So we’re gonna be talking about some datamined stuff from the next expansion, so I’m just gonna derp a bit here so people who want to go into the War Within entirely fresh can do so.
Remember Xal’atath? There’s a weapon that drops off Siege of Orgrimmar Raid Boss, Garrosh Hellscream, that shares a similar naming convention, Xal’atoh. And there’s a blade that drops off a rare in Thaldraszus, the Black Blade of K’tanth, which references a battle Pre-Ordering of Azeroth, possibly between the Old Gods, possibly between the Old Gods and the Elemental Lords.
We know that Xal’atath is after the essence of the Old Gods to empower her relic, the Dark Heart, and she’s already gotten the essence of Yogg’Saron during the events of the Dawn of the Infinite Mega-Dungeon. That’s at least three more Old Gods to go, and there’s two Old God essences trapped in objects, and we don’t know where those objects got to.
Wrathion used the emptied Black Blade of the Empire to draw the ‘Carapace of N’Zoth’ into it, and the Blade was either transfigured into the Raid boss we fight next, or was lost after drawing in a fragment of a rising Old God’s physical form. So either we’re heading back to Nyalotha, or we’re going on a fetch-quest with Wrathion and his smug, handsome, punchable face.
Now, Y’sharrj is a lot more concerning because we have had one of these ‘vessels’ floating around for a while. If you have Xal’atoh, Desecration of Gorehowl equipped or transmogged, the weapon whispers to you ‘embrace your rage’, ‘caress your fear’, ‘gorge your hatred’ and to ‘carve slower, so that it might feed’. This is directly referencing the unshattered version of Y’sharrj, and not just the severed heads which became the Prime Sha of Pandaria. that’s a sliver of an Old God, and possibly enough essence for Xal’atath to use to feed her Dark Heart.
This leaves us only C’Thun, and that occuluar eyesore has multiple fragments of its form scattered about Azeroth, both in the ruined city of the Silithid and in the Twilight Highlands courtesy of Cho’gal, and as loot taken by adventurers from both areas.
I think, when it comes to C’Thun at least, Xal’atath is going to be more troubled by finding enough relics with power, rather than A relic OF power, to drain into her Dark Heart.
I think that’s enough filler to avoid spoilering people. Shall we move on?
Something that cropped up as I’m watching Doron, Bell-end Bellular and the other “OH MY GOD THIS CHANGES WARCRAFT FOREVER?!?!?!?!!” YouTubers, but we know that most, if not all, of the Arathai we’re going to meet are either Half-Elves, or have Elven blood enough to manifest pointed ears.
We know the Light ‘reached out’ to Humanity only after the Quel’dorei taught Humanity the Arcane to push back the Amani Trolls. While this does come from the Chronicles, which seems to be Titan-propaganda authored on behalf of Odyn while he was the Prime Designate, it does seem to be accurate.
But why would the Quel’dorei leave their homeland. The Amani Trolls are finally vanquished and they can freely start expanding their new kingdom. There’s trade and friendship, at least for now, with the Arathai Humans, even if they are barbarians at this stage who have barely mastered forging iron and had been using crude Shamanism and Druidism until the Elves showed up and taught them how to use maths to set Trolls on fire with their minds, but why?
Well … we know that the High Born where fractious and proud, refusing to give up the Arcane even when threatened with exile, and we know that more Kaldorei survived the Sundering and Queen Azshara’s attempt to swipe right on Sargeras. We know the Light has a vested interest in creating unified, advanced worlds to share a single vision which, in turn, empowers the Light. The Draenei were an example of this, with the Ata’mal Crystal being ‘pivotal’ to the evolution of the Draenei, both as a race and a planetary society, and was used as a beacon to summon a star-ship to save Velen and the few hundred Eredar he was able to trust from the Legion’s inbound enslavement of the people of Argus.
Here’s a thought. Even if a big chunk of Queldorei left, they’re not exactly the most fertile race in WoW, and Humanity is very short-lived and, Windrunner sister’s fetish for Humans aside, generally prefer to stick to their own due to their pride in their heritage and bloodlines. Half-Elves in the novels did face tremendous prejudice from their single-heritage kin outside of Dalaran, but that may have had significantly more to do with the growing racial conflicts between Men, Elves and Dwarves that had riven the Eastern Kingdoms prior to the opening of the Dark Portal and the Orc Wars.
Rather than a huge chunk of an already diminished people, what if it was a handful of Queldorei, a bunch of Humans who saw the Light that had revealed itself to them as truly ‘holy’, and began agitating against the Arcane. Many of these Queldorei would have been survivors of the Sundering, or the children and grand-children of those survivors, and Humans didn’t have a centralized faith at this point, with proto-Shamans and -Druids being their spiritual leaders.
This would change as the Kingdom of Arathor would splinter and fail, and the nation of Kul’tiras would return to Druidism and Shamanism, altered by the infusion of Drust beliefs and bloodlines into their people, and the nation of Gilneas, which kept a strong Druidic faith even as the Light supplanted all other beliefs in the more urbanized areas. But as of Alpha, we’re told the Arathai Empire is about 1,200 years old by this point, and the primary mount of these people is a lynx.
Kaldorei are the only race that rides giant cats on a large scale, and the Shal’dorei derive from this with their Mana-sabers.
What if, during the Sundering, whatever effect that prevented transport across the ocean to the other side of Azeroth was disrupted for months on end. We know the Kaldorei Empire spanned most of, if not all of, the Super-Continent. We’ve seen with the Shal’dorei that outposts and enclaves of Kaldorei survived the Sundering even without the Plot Armor of Malformed, Tyrande and Illidan.
We know the Light is harder than adamantite for followers and ‘Armies of Light’ to help fight its enemies, due to it being a primarily healing and defensive Primal Force/Power in the setting.
What if … the Arathai Empire on the other side of the planet is entirely Half-Elves … and the elven half of this equation is both Kaldorei who found the Light, or were rescued by it, during the Sundering, and Quel’dorei who were part of this vision that the early Humans of the Arathai Kingdom and chose to leave with the Humans who either left, or were exiled from, the original Human Kingdom for their belief in the Light.
We don’t know enough about the original Arathai Kingdom to know when the rivalry between the Arcane and the Light began. We know, by the time the story started just before the Orc Wars, that Mages and Elves were often regarded with active malice by the common people of the Human and Dwarven Kingdoms due to the Human Nobles’ tradition of keeping a Mage or three on staff to ‘handle’ issues, such as scrying and anti-scrying measures, messages and good old fashioned fireball-to-the-face erasure of ‘problematic persons’.
We also had Demon Cults popping up sometime after the Mages were trained amongst the Humans, and we were told Demons could ‘follow’ the Arcane back to Azeroth, if one drew from the Twisting Nether and not the Leylines of Azeroth. And stupid people rarely bother to question their views when their hackles are raised and there’s a perfectly good scape-goat for everything going wrong in their lives right in front of them.
For the TL:DRs, I am wondering if this Arathai Empire was formed when a fishing town or settlement of Kaldorei took to the ocean to escape the Demons, and was ‘saved’ by the Light and ferried across the ocean while the barrier was disrupted, and used to ‘start’ a new community, that worshipped the Light rather than Elune and the Wild Gods. Then, thousands of years later, the Light saw something new and went “Yeah, that’ll go great with what we’ve already got cooking!” and used ‘visions’ to convince the most pious and thoughtful amongst the Quel’dorei and Humans shortly after their victory over the Amani to cross the oceans. We’ve seen that Dalaran was able to float and, with the Light’s assistance, we could have seen the first ‘flying ships’ on Azeroth since the destruction of the Kaldorei Empire, and these Light-Humans and -Quel’dorei meet the Light-Kaldorei, a friendship is cemented and Humans will do what Humans do best.
“Where’s the hole?”
Given how fast Humans reproduce, and how strongly Elven blood lingers in individuals of dual-heritage, much like how Draenei and Orc blood is known to linger in Human families for generations, its entirely possible that the vast majority of the population are Half-Elves or, as they seem to put it, Arathai. Regardless of if they share the features of a normal Human or a Drust-blooded Kul’tiran, they don’t seem to view themselves, or each other, as any greater or lesser.
They are ‘one’ within the Light.
And it makes me wonder if this ‘Emperor’ that they speak of ‘back home’ is a Half-Elf like them, a Kaldorei, or a Quel’dorei/Kaldorei mingling? Are they honestly that at peace with each other’s differences or is this propaganda and the Elves rule over the Half-Elves and Humans, or does the Light extend and expand the lifespans of a descendant of Thoradin, first King of the Arathai, and its a pure-blooded Human ruling as a benevolent theocratic tyrant over an Empire of propaganda’d Half-Elves?
As always, what are your thoughts?