So a rogue thought hit me as I was doing my weekly run of older content for mounts, mogs and money.
The Kaldorei are often depicted as ‘Feral’ Elves, enlarged incisors, sharp nails bordering on talons, very hairy (stop it), but that’s post-Sundering, when they went back on their civilisation and re-embraced the Wilds like their Dark Troll ancestors, including a short-sighted rejection of the Arcane as the root of all evils.
But something I noticed, from Kaldorei ruins that pre-date the Sundering by centuries, if not thousands of years.
Elune is often depicted with talons, not fingernails. Azshara in most of her modern, official artwork is depicted with long, sharp nails, and in the statues of her in the Nazjatar zone also depict her Kaldorei form as having talons.
We can see the Elune States in the Cathedral of Night Dungeon, the Nighthold Raid and the Tomb of Sargeras Raid all depict Elune with taloned fingers. Azshara in her Warbringers Cinematic had taloned fingers before she became the first Naga.
State of Elune in the Tomb of Sargeras Raid https://i.imgur.com/6Y4pjG3.png
Screenshot of Azshara in the Warbringers Cinematic https://i.imgur.com/iaVdiVg.jpg
And we just met the Harronir, who seem to be agents of Life and are skulking around Titanic sites of power to preserve certain elements and keep watch over both the Void and the Arcane. And we know that Dark Trolls mysteriously came to the surface, following a ‘vision’.
Or perhaps a Radiant Song?
We know that Harronir face immense censure for communicating with others, or even revealing their existence. We know the Trolls pre-date both the Ordering of Azeroth under the Titans, and the existence of the Black Empire itself, that their species is innately capable of adapting to new environments within a handful of generations, and that they are extremely mutable when exposed to certain forms of energy, a trait they seemingly passed down to their off-shoots, the Elves.
I have a theory about why the Kaldorei thought that the White Moon/Elune was trapped in the Well of Eternity, and why Azshara was worshipped as a near demi-God in her own right, but lacked the clout to overshadow the Priesthood of Elune, and seemed to be the central force behind the contempt and xenophobia of the ancient Kaldorei Empire.
We know Azshara sneered down her nose at those without power, and considered herself the pinnacle of the very world, even the most perfect representation of the Kaldorei people, but we’re never introduced to her family, or how her family became the ‘Royal’ family of the Kaldorei Empire.
The theory is that the Dark Troll Tribes that would become the Kaldorei were followers of an exiled Harronir, or a Harronir on a mission to remove a hostile force from around the Well of Eternity, and given just how important, and dangerous, to the World Soul that the Well of Eternity was, why was it not guarded by Titanic Constructs and Watchers? Why would they just allow Trolls to settle around the boundaries of the Well?
So 15,000 - 13,000 years ago, these Dark Trolls settled around the well and began to mutate into Kaldorei … and the Harronir are natural shape-changers. They also appear to be either related to or the ancestors of the Trolls, having arrived sometime before currently recorded history after Amun’thul had his manbaby hissy-fit and ripped G’Hanir out of the planet rather than risk ‘Chaos’ being present in his ‘perfect Order’, and Eonar quietly commanded some unnamed forces to guard the still-living roots of the Mother-Tree, deep beneath the earth and beyond the sight of the High Father of the Titanic Pantheon.
That puts the Harronir at being on Azeroth for over 150,000 thousand years. Possibly even older, if they predated the Black Empire and were recruited by Eonar to guard and protect the roots, and if they are indeed the progenitors of the Trolls, as the Trolls are progenitors of the Elves, then that same mutability and adaptive trait would have allowed them to become infused with both the Life energy within the Roots of G’Hanir (and possibly the origin of their racial name, the Harronir, or Children of G’Hanir?) and the arcane energies within Eonar’s tears, that formed the underground sea we find in Hallowfall and the surrounding cave systems.
What if the reason that Azshara’s bloodline were the ‘Imperial’ Bloodline, and her disdain for ‘Elune’ and non-Kaldorei, as well as her absurd sorcerous power compared to the rest of her kind, is that Azshara is half Harronir.
It would explain why her Naga form was so much more extra than the rest of her kind but not crippled by the random and chaotic mutations that plagued the Naga due to their proximity to the sunken remains of the Well of Eternity.
It would explain why she had so much magical power that even Mannoroth the Destroyer took one look at her and decided he did not want that smoke, and this was the Lord of all Pit Fiends, and who feared only three other entities before this point, those being Archimonde, Kil’jaden and Sargeras himself.
It would explain why N’Zoth agreed to her demands despite having Azshara over a barrel with the Well of Eternity crashing down on her in a very literal fashion, and was so hellbent on keeping her as his agent despite knowing she was going to stab him in the back as soon as she could with the one weapon that might cause him to lose against us.
Azshara is a Chosen One, the same as Illidan, the same as Malfurion, an entity with Harronir blood, marked by talons and large incisors even before the Sundering, and a marked tolerance for infusion of magical energies, as well as the ability to contain and absorb massive quantities of those magical energies.
This is almost linebreeding in a sense, wherein the most potent members of the descendant race(s) intermingle with their primordial ancestors, in this case Trolls having relations with the Harronir, creating something stronger than both when it comes to magical potential and power.
I have another theory that most of the ‘historically important’ families in history are all, in some form or fashion, related to rogue agents of the Primal Powers, or servants with split agendas. I’ve theorized that the bloodline of Thoradin might trace their ancestry to not just Vrykul, but of Ironaya, who was a Giant, but not a Vrykul or a Titan Watcher/Keeper. Whom had a stone body when we fought her in the original version of Uldaman, wherein she entered a form of stasis, mentally interacting with the archives of the Titanic facility. Apparently her body was slain, but much like Archaedas who is officially ‘in stasis lock’ following his defeat, she’s not ‘officially’ dead, with both her body and that of the Keeper disappearing mysteriously, and we still don’t know exactly what purpose the Facility at Uldaman served in the Manifold.
Ironaya was apparently responsible for building the tomb to house Tyr’s shattered form and the dormant remains of the Old God servant whom he had killed at the cost of his own life. She would have been exposed to the Curse of Flesh after working alongside the Vrykul that joined Tyr and Archaedas’s rebellion against the False Prime Designate, Loken, but her form was still stone.
I theorize, given her role as the Guardian and overseer of Uldaman, it is likely that was not Ironaya’s true body we destroyed, but rather a proxy or avatar, and it is likely that Ironaya was afflicted with the Curse of Flesh during the time after Tyr’s death, as she would have needed to work closely with the Giant-kin to build the tomb, and most of these Vrykul had, at this point, completely succumbed to the Curse of Flesh, which was highly infectious at this period of time.
Whether she reproduced naturally or somehow imbued a strain of Vrykul with her essence to create a smarter, more viable strain of Humanity, I theorize that the line of Thoradin wasn’t purely Vrykul in origin given their progenitor’s intelligence and political skill considering the technological prowess and cultural level of the species at the time. This was, even by WoW standards, an unnatural jump in their baseline and was likely the result of meddling.
We also know the Light only ever made contact with Humanity after they learned to wield the arcane via the High Elves and dominated the northern half of the Eastern Kingdoms after driving the native troll populations into hiding after nearly eradicating the Forest Troll Tribes that were still hanging on in the region.
What if that becomes the twist in the tail of this tale? That the big heroes we’ve met are the WoW version of the Nephalim, with ancestral ties to these great and terrible powers that have unlocked their latent potential, hence why the Thoradin line was so revered, why Azshara was so powerful yet despised the very Goddess to whom her empire had devoted itself to, why Thrall was able to connect with the Elements of Draenor despite being from a different timeline and being unable to ‘speak’ to them normally, and why he was able to wield the Demonsoul without corruption or damage like any other character did, why certain Gnomes seem to be so innately more intelligent than even their culture would produce, etc etc etc.
Its not just that they’re the best of their people, they are something more, and just like the fractal patterns we heard of in Zerith Mortis and the Shadowlands, that the interplay between these Primal Powers is what creates and sustains the very setting itself, their existence is both reflections of, and variations of, the same alliances and conflicts that created the setting of WoW.
If Time really is a ‘flat circle’ as we learned in the Draenor expansion, and then in Legion expansion, everything we do is a distortion and a variation of what has already happened, it is a new ‘fractal’ of the Pattern that underpins and creates the very cosmos itself, but because of our connection to the World Soul, our ‘fractal’ is dominant and seems to be affecting the whole cosmos far beyond what we should be able to, as we’ve heard from Zovaal himself as well as several Titanic-level entities who seem at once both bemused and low-key horrified at how easily we’re able to take on threats several orders of magnitude above our weight-bracket.
But what are your thoughts?