So the problem with messing around is, eventually, you’re gonna find out.
I made a dumb bet that I could do something solo, and do it faster, than a friend with their Mythic+ geared character. I succeeded, but forgot this friend is a Rules Lawyer and I had fallen into her trap, because I have a 2-piece set for the current Shaman Tier, which summons a lightning wolf when you cast Primordial Wave, which is a big part of my DPS rotation.
I technically did not do the thing solo, because I had this wolf out. And so technically I lost the bet.
In her mercy, I don’t have to run around for a week naked, but I do have to go shirtless for a week, and in change for not having to save Azeroth in my tighty-whiteys, I have to do a thread about the Nerubians, the Spider-Elves of the Broken Isles, and the possible link between the two and the Spider-People they’re teasing for the next expansion, The War Within.
Pardon my nips, and here we go.
Now, let’s tackle the weirdest part of this, the Fal’Dorei.
The Not-Driders of WoW
The Fal'Dorei are one of the oddest things in WoW because they're yet another mutation of the Troll family tree, Troll>Elf>Fal'dorei, but because they're visibly non-mammalian. Fal'dorei don't just look like they're half-spider, they *are* half-spider, and horrifyingly enough, their origins may indeed be the good old fashioned body-horror nightmare of the Brundlefly scenario.The story goes back to an unknown period during the 10,000 years between the Sundering and modern WoW, when a large group of Shal’dorei who had been exiled from Suramar settled in the Falannar ruins and one of the Valewalkers, a group of proto-druids that predated Malfurion incidentally, took pity on the refugees and gave them an Arcan’dor Tree to sustain them and free them from their addiction to the Nightwell, instead tying them to the ley-lines of Azeroth itself.
Unfortunately, during this point in time, Valewalker Farodin was one of the last of his order and lacked the ability to gain access to the required components to fully balance the Arcan’dor and prevent it from collapsing, although his comments also point to treachery from the Falannar refugees who may have encouraged the destabilisation of the tree to fuel their magical powers, not realising the tree needed perfect harmony of the two powers it drew from during its final stages of life to reach full maturity and stability. During this time, this Arcan’dor tree exploded and became super-charged arcane crystals as the arcane within the tree overwhelmed and consumed the nature magic, turning the tree mid-explosion into solidified, crystalized arcane energy that was still connected to the ley-lines. This would both sustain and contain the Fal’dorei, since the Falannar Arcan’dor had never matured and produced any fruit, and thus the Falannar Shal’dorei or Fal’dorei as they became, were still completely addicted to the energies of the Nightwell, and thus required constant ‘feedings’ to sustain both their sense of self and the mental capacity, but it would also radiate enough energy through-out the ruins and tunnels of Falannar to allow the mutated Elves to develop their own society and successive generations to continue that society.
What’s worse is that there is a theory that, just like the Shal’aran Arcan’dor tree that the Heroes of the Alliance and Horde became unstable due to the parasitic moths that are drawn to the young Tree and begin destabilizing the tree with their feeding. Players are sent to gather Mana Wyrms from the Suramar vineyards to correct the issue, but as a Kaldorei, Valwalker Farodin could not penetrate the barrier around Suramar and would not have had access to Mana Wyrms, so he would have gone to the next best solution to naturally deal with the pest issue.
Spiders.
Spiders who would also have become saturated in the heady mixture of arcane and nature energies within the Arcan’dor tree, and would would have spun webs between the branches and leaves to catch the moths and other parasites, creating new connections around the Arcan’dor and further destabilizing the process since the growth process demands absolute harmony, and from what we see of the Shal’aran Arcan’dor tree, it is perfectly symmetrical from all angles. Each strand of web altered that symmetry, and acted as a tiny conduit for energy to flow in directions never intended.
So eventually, the Falannar Arcan’dor exploded outwards, washing the entire Falannar ruins in corrupted Wild Magic (interesting that this is one of the few incidents where we’re told outright this was ‘wild’ magic, and like what we see in the Dragon Isles and Northrend, it results in crystalized arcane phenomena and heavy mutated life-forms) and fusing the surviving Falannar refugees and the spiders who had absorbed so much energy from the Arcan’dor into a singular species.
Horrifyingly, the Fal’dorei are both highly intelligent, able to use arcane, void and fel energies with their spellwork, and savagely brutal, lashing out with feral cunning with their mutated limbs to slay foes too dangerous to web up and drain for arcane energies to fortify their own minds, and then devour the flesh to sustain their physical bulk. By the time the Fal’dorei were encountered, they had become their own society and planned to use the Arcan’dor seed they stole from the Players and Farodin as a portable version of their tree to invade and conquer the surface world, in an attempt to claim territory (their numbers were expanding beyond the limitations of the Falannar ruins ability to house) food (they’d nearly stripped the surrounding area bare of life, leaving only a few Withered, Suramar refugees and small vermin in the process) and access to magic (access to the Nightwell and following the leylines would allow the Fal’dorei to expand their nascent empire across the length and breadth of Azeroth, IF they could have access to enough food to sustain their numbers).
Post Legion expansion, we don’t know what happened to the Fal’dorei, since we killed their Queen and their ‘Alpha’, meaning the two leaders of their race have been unmercifully slaughtered and their tunnels and caverns ravaged by loot-crazed murder-hobos. With the Nightwell’s energies expended, the leylines around Suramar are significantly weakened and with only the one Arcan’dor tree known to exist, the Fal’dorei are in a tight spot.
No resources, dwindling access to the magic they require to sustain their intelligence and sense of self, few food sources to access that don’t result in overwhelming violence in retaliation, and with many of their secondary leaders signing on with the Legion and getting murked as a result, there’s a high likelihood that the Fal’dorei are on the slow slide to extinction.
But we know that Xal’atath enjoys collecting desperate servants because they’ll fight all the harder and thus will be left all the more gutted when she eventually abandons them. And we now know there’s more Nerubian civilisations than just the massive empire in Northrend. We encountered a secondary Empire fleeing Northrend and the Scourge during the Island Expeditions content of the Battle for Azeroth expansion, and in the War Within, there’s a third Empire of Nerubians, ones who are willing to sign on with the Old Gods yet again, just off the coast of Pandaria, apparently.
Given that the Fal’dorei were resilient enough to use Arcane, Fel and Void magic, and were even capable of surviving direct Fel infusion with their intellect and sense of self intact, they’d be a potent, if disposable, force for The Harbringer to recruit, and given we thwarted their plans and doomed them to extinction, its highly likely they’d like to take a second swing at us with some powerful allies at their back and a sizeable chunk of power to feed off in the bargain. We might actually see Xal’atath using them to further hybridize with the Nerubians, considering the Spider-People we see in the promotional art for the War Within …
Time for the Neruwubians!
Spider-Bug, Spider-bug, eats your face off and don't give a (Redacted)
The Nerubians have long been a fan-favourite race amongst the WoW players, both as enemy combatants and potential allies, given their alien origins and mindset, and their innate hostility to both the Scourge and the Old Gods.And yet, we see that even the Nerubians are not immune to the lure of the Void. The Harbringer has seduced or corrupted a large colony/Empire of Nerubians just off the coast of Pandaria that are now assisting the Harbringer and her other allies in trying some new devilry on behalf of the Void. If this colony is indeed separate from the Northrend Empire, with its own distinct culture and possibly religion. We know the Nerubians of Northrend eschewed all forms of religion when they broke free of the Old Gods, it could be these Nerubians of the south refused to rescind their faith in the Old Gods and were driven away as a result of losing the civil war. We also have met Nerubians who fled all the way to the Thousand Isles via underground tunnels, and that’s after the Cataclysm, which caused a lot of tectonic activity and probably closed off a lot of the old tunnels and opened up more to the crushing pressure from the bottom of the ocean.
Its entirely possible that the Nerubians are happy to completely avoid the Old Gods, but not the Void itself. If The Harbringer is as capable and intelligent as we think, her ultimate goal was always freeing herself from the dagger she was imprisoned in, not reviving the Black Empire or serving the Old Gods. To us, she’s a treacherous entity that has betrayed and misled us all at every turn, but to the Nerubians, she might be a long-lost and cherished ally who was cruelly betrayed and imprisoned by the Old Gods. Interesting, she might even be the reason that the Nerubians cut themselves off from the Old Gods, seeing their betrayal of Xal’atath as proof that no matter how loyal they were, no matter how diligently they worked or how brutally they fought, they were all disposable pawns, toys to be used, broken and replaced by the uncaring Old Gods as they brawled with each other and everything else on the planet for the right to consume and fuse with the World Soul of Azeroth.
Its going to be very interesting to see how this Nerubian Empire plays out. Are they exiles from Northrend, ‘heretics’ who refused to give up the Old Gods or those who were cast out for joining with Xal’atath, or are they an active detachment from Northrend, sent with the blessings of their brethren in Northrend to aid and assist Xal’atath directly in her mission? And how does this intersect with both the Fal’dorei and the Humanoid ‘Nerubians’ that were displayed in the War Within?
New Nerubians, or Goldshire has a lot to answer for!
Something to notice is that these new Nerubians, Neruwubians as we like to call them, is that they are very fleshy compared to their Northrend cousins, although if this is due to 10,000 years of separation and exposure to different ecological pressures and magical energies, or if its the side-effect of Xal’atath’s alchemical ‘gifts’ that is causing extremely fast evolution amongst their kind is yet to be known.
The fact that this ‘evolution’ is making them look more Elf-like is rather concerning, since exposure to the ‘waters’ of the Well of Eternity, Titan blood from Azeroth’s world-soul, turned Cave Trolls into the Kaldorei, and we were never given an exact time-frame of how long this took, nor can we discount this was a supposedly random and unguided event, yet Xal’atath is ancient, far more knowledgeable about the uses of a World Soul’s blood than we are, and has the wisdom of the Void backing her up without the cackling EVERYTHINGEVERYWHEREALLATONCE issue that the Old Gods called a perk rather than a bug. She might be able to force a similar evolution in a matter of months instead of decades or years, and without horrendous loss of life either.
The Fal’dorei may play a part in this as being part Elf and part Spider, and either be the unwilling ‘source’ of the ingredients Xal’atath is using to mutate the Nerubians, or has taken the leaderless and mentally degrading Fal’dorei and brought them to the Nerubians to be inducted into the Empire as a new ‘caste’ within their society, feeding them magic and re-indoctrinating them as willing servants of the Nerubians, possibly even fusing Nerubians and Fal’Dorei together to create the ‘evolved’ Nerubians we’re supposedly going to be having very aggressive Meet’n’Greets with in the War Within expansion.
If I had to guess what the goal of this is, I’d argue that exposure to and mutation by a World Soul’s blood also renders a connection between the World Soul and the mutated individuals, and since Xal’atath is a servant of the Void, their ‘Herald’ after all, connecting a race whose biology stems from servants of the Void, the Aqir and their descendants, the Nerubians, and then making a second connection through mutating them again with exposure to Azerite-infused alchemical concoctions, could enable the Void to directly begin ‘speaking to’ or ‘influencing’ the slumbering and wounded World Soul’s consciousness, creating a group, gestalt and artificial version of Magni’s role as the ‘Speaker of Azeroth’.
What are your thoughts?
