Lore dictates that when a demon die, their soul gets sent to the twisting nether, where over time said demon will be reborn again.
It was also known that the legion used Argus’ soul to speed up that process and also anchor demon souls to Argus so they would reform there and be ready for action any time soon.
My question is, do we actually see this happening? The only demon resurrection I recall we seeing as it happens is Mannoroth in HFC, but that seems to be an unique exception since Gul’dan forced him back to his corpse.
I’m really curious about this because I want to illustrate this event happening, but I’m not sure exactly how it happens, do they just spawn in Argus randomly, is there incubation chambers or something? Is their body always the same?
The rules of a demon’s death and incarnation has been wildly inconsistent in Warcraft.
We saw AU Gul’dan resurrecting Mannoroth from the skeletal remains, which seems really odd.
As for what happens? Who knows. Probably just a ball of fel energy and they slowly take form. Since they are reborn on other worlds, seems they are related to elementals, but that’s probably just a coincidence.
My recollection isn’t great but I think demons tend to just ‘materialize’ back into being rather than being in stasis or anything like that. It’s been pretty inconsistent AFAIK.
The same can be said about whether or not they have the same body. For the most part, I want to say ‘yes’, but some demons who die are severely punished for their failures by Sargeras before resurrecting which can cause them to become deformed or potentially have their form changed (Goroth for example).
We also know that Warlocks love stuffing souls back into things, so I don’t think it would be outside the realm of possibility that there’s some body swapping shenanigans going on as well.
BC era Ogrilla questing actually touches on this in Outland. Demons we kill on Outland which rides the Twisting Nether winds still has demons resurrecting and returning. Fully formed and right back to work. After very short periods. I suppose with later lore it could be they were resurrected on Argus then sent back to Outland, but the original questing states they resurrected in the Twisting Nether and are able to reform their bodies and return.
Hellfire Citadel had Mannoroth be resurrected with fel necromancy to restore him maybe to avoid the lengthy wait of him fully reforming a new body? No reasons were given. I only suspect that greater demons take a long time to come back fully formed. Meaning the wait is longer, but then why Argus? Idk.
We have no idea. We only see parts of Argus and not the place where the demons are expeditiously reborn area. Only that their souls go to Argus to be resurrected instead of the normal process in the Twisting Nether. Now that the Death Titan is dead. They have to do it the natural way, but while Argus existed surely there must of been an area where they were housed and reformed artificially. I’ve no idea and we can only guess.
Sans Argus the process is exceedingly slow and where in the Nether a demon finds themselves is random. It seems like they sort of just… rematerialize in a slow and panful fashion ala Doctor Manhattan.
We had Kruul reborn in Outland (so technically within the Nether) in the tank Mage Tower quest line, but like HFC Mannoroth, his regeneration was being expedited by servants of the Legion (plus he seemed to have been specifically called there to do it) so it wasn’t necessarily representative of how long it normally takes in Antorus or how long it would take to occur naturally.
Plus the weird inconsistent rates at which Time flows in the Nether further complicates any effort to attach a reliable duration. The amount of time that passes for the demon may be quite different from how much passes elsewhere in the Twisting Nether, both could vary significantly from how much time passes in the Great Dark, and every regeneration - both between different demons and for the same demon on separate occasions - could be different across all three points of reference.
I hope all that “time flows differently” crap gets squashed. It was just a lazy handwave to brush off why nothing made sense. Turalyon is not 1000 years old. They tried it with the Shadowlands too. Timeless zone. But they literally have a history of a light incursion, an anima drought, the Primus disappearing.
You can try to explain it all you want, but that doesn’t make it any less lame. 1000 years fighting the Legion and accomplished literally nothing. The Burning Legion aren’t even that big of a threat.
It made sense with the Twisting Nether because how long it took for things to happen in the Great Dark didn’t have to affect how long things took there. It explicitly didn’t make sense with the Shadowlands because the whole place operates on the premise of when people are dying in the living world and crossing over. Time should be very important to the Shadowlands because its entire reason for existing is contingent upon the Time arriving when each person dies and their soul crosses the Veil.
My personal opinion, demons are souls, those souls go to the nether and gather mass from the nether. Argus’ power accelerates their ability to draw matter from the twisted nether to form their new bodies.