So a rogue thought hit me while I was running around Dornogal and other Earthen towns with my Demon Huntard, using spectral sight on everything and noticing that, in Gundagarz, there’s a Warlock/Demon Hunter only quest to hunt down a rogue Demon that has been preying upon Earthen in the region.
Why would a Demon bother with hunting Earthen, when they could just run and get away?
Demons need Fel energy to function. Its not just the source of their magic, it is their very life force. A demon without Fel energy is a dead demon.
So why hunt Earthen? The Demon would have to know that the Legion is defeated by now, even after being trapped within the Violet Hold, they’d have to know they stand no chance against the Mortals without a base of operation, a cult to feed them information, souls and meat-shields, or even the backing of the Legion itself.
It isn’t out-of-bounds to think the Demon went insane while trapped in the Violet Hold, or when it was free, was able to reach out to the Nether and feel the gaping, burning hole here Sargeras used to be, but I think it comes down to one of two options.
- Demons are all addicts
To a point, all Demons who were or are a part of the Legion were infected with Entropic magic that Sargeras used to both force compliance to his orders, and to ensure no Legion Demon could simply leave without consequences. The ‘drug’ in this case is Arcane energy, and as a Titan, and with the bound essence of Argus, that was plentiful stockpiles of Arcane Energy to feed the addiction and keep his army both loyal and leashed.
The Earthen of Dornogal are unique in that their memories and personalities are contained within a large, melon-sized gemstone within their bodies called a ‘Memory Gem’ or ‘Memory Crystal’, a Titanic invention that can be connected to the Archives, download the Earthen’s memories and personality, and then be refilled with mission-essential memories. It also holds the Earthen’s vitality and life-force.
If we consider this a fundamentally arcane invention, then the Demon, trapped within the Violet Hold, surrounded by the Arcane but unable to feed its addiction, would have immediately started hunting down whatever ‘pure’ arcane sources it could find, discreetly, and the best hunting grounds for this would of course be the Ringing Deeps, and the Earthen there, who toil beneath the stony boot of the High Speaker who is already uninterested in protecting or following up on issues plaguing his work-force due to his own ego.
Sating the addiction gives the Demon time to put her thoughts in order and plan her escape, since there’s no easy way out of the Ringing Deeps without running into more active Earthen, Dalaran survivors, or most damning of all, Player Characters, and the reason we find her so early on is because she still hasn’t consumed enough of this ‘pure’ Arcane Energy that empowers the Earthen to overcome the afflictions her addiction has forced on her.
- The Fel must have fuel
The Fel is arguably the most destructive and offensively-orientated of the Primal Powers, but its one fundamental flaw is that the Fel must always consume to make more of itself. The Arcane, the Light, the Void, Life and Death all seem to be self-sustaining, but top themselves up with Anima parceled out from the Shadowlands as part of some sort of trade-agreement or peace treaty between the Primal Powers.
(And interestingly, the original color of the Fel might be RED, not Green, as the Green seems to come from the entropic magic that Sargeras used to take control of the Demons via addiction, as we see in the Warlock Green Fire questline, and the fact that Argus was red before he turned back to Blue during his transformation from World Soul to Titan. And one of the big rivers of Anima heading out of the Shadowlands heads to a red area, not a green one, and there’s no Primal Power that we’ve met who is red. Light is Gold, Void is Black, Arcane is Purple, Life is Bright Green, and Death in most of the forms we see it, is Black and Dark Green.)
Regardless, it seems like the Earthen are ensouled in some form or fashion despite what the Titans intended for them, being made from the very matter of Azeroth itself and empowered by Arcane energies culled from the planet itself, if the Leylines are natural features of Azeroth, or infected by Azeroth’s energies, if the Leylines are an artificial construct created by the Titans to feed their facilities that control the Mantle Super-Structure.
And that means they’re not just a tasty morsel of nose-candy for the Demon to sate their addiction on, they’re food. Fuel for the Fel, soul-matter, anima that can be immediately burned up and turned into the purest, hottest burning version of Fel to give the Demon in question an immense power boost, possibly enough to eventually return to the Twisting Nether directly and escape these Mortals, and come back with a reprisal force later on.
And either way, this ties in interestingly to something I found in Dornogal, in the southern section of the Stoneshaper’s Atrium. Windle and Jaxi Sparkshine, with a Earthen book on what appears to be an Earthen book open, and a holographic image of their dead daughter, Kinndy Sparkshine, over an Earthen light-crystal of some kind.
And the open pages of the book displays what looks like a midway point between the First One Gates we use to escape the Maw, and the emblems on the Earthen’s Memory Storage devices used to contain and hold the Memory Gems of fallen Earthen.
Are the Sparkshines trying to find a way to use Earthen/Titan Tech to reach out to the Shadowlands, either to talk to their daughter … or try to bring her back?
If an Earthen Memory Gem can be used to hold a soul, similar to how a Warlock’s Soul Gem can contain the mind and soul of its caster, or target, and be used to revive the target/caster after their corporeal forms receive otherwise fatal damage, then is it possible for the Awakening Machine to funnel a Soul into a Memory Gem, and then revive it in either an Earthen Form, or with some tinkering, some other form of Titan-forged creation?
Is this how we’re going to ‘save’ the Forsaken from their inevitable decay?
Forsaken, as they are, might not be able to inhabit living bodies, because of the effects of the Scourge Magic/Domination Magic that forged them into Undead, with most of them missing chunks of their Souls due to the Jailer’s influence in raising them to serve his puppets’ as fodder-troops and brute labour. But if they can study the process, and combine it with what they know of a Lich’s phylactery, a Warlock’s Soul Gem, and what they’ve learned from the Shadowlands, it might be possible for the Forsaken to start to seal their souls into Memory Gems of their own creation, and forge new bodies using alchemy, science and magic, effectively stabilising their population and ensuring they won’t need to harvest the dead or the living for spare parts to keep themselves shuffling along.
Forsaken might find themselves in new bodies, made of muscle and bone, sinew and blood, but not of Humanoid origin. Cattle, pigs, other forms of livestock, the mushrooms of the Plaguelands, alchemically grown organs or reagents, all shaped and forged by alchemy and magic and assembled through science and medical knowledge into a new form that will last for decades, not quite alive but certainly not dead, something that maintains a faint echo of the restorative and self-repairing functions of a living body, but due to the nature of the soul that inhabits it and the magic that binds it together, will slowly and inevitably fail.
Or maybe they can use the knowledge to duplicate the process that Sylvanas and Nathanos used and become pseudo-living entities, creating a new ‘Allied Race’ of sorts, which again might allow them to reproduce naturally, or failing that, encourage a lot of Scourge Undead to swear allegiance, or be made to by the Death Knights of Archerus, because the process also returns the mind of the Undead to some semblance of ‘Humanity’, and cuts off any lingering connection to the Scourge Hive-Mind.
Willing ‘living’ donors provide blood, muscle and other samples, the Forsaken apothecaries create clones using what they have learned and we’ve seen the Titanic facilities can create biological life on command, BRANN IS RUNNING AROUND WITH A DAMN BIO-PRINTER NO LESS, and the process of creating living vessels that can be used to duplicate the process that turned Nathanos from a generic zombie-man into the greasy simp in the sweet drip we ran around with in the Battle for Azeroth. Bang.
The Forsaken endure, they might even start to replenish their numbers with people who seek to escape death, or seek to extend their lives, as well as Scourge who seek to escape the torment they endure under the Warlords who rose up after the Lich King’s defeat and the destruction of the Helm of Domination, and they become a force to be reckoned with again without needing to rely so heavily upon planet-threatening super-weapons like the Blight to do so.
Or do I just need to be forcibly rolled on the grass again?