalla, and is worshipped by the Sandfury/Farraki Trolls (the desert trolls of Tanaris who live in Zul'farrak - represented by the evil General Jak'razet in Vol'dun.) Among his many names, one is the "Son of Time."

Now, that could easily just be a classic connection between gods and symbols of death being associated with time as well.

But let's make the biggest logical reach: Doesn't Mueh'zalla kind of sound like Murozond?

Oh, it's a stretch for sure, which makes this post a clear tin-foil hat one. But if we want to take what is very likely just a coincidental similarity between the two names and read way too into it, what could it imply?

Well, first, we know Odyn didn't trust the dragons, which is why he wanted the Valarjar to serve their function instead, so why would he treat with an evil dragon (or are the infinites chaotic neutral?) Perhaps Murozond was merely disguised - something dragons certainly have a propensity for.

Also, the Infinites have generally been linked with the Old Gods and the Void, whereas this entity seems more of a death-domain being. On the other hand, we've definitely seen Void-related creatures engaging in Necromancy, so it's not unthinkable.

The reason I think this clicks so well is that Odyn's sacrifice of his eye is such an ancient thing, and one that had some nasty repercussions for the world. Helya was able to trap Odyn, which likely led to the corruption of Loken and the chaos in Ulduar that left the world's Titan facilities basically unmanned for tens of thousands of years. So much of Azeroth's history would probably have been very different had Odyn not turned Helya into a Val'kyr, and that seems like the perfect sweet spot for a time-traveling agent of chaos to screw things up.

We're at a point where we're inclined to think of Odyn's actions as so far in the past that it's hard to imagine things going differently. But to a time-traveler, the ancient past's immutability is a falsehood.

Was there a different timeline? One without a Sundering? One in which the Titanforged never fell to the Curse of Flesh?

And here's a tricky question: are we better or worse off?

The Whispers of Barrowknoll Cemetery

Drustvar is Kul Tiras' creepy zone (Nazmir is Zandalar's, and I don't want to claim one is the creepier of the two, though my tastes tend toward Drustvar.) It's filled with witches who are channeling the death magic used by the Drust that seems to tie into basically every undead thing we've encountered on Azeroth.

Now, WoW is known for its enigmatic clues and hints to future story developments. My favorite item I've ever gotten out of Archaeology is the Puzzle-box of Yogg-Saron, which simply whispers to you enigmatic hints when you use it on a one-minute cooldown. It's from this item that we first heard of Ny'alotha, which is now being spoken of directly by enemies in Stormsong Valley and its Shrine of the Storm dungeon.

Il'gynoth was another great source of eldritch whispers, which we're still trying to puzzle out nearly two years later.

And now we can add Barrowknoll Cemetery to the list of enigmatic clues in WoW. What's really interesting about it is that it's so out of the way. Alliance players only go there for a short side-quest, and Horde players visit it once (only once as far as I can tell) during their War Campaign quests. Yet it seems to be the latest place for the kind of writers on WoW's creative team that I would want to be if I worked there get to drop all sorts of clues.

While taking my Warlock (the latest toon to enter the new content, and the first ranged one!) through the early quests of Drustvar (he just hit 111,) I did these quests and was reminded of these quotes, which seem to be worth talking about (it's possible I like speculating about WoW lore more than playing the game.)

Now, the tricky thing here is that the only compiled list of quotes from the cemetery I've found is from WoWhead's alpha database, and so some of these are subject to change or might not even be there. The one I got on the Warlock was "The Burning Ones kept balance. Now, all lost. All lost."

That one doesn't require a PhD to figure out - we've beaten the Burning Legion, and as horrible as they were, they were also probably the most dedicated and coordinated force marshaled to fight the Void in the universe, meaning that the Void is definitely going to take advantage of these circumstances.

So, using WoWhead's list, let's go down and speculate on meaning.

Notably, by the way, Barrowknoll is, unlike the other enigmatic quote sources, not obviously tied to the Old Gods or the Void. Like many, I believe they're building up Death as a primal force to be the next thing lurking behind the Void just as the Void had lurked behind the Legion, which suggests that we might actually be getting a different perspective this time, and while the Void is all about believing all possibilities as equally true, Death as a force (which would seem the most logical connection to this cemetery) might actually be more trustworthy.

So, going from the list (found here,) let's get to the quotes!

"Her blood is making him stronger. Yours will, too."

Easiest guess here would be Azeroth's blood (Azerite) and "him" being N'zoth. We don't exactly know what it would mean for the Old Gods to corrupt a Titan. One possibility I've thought about is if the Old Gods actually sort of consumed the Titan (after consuming each other until there's only one left) and thus sort of embodied the Dark Titan. Is N'zoth intending to simply fill Azeroth with void energy, or does he intend to be the Dark Titan (perhaps even in defiance of the Void Lords' intentions?) This could actually explain the endless fighting between the Old Gods - perhaps the idea was that they were meant to fight each other until the strongest had consumed the others and was thus strong enough to consume the World Soul?

"Night falls. Her song will end."

Could be more Azeroth reference, though I also wonder if this could have something to do with a character affiliated with a song. Jaina's got the Daughter of the Sea, Sylvanas has Lament of the Highborne.

"Her whispers echo loudest of all."

Again, could be Azeroth, who "whispers" to Magni. What would it mean for them to echo? Alternatively, could this be Tyrande Whisperwind? After the burning of Teldrassil, might she go off the deep end in some way?

"The cracks widen."

This, I think, simply refers to the prisons of the Old Gods weakening.

"She seeks that which must be earned by sacrifice."

Ooh, that's pretty interesting. If any character has been searching desperately for a quick fix, it's Sylvanas. She has done a lot of terrible things in the name of keeping her people preserved in their undead state, but it has always been kind of selfishly motivated.

"The burning ones kept balance. Lost now... lost."

As I said above, this is presumably a reference to the demons of the Burning Legion, who aren't trying to kill us (hooray) but also aren't fighting the Void anymore (boo!)

"Their victory is closer than you know."

Old Gods? Given Azeroth's state and the weakening of the Old Gods' prison, it seems very likely that their goal of corrupting (or whatevering) Azeroth is probably closer than it has been since the days of the Black Empire.

"Embrace your fate. All will drown."

Now, this could very easily have to do with Azshara and/or N'zoth. But it might not actually be as bad as it sounds: if we take Il'gynoth's quote "To find him, drown yourself in a circle of stars," perhaps what this means is that we have to go through some kind of ritual, symbolic "drowning" in order to get to Ny'alotha and fight him in the first place.

There are then a few others which seem like pretty standard creepiness: "We are the lucky ones. Not you. Not yet." seems to be the dead perhaps boasting of the fact that they're beyond the reach of what horrors might afflict the world. "I only wanted to help." Just standard creepiness, I think. "Your pride is what led to all of this." Well, we can trace things all the way back to pride kind of on both sides - Garrosh was too proud and turned into a genocidal monster who wanted revenge on the Alliance that defeated him and the Horde that turned on him, which led to the Legion's invasion and ultimately Sargeras' big stab. You could argue that it was prideful of the Horde to not stop him before he got that far, and prideful of the Alliance to deny Thrall the killing blow after Garrosh's defeat. I don't know.

On top of this, apparently there's a ghostly follower who will sometimes follow you around there. I haven't seen this myself, but there are a few notable quotes:

"Beyond this small sea of stars there is only endless darkness." That more or less describes the Void, and reinforces the lovecraftian awe toward it. Also, the "sea of stars" seems to relate to drowning oneself in a circle thereof.

"He is awake now. And he has noticed you." We definitely woke N'zoth up when we defeated the Emerald Nightmare. And again, in Lovecraftian terms, it's always a very, very, very, very bad thing when any sort of eldritch abomination notices you.

Finally, "Has she betrayed you yet? She will..." For the Horde, it seems only a matter of time before Sylvanas screws over her people in some way. But Sylvanas doing harm to the Alliance wouldn't be betrayal - people you already know to be your enemies can't really betray you. So it does make me wonder if there's someone on the Alliance side who is also capable of betrayal. Jaina's a popular choice for that (though I hope it's not her, as I feel like she's demonized unjustly.) But on the other hand, I think Tyrande could pull something extreme out of desperation for revenge. I also wonder what would happen if we met Yrel again, who apparently has become a fundamentalist zealot (at least from the perspective of the Mag'har orcs.) Would she tolerate the Alliance's diversity after decades of Xe'ra B indoctrinating her?

Questions about Ahn'Qiraj and Ahn'Kahet

The Old Gods were first explicitly introduced in World of Warcraft, though there were strong hints to their presence in The Frozen Throne, when Arthas fought through Azjol-Nerub and encountered what was likely some appendage of Yogg-Saron or one of the monstrous growths like we see in Twilight Highlands and during the Dragon Soul raid. But our first bona fide Old God introduced in any Warcraft game was C'thun (interestingly, there's a Stephen King story involving a similarly Lovecraftian entity known as C'thun, both clearly being references to the most famous of Lovecraft's creations, Cthulhu.)

Silithus was basically C'thun's front yard, and there were some suitably eerie elements there - I particularly liked the obelisk-like structures that began to break down and float the closer you got to Ahn'qiraj. Ahn'qiraj appears as a desert ruin with elements of Egyptian and Mesopotamian architecture that plays well into the Lovecraftian vibe - even if Cthulhu's lair was in an underwater city that occasionally rose from the depths, the idea of stretching back to the oldest known civilizations and the desert-like environments they sprang from to place your eldritch horrors is something he played with. Indeed, the author of his in-universe book that details all these strange creatures, the Necronomicon, is Abdul Alhazred, the "Mad Arab" (and that's very mild on the scale of racist things Lovecraft said, sadly.)

The character of Alhazred actually fits pretty well into a kind of Twilight's Hammer context for WoW - he went into the desert and started worshipping these beings and eventually wrote a book called "Al Aziz," translated theoretically as the buzzing sound of insects, but also as sort of ghostly whispers - the story being that he didn't so much write the Necronomicon (the later title for Al Aziz) as record the whispers he was hearing.

Anyway, it wasn't until Chronicle Vol. 1 that we really got details about what it was like when the Old Gods ruled over Azeroth. This "Black Empire," actually saw massive cities built around the enormous forms of the Old Gods. Given that they are implanted into the very crust of the world, it stands to reason that these cities must have been where we find the Old Gods today. To be fair, given my interpretation that the Old Gods are nearly the size of continents, it's possible that they could manifest their "heads" in different locations - I don't really know much about Old God anatomy.

Still, I think the most logical interpretation is that wherever we've found Old Gods, that was also where their cities stood.

Chronicle also said that each of the Old Gods was trapped in a Titan facility, suggesting these were built up around the Old Gods where they were. Ulduar is very obviously titanic in nature, and its function as both prison and command center for the whole planet (which, um, Titans, was that such a good idea?) makes it one of the clearest repositories of Titan knowledge and demonstrations of Titan (and Titanforged) activities on the planet.

Beneath Northrend, however, we see Azjol-Nerub (sadly not as much as they had originally brainstormed - it was meant to be a whole zone, but I think they had trouble figuring out the whole underground aspect of it.) Azjol-Nerub is the realm of the Nerubians, who are one of the Aqir races created by the Old Gods. Ironically, we actually meet some Nerubians who wish us to defeat the Faceless Ones inhabiting their Old City - Azjol-Nerub, the dungeon, is entirely held by the Scourge under Anub'arak, while Ahn-Kahet, the Old Kingdom, is a mix of Scourge to start and then Twilight's Hammer and Faceless Ones further in.

It seems unlikely that Nerubians, an Aqir race who were supposedly born from the Old Gods directly, would turn against the Faceless (or "N'raqi") who had the same origin. I do have a vague and underdeveloped theory that the insectoid Aqir races were born of Y'Shaarj and C'thun while the cephalopod-like N'raqi were born of Yogg-Saron and N'zoth, but who knows? The Old Gods do love conflict, after all, so it could be as simple as that.

Anyway, one thing I wonder about is the the name Ahn'Kahet. Clearly, this follows a similar naming convention to Ahn'Qiraj. We're told Ahn'Kahet is the "Old Kingdom," which perhaps distinguishes it from Azjol-Nerub.

Chronicle suggested that Ahn'Qiraj was another Titan facility meant to imprison C'thun. But first off, Titan facilities seem to always be "Uld"-something (the dying Titanforged watcher in the Heart Chamber where you get the Heart of Azeroth seems to be aware of containment breaches in many Uld-locations, including the ones we've seen like Uldaman, Ulduar, Uldum, and soon Uldir, but also some others (though I think one of them, maybe Uldaz, is actually just another part of Storm Peaks.)

Now that we know the term "Black Empire," and we've seen images of it in both Chronicle and in the Warbringers: Azshara short, I'm beginning to suspect that Ahn'qiraj is actually a preserved portion of that Empire.

C'thun is locked behind the Scarab Wall along with his empire, and so perhaps the idea was simply to wall them off. I believe that if you work out the internal structure of the raid with the outdoor version of it, there's a giant domed building which ought to house C'thun's "head." Perhaps before the Titans defeated him, C'thun once rose high above this spot to survey its vast territories.

That could suggest that Ahn'Qiraj was basically "C'thun Town" at the time of the Black Empire.

Furthermore, perhaps Ahn'Kahet was "Yogg-Saron Town." But one thing that's strange about that is that Ahn'Kahet is about half a continent away from where we know Yogg-Saron's "head" to be. It is of course possible that not every "Ahn" city was built around an Old God's... most important protrusion above ground is the best way I can describe it. Alternatively, maybe Yogg-Saron was just that ridiculously huge, or perhaps the Titans really kind of moved him/it when imprisoning the Fiend with a Thousand Faces.

If Y'Shaarj had an "Ahn" city, it's likely that it was destroyed when the God of Seven Heads was torn out of the planet. But whatever might have been left of it would likely have been built over by the Dark Trolls before their transformation into the Night Elves.

This raises an interesting question, then: if, as I have theorized, we're going to be going to see N'zoth this expansion, what exactly will we find in its vicinity?

N'zoth presumably inhabits Ny'alotha, but this follows neither the Uld- nor the Ahn'- nomenclature we've seen affiliated with Old Gods. N'zoth is the schemer of the Old Gods, and so it's possible that it/he/whatever has somehow altered the environment into something totally new. Does N'zoth even have an Aqir-like race to serve him? It would seem that the Mantid served Y'shaarj, the Nerubians maybe served Yogg-Saron, and the Qiraji served C'thun. But rather than an Aqir race, N'zoth seems to have made his servants from the Elves, creating the Naga. Might we then find some place called "Ahn'Naga?"