So they basically say the people of Hallowfall are survivors of an expedition sent from Arathor that settled in this underground area of Khaz Algar. Didn’t Arathor fall apart centuries ago…like long before Warcraft 1? Faerin Lothar said she was part of the expedition that brought here there when she suffered her accident. Does this mean she is actually a few hundred years old? Or did I miss a recent storyline where perhaps Calia Menethil decided to surrender all the territory the Forsaken took in earlier expansions and Arathor was reunited during that time?
That expedition founded a new empire on the other side of the world. Descendants of that new empire are the Hallowfall Expedition.
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Right but as I asked…does this mean Faerin Lothar is like hundreds of years old because she said she suffered her accident during the journey.
They are different expeditions separated by a massive chunk of time.
2500+ years ago, Arathor sends out an expedition of humans and elves
They found a new Empire on the other side of the world
~15 years ago, Emperor Thoradin IX sends an expedition to Hallowfall
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So the one Thoradin IX sent out is the one Faerin was with…and does this mean Arathor was reunited during that time 15 years ago?
The Arathi Empire that Faerin is from is an entirely SEPARATE kingdom. Based somewhere on a continent out near the Storming Seas.
After 2,500 years, it has little to do with the orignal empire.
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Years back when the Arathor still stood, and before it crumpled into the seven kingdoms, at some point a group of humans and high elves departed from Stromgarde and traveled by sea to a new landmass, where they founded the Arathi Empire.
Essentially the Arathi Empire is another kingdom that broke away from Arathor, which hasn’t been reunited.
Now in regards to the Hallowfall Expedition…
More than a decade before The War Within, the current Arathi Empire Emperor had a vision of the final clash between the Light and Void and sent an expedition. This expedition was meant to make landfall, establish itself, and then make portals to the homeland to ensure a steady stream of supplies and reinforcements.
However as this expedition was making their way through the Storming Sea, they were nearly destroyed when in a burst of light they were transported to Hallowfall. However in the process all the mages, save the one who didn’t know how to make a portal home, were killed. With no way to contact the homeland, the Arathi established itself in Hallowfall under the light of Beledar.
Now as for Faerin. As a child she snuck into the fleet, as a means to escape the family that she felt viewed her as a disappointment and because she heard the call of Beledar. The orphanage was actually initially created for her.
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So there is a new empire near the storming seas? Khaz algar is below kalimdor…? That means they came east from the other side of the world… wait what…? 
interesting
I don’t get how they’ve only been there 15 years. The Priory not only looks like it’d take 100+ years to construct, it also has significant age wear and tear on it. It does not look like a newly constructed building.
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I had this same issue with Darnassus when I learned it was only five years old back in Vanilla. It has a giant stone temple on top of a dang tree (trees are not known for their large quarry sites), and that building has some moss growing on it already!! And they already have a rampant grell and sabercat problem?! And a giant spider problem?!?
In five years?!?!?
But, ahem. Yeah, this whole fifteen years thing feels like it should have been fifty. There’s just way too much development for such a short time by what was supposed to be one expeditionary force.
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I thought the exact same thing. All that lumber and massive quarried stone was built that fast by a military expedition. And you can’t even chalk it up to magic, because almost all of their mages died.
Undoubtedly they are supposed to have been down there for far, far longer, but something changed in the planning and it got rolled back to recent history.
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Add to that the whole “we’ve been cut off from our earthen trading partners for a while now” thing.
People, you haven’t even been there for a while now. They talk about their trade deal like they’ve been old pals of the earthen, but their whole trade agreement barely made it out of puberty and they’re already desperate for new partners.
In fifteen years, they made a whole entire mini-nation underground, made pals with the not-all-about-that-with-strangers earthen enough to have a whole trade route, built a small force of airships, and built the in-game largest church building with pre-built weathering. All with one mage who never learned the Teleport: Arathi Empire spell.
I’m guessing this was originally going to be the Arathi Empire, but the devs changed their mind and hastily threw the fifteen year number in for reasons.
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It may line up neatly for when the sunwell was reignited as part light part arcane (like their sacred flame), which perhaps was part of why the emperor had his vision.
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Also, where are all the stone quarries and large scale tree cutting operations? Stuff like that scars the land permantely and yet we see zero evidence of such an operation anywhere on Khaz Algar.
Also, nobody bothered to ask why the Arathi, a small military force mind you, would need that much stone and wood? And what it was being used for?
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It’s likely that they wrote the length of time of the Arathi being in Hallowfall around Faerin Lothar so that she would be around the same age as Anduin and still have been someone who arrived with the Arathi expedition.
Blizzard has never been particularly realistic with structure scale versus time it was built in general, like the garrisons in WoD alone would probably take years to build in real life yet they’re built instantly in-game and the story of WoD is probably canonically contained within a timeframe shorter than the realistic timeframe required to build just the garrisons, and then there are all those other fortified structures like the ones in Ashran which logically would require more time to build.
On top of everything else, in WoD we’re literally building massive ships and submarines within days when in real life they would take between several months to literal YEARS to fully construct, depending on various factors. Construction workers in the Warcraft universe certainly know how to work fast and efficiently. 
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I can normally chalk a lot of that up to mAgIc oOoooOO! But in this case, the Arathi storyline went out of its way to kill the mages off.
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Maybe they have peasants building in Warcraft times.
Yeah, I kept waiting for someone to tell them they were transported 2500 years into the future…
I think it eould have made sense for Hallowfall to have been established hundreds of years ago. Faerin could have just been born in Hallowfall. Her injuries could have still involved a stowaway situation, like a childhood dare. (Also, Faerin being a Lothar is just dumb to me. The name drop just felt like a prop.)
Making Hallowfall older would also make the culture aspect easier to swallow.
Like, it’s been pointed out in other threads that there’s some odd dissonance on how Xenophobic the Arathi are supposed to be. It’s occasionally suggested that the empire is extremely Xenophobic and the Hallowfall Arathi are only accepting our presence out of desperation, but 99% of the dialogue in the expansion doesn’t convey that at all. They all seem totally fine.
If Hallowfall was a few generations old and the people there had coexisted alongside the Earthen, Kobolds, and pre-void Nerubians all that time, it would be easier to pitch the idea that they had mellowed out.
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Ok oddly, I had this feeling that the Arathi must have had a longer trading connection with the Earthen, because of apparently all the foreign crops and plants they managed to bring into Hallowfall, and is now propagating throughout Hallowfall in the wild, yet they themselves are surprised by some of the stuff out there, like taro, carrots or onions weren’t even in their original inventory in the ships so they have no idea how the crops even got there?
Like tinfoil hat, an explanation could be there were other expeditions over time, that fell into the same…hole? And maybe there were even more ancient expeditions? Though they definitely do not say anything like that. I just think that makes more sense to explain older buildings being used, and the accumulation of more and more building materials from the ships that fell into Hallowfall.
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