The questline seems to indicate the Ethereals and Brokers are both from K’aresh but may have originally been different races.
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Ok, well now this is confirmed.
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So… huh. I expected us to get the big reveal on Xal in-game. This seems to imply we will see what she actually is in some kind of flashback sidequest. Unless that comes in the new storyline and quests first.
I expected that to be an 11.2 thing leading into Midnight, honestly.
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Maybe, though the way they act makes it seem like if so, they don’t necessarily remember it. Unlike the Ethereals, the Brokers came across as finding the tangible, humanoid behaviors of living and dead mortals strange and alien, and it frankly seemed like only the floating “head” portion of them might be the actual Broker, with their bodies otherwise being “encounter suits” made to better interact with humanoid races.
Conversely, the Ethereals come across more like they wear the bandages to roughly approximate their old bodies, and act like that shape is still what feels natural to them.
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Maybe they will just got all Kingdom Hearts and have the Brokers/Eathereals be two halves of what was once a whole person.
I dread they’re gonna add shadowlands context to the LK stuff
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Or maybe any races on K’aresh who didn’t have the fancy shield tech to semi-protect them from the Void and Arcane energies assailing the planet were killed, but still had their souls sufficiently altered by said energies in a way that saw them shunted off to the In-Between instead of sorted into afterlives.
It could even turn out that arranging to have a bunch of Void/Arcane-corrupted mortal souls dumped into the Shadowlands all at once by Dimensius’ assault was an earlier, unsuccessful attempt by the nathrezim to do to the Arbiter what they later successfully did with Argus.
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For the ethereals it did protect them from the void, but didn’t do anything against the arcane. They’re arcane infused souls and some have since gone on a void binge further corrupting their souls.
I don’t remember anything particularly void-y about the Brokers, so they likely were also protected by the shields assuming they were a separate race originally.
Apparently there’s a hidden fourth one about the Sunwell and the void elves.
https.://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gp5GhIwawAAjxdu?format=jpg&name=medium
Oh, that is a spicy new lore that draining magic “ravaged their mind and bodies over time”.
The old lore was that withdrawal from magic ran the risk of “permanent mental and physical damage,” and that the Magisters dismissed Kael’s “eat M’uru” idea in favor of the Blood Knight experiment, but keeping the broad strokes of blood elf lore straight is an impossible challenge apparently.
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There are lines that imply the old gods were all warring until xal’atath betrayed them
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Just played through the Ethereal lorewalking questline. Here’s the new stuff:
- Cho covers the Protectorate, the Ethereum, and Dimensius from TBC, a bit of Locus-Walker and Alleria from Legion, and a bit of Tazavesh and Ve’nari from Shadowlands.
- Locus-Walker is seemingly the only ethereal who uses the Void without being consumed by it.
- When Cho finishes his story, a broker named Om’rajula appears in Dornogal and asks us to deliver a package from Ve’nari to Locus-Walker. Apparently Ve’nari is just aware of whenever anyone is talking about her? It fits her paranoia, at least.
- When we get to Telogrius Rift, the Shadowguard ethereals have sent assassins, and after we drop off the package (which is “trilling”) we get this conversation:
Projection of Ve’nari: Oh. As I suspected. The Shadowguard are after you as well?
Locus-Walker: I have not seen you since the destruction of our world. As I preferred it.
Projection of Ve’nari: Such fangs, Locus-Walker. You wound me. Yet unfortunate as it may be, it seems we must work together one last time. Come, we have much to discuss.
- Cho is stunned to hear about this, but he points out that all we have confirmed is that both the ethereals and the brokers come from K’aresh.
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Did you do the Arthas one yet? Any particularly juicy new info?
Brokers could just be dead ethereals
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say her name and she appears…
I BELIEVE IN VE’NARI…clap clap
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I appreciate you very much right now.
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So, seems they’re setting up for arcane ethereals+brokers+locus walker vs. void ethereals in the future?
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And the Xal’atath questline:
- Cho covers the acquisition of the blade in Legion (including replaying the whispers that it gave over the entire expansion), and the BFA re-empowering (which seems to have been canonically done by the same priest from Legion, a male blood elf).
- Then Cho says that he and the other Lorewalkers have found something new. An ancient tablet from Stormsong that took many years to decipher. A record of the Black Empire.
- We are taken back to Ny’alotha, when the Old Gods sent all their forces to counter an unexpected attack from Xal’atath and her void minions. We play as a faceless one pledged to N’Zoth, fighting this attempted “usurping.”
- We summon in all the other Old Gods. Some of N’Zoth’s minions claim that he could easily have defeated Xal’atath on his own, if his forces had not been “infiltrated.”
Yogg-Saron: Xal’atath’s betrayal was inevitable, but she has played her hand too soon.
Y’Shaarj: N’Zoth should have known Xal’atath would target him when she learned what he was building. Fortunately, our aid will leave him in our debt.
C’Thun: Xal’atath underestimates us. Her attempts to distract us have failed. Even we will work together, when faced with such blatant betrayal.
- For her betrayal of the Black Empire, Xal’atath (shows as a voidwalker-type shadow creature) is condemned to imprisonment. I’ll just link the video from Wowhead that shows it.
- Cho wonders if Xal’atath was unfazed by her imprisonment, because her ultimate plan was to collaborate with N’Zoth in the far distant future of BFA. We still don’t know her ultimate origin - even though it may not be connected to the Old Gods at all - but we have another piece of the puzzle.
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