Here, I am referring to the Dragonflight Legacies: Chapter Three , which was the animated short released in November of 2022 involving Nozdormu and Emberthal…where Nozdormu could not do any time traveling to a specific event so in some non-specified way, he was going to check what Emberthal remembered. And then Emberthal describes her memory with an image of what seems very similar to Raszageth attacking something that looks like Neltharion. And then the thing that looks like Neltharion had some kind of angry reaction and void powers took away the enemy which looked like Raszageth.
Now, that short came out long before we ever knew there was going to be an Aberrus Raid. And I will admit, back when I originally watched that short I did not voice enough skepticism to raise my hand and say “wait, memory?” Because those are the most unreliable of all. So probably the very common interpretation of that animated short was us thinking “yeah…okay, I guess that is Neltharion, and we know he worked with Old Gods in cataclysm, so maybe this is an origin of that?” But we were also very early to the Dragonflight expansion speculation and therefore were in a wait and see mode.
But now that we cleared the Aberrus Raid and any associated story campaigns with it…should we all abandon that initial interpretation and change the context based on what we know now? Specifically, if that is only a memory of Emberthal, couldn’t that thing which looked like Neltharion just be the Faceless One that we found and defeated in Aberrus all along? Consequently, could it have been the Faceless One pretending to be Neltharion who created the Dracthyr and then imprisoned the Dracthyr when his glove couldn’t control them as he wanted? Since we have never seen or been told that the Deathwing we know from Cataclysm ever pulled somebody into a Void Portal…should we see it as more likely that it was the Faceless One impostor?
Well the recorded messages Neltharion did have Neltharion say he had to bury his beloved laboratory Aberrus underground due to something terrifying so…
…The Faceless One could as you have suggested created the Dracthyr, discarded them after beating Raszageth then when Neltharion discovered the Faceless One’s presence via overhearing Malygos congratulating him on sealing away the Dracthyr on his request(despite Neltharion not knowing what Malygos was talking about until he investigated Aberrus) decided to seal it away in Zaralek Cavern where Aberrus was locking away all 3 entrances!
The Faceless of course perfects the Armor for Deathwing and eventually has it sent to Deepholm because who are we kidding? There is no way a cave-in is going to stop a Faceless One from leaving Zaralek Cavern! It’s just going to portal out of there and get back to whatever it was doing(which includes getting Neltharion to create the Dragon Soul while whispering from the shadows)! All Neltharion did was make the imposter’s manipulations more hidden!
Of course the Imposter didn’t even try to disguise itself properly when we came to Aberrus as it grabbed Nefarian’s Sword(which was already swiped from the Players once before and given back to Nefarian) and reforged it into Ashkandur despite it being a Greatsword of Lothar in otherwords something younger than a Hologram of Neltharion should be!
The Faceless One only succeeded in fooling people because they were less intelligent than it was!
It created the Dracthyr only to lose control over them and created the Slitherdragons only to lose control over them! Good at creating yes but bad at controlling it’s creations too! The Faceless One relies on sheer ignorance to get by! Too bad for him we killed it!
The book also covers this point, and it was for sure Neltharion’s first time using the power of the Void. He was forced to do so a second time to defeat Iridikron, as his Earthwarder powers were insufficient to defeat the primal aspect of earth.
What evidence do we have that Neltharion ever made such recordings? As it stands, those would be consistent as just more fake messages by the Faceless impostor.
There is no evidence that any armor talked about by Zskarn was ever any armor ever used by Deathwing. If the Faceless One was acting as an impostor with the image of Neltharion and voice of Neltharion and all the earth magic powers of Neltharion that we saw during the faceless one boss fight… then every single thing spoken out loud by Zskarn can be about the fake, never about the real Deathwing locked out of the dragon isles for more than 10,000 years.
Nah… I mean canon info. The lore in the game.