Something that just popped into my head.
We know the Pantheons, Order, Void, Light, Fel, are are war with each other, and only Life and Death seem to be on any kind of neutral or collaborative footing.
But why, specifically, Life and Death? I mean, on the one hand, it makes sense because you can’t have Life without Death, and without Death, there’s no room for new Life. They’re two sides of the same coin, similar to how Light and Void are Positive Emotions/Singular Focus/Light vs Negative Emotions/Multiple Paths/Void. The Arcane and the Fel might even be on a similar footing, Order/Creation/Arcane vs Chaos/Entropy/Fel.
But on the other hand, Death seems to be rather passive and almost a non-player in the conflicts between the Pantheons other than guarding what they still have a hold on.
And something twigged to me. Why would a robot refer to a God from another Pantheon as a Sister? Why would Aman’thul refer to Sargeras as his brother even after all of the beef and anger between the two of them?
It makes no sense, until we take a step back and consider that the first choice for replacing the lost Arbiter in Orobos was a World Soul, stored in Zerith Mortis, and replaced by the tortured essence of Argus, whom we then perma-killed(? we think ?) and who was then replaced in turn by the Smurf Kyrian flashlight, Goodest Boi 1.2.5 Peg’im’loose Pelagos, who was able to ascend to the role due to being given a metric butt-load of Anima from the Champion and the entity who was helping us shrugging and giving it a go because there was nothing else left to try.
What if the Winter Queen wasn’t referring to Elune as a sister in the biological sense, but the metaphysical. If every member of the Pantheons is a World Soul trapped/infused into a giant synthetic body to serve the agendas of the First Ones, then they really are ‘siblings’ in a cosmic sense, each a unique miracle of a living, sapient world. With so few of them in existence and most under the guidance of the First Ones, they would inevitably come to see each other as a source of comfort and sympathy, hence becoming a ‘family’ of sorts that would inevitably be torn apart by the differing opinions of the leaders of their respective Pantheons.
And then another rogue thought hit me. How did old families avoid conflicts where the might of two or more powerful houses or alliances might wipe each other out? They’d exchange family members as hostages, and possibly even marry them to establish bonds of family, to keep the peace and reach an accord.
The Pantheon of Death, the Eternal Ones, are just five members, two of which turned against their own Pantheon. The Titans number at least seven. We don’t know how many members of the other Pantheons exist, but we do know the Old Gods refer to Elune, with great contempt, as an ‘upstart Goddess’.
If the Pantheons did undergo an exchange with each other, then it would make sense that they would exchange somebody of great value to the entire Pantheon to both make sure they would play along with the whole reason for the exchange, but to make sure they would also protect the God they received in turn, as killing one would trigger reprisals across all of the Pantheons.
Except Elune, as the Winter Queen’s sister, didn’t play along. She was in love with Eonar and likely wanted to go be with her lover, but for some reason, ended up in the Life Pantheon, and the Titans ended up with an additional member, which threw the whole thing out of whack and left the Pantheons once again at each other’s throats, and out of balance with some having too few members, and some too many.
This is why the Eternal Ones are so few compared to the Titans, and why they’re so lethargic. There was meant to be a sixth member of their Pantheon, and if Elune fled to the Life Pantheon because the ‘original’ option would have kept her apart from Eonar, that would have also put a negative light on the Eternal Ones in the eyes of the other Pantheons in an already tense and fraught situation.
But what would a 6th member of the Eternal Ones do? Well … rebirth. Essentially a backup to keep Zoval or the Arbiter on the straight and narrow, and seeing to souls not meant for the Shadowlands being sent on to the realm they were meant to be. She might even have been the one meant to restore and renew the Wild Gods we tend to in the Winter Queen’s gardens of renewal, given how cold and detached the Winter Queen is, this could be because of her lingering resentment towards Elune, as the Winter Queen was quite proud of the Eternal Ones and rather more warm to her ‘Siblings’ than she was to anyone else previously, and her icy facade seemed more to prevent her getting close enough that she would begin to care for them again.
This is even referenced in the chain of events that not only saw Ysera’s revival, but her being bound to the Winter Queen’s essence, and thus the Shadowlands. She’s cut herself off from her emotions to avoid being hurt again, and become a cold, proper and implacable leader of the Wild Hunt and the peoples of Ardenweald, yet Ardenweald was a place of laughter, music, plays and community outside of the Queen’s Court. So why was the Winter Queen so mis-matched with her realm’s nature in this regard?
Two theories come to mind if the ‘Hostage Exchange’ situation is in any way accurate.
- The Winter Queen was the promised hostage, but Elune took her place to save her sister, not realising the Winter Queen didn’t vibe with Ardenweald and never truly would, sacrificing herself needlessly, upending the whole exchange, and with her sister now bound to Life instead of Death, the Winter Queen had no choice but to take up her sister’s abandoned mantle and rule a realm she might love but will always be awkward and an outsider to, despite how fond her citizens are of their Queen.
- Elune was indeed the original hostage, but fumbled the bag badly and flubbed the whole exchange. The Winter Queen was left as the sole member carrying on a role meant for two Eternal Ones and grew bitter and resentful of not just Elune’s actions, but the fact she was expected to just harden up and deal with it as one of the two oldest members of the Eternal Ones, and as such she had the burden of responsibility of two distinct yet interlinked roles with nobody she could rely on, either for actual assistance or as moral support.
I doubt this actually happened, but it would make for a rather tragic twist to the events of the setting, that everything is the result of a spiral of intrigue and lies, love and passion, between the First Ones and their creations, the Pantheons, that caused the original sundering of Light and Void and set all of creation on an infinitely-repeating collision of heroes, villains and champions of all the Primal Powers until one ultimately triumphs, no matter how many times the story must be repeated.