So, this tickled into my mind while I had Accolon’s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAO8nCRmSIk&ab_channel=Doronsmovies playing in the background.
Blizzard may make pants-on-head decisions with their story at times, but there is connective tissue between them, even Shadowlands (although I will die, doing my best impression of the Black Knight of Monty Python fame, on the hill that its flimsy at best for that expansion!), and we’re told that The War Within, Midnight and The Last Titan will all be heavily interconnected, at least story-wise.
Something that has been bugging me is that you don’t just make a thing like Pandaria Re:Mix on a whim. And we’ve seen Chromie break the Sacred Timeline to save Nozdormu from becoming Murozond, which resulted in Xal’atath getting an empowered Dark Heart from Iridikron, and yet there’s no mention of the timeline splitting further. We even get a huge chunk of the Infinite Flight defect to and tentatively align with the Bronze Flight and work on a more ethical and less authoritarian take on guiding WoW’s temporal course into the future.
There may only be a small amount of ‘True’ Timelines, and only one ‘Sacred’ Timeline (ours), but there’s thousands of alternate timelines out there that are born, bloom and die because they deviate too far and are wiped out, because none of the Primal Powers seem to claim them or even show interest in them.
Nozdormu is letting the Infinites play around with Pandaria, one of the most tenuous moments in history no less, just so they can experiment with how far they can push the timeline to create a more compassionate timeline without causing temporal anomalies or time paradoxes.
If all the leaks and rumors are true, and we really are being set up to canonically lose at the end of The War Within, Midnight could instead send us back in time to the Black Empire to find Xal’atath and study the Black Empire, to understand what the world was like before both Old Gods and Titans alike showed up, and glean whatever knowledge we need to come back to our place in time and derail Xal’atath’s plan enough to deny her her vicoty and save the World Soul, but that could lead us to the final expansion of the trilogy, The Last Titan.
And most tellingly, Wrathion, after eating the heart of Lei Shen, who in turn tore out and absorbed the heart of Ra-Den, speakings in a voice not his own, saying :
WE HAVE FALLEN. WE MUST REBUILD THE FINAL TITAN. DO NOT FORGET.
And then he seemingly forgets everything he said, stunned and befuddled by the power he took into his body, in an ironic echo of why he gave us our Pandarian Cloaks, because our ‘Mortal’ frames could not survive an infusion of such power.
Who is the Last Titan? If its Azeroth, why would they need to ‘rebuild’ her if she’s been inside of Azeroth all along? Or are they rebuilding a lost member of the Pantheon we have never heard of, and they’re going to drain Azeroth dry to ‘restore’ this lost Titan? The Last Titan cannot be Sargeras, he’s one of the Older Titans in the Pantheon, and all the known Titans were revived and restored at the end of Legion, trapping Sargeras in the Seat of the Pantheon to behead and disrupt the Legion and stop the Burning Crusade dead in its tracks.
I have 3 theories:
- We will be going back in time in Midnight to various points in Azeroth’s history, courtesy of what the Infinites and Bronzes have learned during the Re:Mix event to ‘alter’ key points in history without diverting, splitting or distorting the timeline, to points where the World Soul was at its most vulnerable, it’s literal “Darkest Hours” aka Midnight, to help undo/restore whatever damage Xal’atath is going to inflict during The War Within expansion, creating a Stable Temporal Loop so we don’t end up with time paradoxes or anomalies that will disrupt and corrupt our Timeline, notable the creation of the Black Empire, the War between the Elemental Lords and the Old Gods, the War between the Old Gods and the Titans, the planting and destruction of G’hanir, so on and so forth.
Eventually this could lead us to some grand revelation of what the Titans are actually planning for Azeroth, possible involving a Titan ‘Civil War’ with the Pantheon split between Amun’thul and his die-hards, Eonar and her moderates, and possibly even Sargeras himself pitching in either to save reality from the Void, or just screwing with everyone because we derailed his plans, so turn about is fair play.
- Midnight will actually send us into the Great Dark Beyond, off of Azeroth and into space itself, to find the other World Souls, and will challenge our entire view of our ‘Gods’ and the cosmology itself, with revelations that Titans, Void Lords, the Eternals of the Shadow Lands, none of them are natural, but rather corruptions of the true rulers of creation, the World Souls themselves, and the First Ones were the original creations of these ‘True Gods’, and this treacherous group found a way to trick their masters into descending into the Material Plane and trapping them inside of planets, but the conspirators would fall out over who would lead in the power-vacuum as their masters were sealed way inside worlds, causing the original fight between the Light and the Void and trapping the First Ones either outside of reality itself, or shattered them entirely, creating the Naaru in the process, beings forever torn between Light and Void, trapped in a cylindrical hell of a life-cycle.
And the First Ones, before they shattered the universe, were been re-writing reality and history, carving up the weaker World Souls, butchering them to fit into an artificial system and into much weakened and distorted echoes of what they once could be, ie the Titans, Void Lords, Eternal Ones, etc etc. The reason why all the Primal Powers, Arcane, Fel, Void etc, can all do the same thing, just with varying degrees of success and ease, is because they’re all parts of the original whole, just splintered and distorted by the machinations of the First Ones, and there’s Six World Souls whose energies are constantly being drained to reset and reapply the First Ones’ vision, but when they vanished mysteriously, there was nothing to stop their facade from going rogue.
The Primal Powers didn’t know what they were because that would defeat the whole purpose, and the First Ones were so devious all traces of the ‘truth’ of reality was hidden, hence why we have wildly different cosmology maps between what the Titans give us in the Chronicles, and what the Eternals use, and they’re so arrogant, set in their ways and desperate to win this six-way war that’s been raging for billions of years that even if they have come to suspect the truth, they’re in too deep to stop now.
The Six World Souls that correspond to the six Zerith Installations are key to either resetting the situation, keeping our reality as is, flawed and broken as it is, breaking the cycle entirely and dooming all the Primal Powers and all layers of reality to an inevitable self-destruction, or possibly releasing the World Souls entirely, allowing these slumbering and entrapped ‘True Gods’ to re-establish their control and end the conflicts between the Primal Powers, averting destruction but leading us to The Last Titan, as the First Ones either react from where-ever they’ve hidden themselves, or their ‘fail safe’ kicks in, and an Artificial World Soul is used to create an all-powerful Titan that can rival, at least in terms of destructive power, the abilities of a fully-roused World Soul, forcibly taking over control of all Titanic facilities on a thousand worlds to create armies and forge a physical body and armaments capable of sundering a universe down to its core.
- Kypari and G’hanir are linked. The Mantid tell us the Kypari Trees grew when ‘the world was young’, and that the sap of the trees, found nowhere else on Azeroth, nurtured and fed the Mantid when they were on the run and fighting the ‘usurpers’, the Titan Keepers and Watchers who came to stamp the Titan’s vision of Order onto the face of Azeroth. Interestingly, we’ll learn in The War Within that a physical aspect of G’Hanir the Mother-Tree was planted just off the coast of Pandaria, and was ripped out but for its roots by an enraged Amun’thul who saw it as too chaotic for ‘his’ world, but the roots survived and Eonar charged some servants with keeping those roots alive and hidden from the rest of the world and the other Titans. And in truth, we have never seen Kypari Trees anywhere else on Azeroth.
The Kypari are either the branches of G’hanir who fell to earth and began growing similar to how certain tree-species can propagate through cuttings, or they are roots of G’Hanir that made their way to the surface, which is very troubling given that the Sha infested them and what few Kypari Trees remain are either being over-harvested by the Mantid in their fear-fueled frenzy, or were burnt from the inside-out by the Sha ‘Blighting’ caused by the war between the Alliance and Horde in Pandaria. That Void corruption might have had long-lasting effects, and given how deep the Roots of G’Hanir reached, might have provided a vehicle for the Void to access the World Soul directly, considering how strong Y’Shaarj became from sinking so deep into the planet that it took a Titan’s direct intervention to take him out, and left a ‘wound’ in the planet so deep and so dire that it threatened the survival of the World Soul itself.
And considering how useful in so many ways Kypari sap can be, and how Azerite shared a similar bent, albeit on a more massive scale, does that mean that Kypari sap is a diluted and diminished form of Azerite, filtered through the Kypari trees and the chaotic power of Life from which G’Hanir was a conduit?
There’s more but the meds are kicking my Bag of Holding, so what are your thoughts?