Something that’s gotten my thinking parts working overtime is some of the quests that drop off the Island Expeditions.
We know that the Flights are active behind the scenes, some working at the behest of their former Aspects, others striking out on their own to cure their infertility or to carve out homes for their now very-finite Flights.
The Twilight Flight is perhaps the only truly fecund Flight left, excluding the non-Aspected Flights like the Stormdrakes of the Broken Isles, the Flying Serpents of Pandaria and the quasi-sentient Proto-Drakes of Northrend.
And yet, we’ve seen with Wrathion that, under the right circumstances and with the right Titanic artifact, the Corruption of the Old Gods can be removed and a Flight restored, albeit one member at a time.
Now, assuming that Wrathion got his hands on Blastenheimer’s little toy, and I’ve no doubt the Black Prince, claiming to be aware of what was going on around him even inside his egg (a horrifying concept if true, as that would mean he was ‘aware’ of being three different entities fused together to make a singular, purified entity, and one of those ‘components’ was a dead whelp no less) then he would likely know the name of his ‘creator’ and would have sought the Gnome out, either for vengeance or to see if the ‘miracle’ of his birth could be replicated.
But the Titans hard-coded a ‘kill switch’ into their creations, presumably because the Titan of Time knew something and needed to stop the Dragonflights continuing on past a specific time in Azeroth’s history.
And I doubt Wrathion gives a damn so long as he can protect Azeroth.
So, assuming that Wrathion was somehow spared the neutering that infected the majority of his species, he’d want new allies in his self-appointed quest to be the Earthwarden of Azeroth, and the best source of that would be other Dragons, specifically other Black Dragons, purified and warded against further Old God interference.
That said, there’s next to no Black Dragon eggs left on Azeroth, and the only bloodline relatives are the Nether Flight, and that involves going to Outland, a difficult enough task given that the major access point, the Dark Portal, is under heavy watch by both the Alliance and Horde and the Nether Flight has allies in the Blue Dragon Flight, so stealing eggs must be done discreetly and covertly.
That said, on Azeroth there’s two other Flights with the bloodline of the Black Dragons. The Black Proto-Drakes, already rare and almost impossible to find, and the Twilight Flight, the so-called ‘mongrel’ Flight.
The problem is, even if Wrathion can find their Broodmother, she’s hidden either very, very deep beneath the Twilight Cult-infested halls of the Wildhammer’s former holdings, or she’s taken up residence on the Dragon Isles, or she’s scattered to one of the Thousand Isles.
Now, assuming Wrathion got hold of those Twilight Eggs, either through a raid by his Black Talon Watchers or some bargain with the ‘freed’ Broodmother, now that Deathwing is dead and the Old Gods have apparently been defeated or have lost interest in their creations (for the time being, at least), and Wrathion decided to use the Titanic Relic to fuse Twilight eggs together to try and create ‘purified’ eggs for his own purposes, what do you think would happen?
I can extrapolate three possible outcomes:
- Purified Twilight Dragons: Unable to extract enough material to create a normal Flight Dragon, the artifact instead stutters and simply purges the Old God influence, leaving Wrathion bemused with Twilight Whelps on his hands, chaotic beings with unpredictable powers that run the gamut of weird to strange to deadly. Not entirely sure what to do, Wrathion is begrudgingly forced to seek aid in caring for the Twilight Whelps, and finds an unlikely ally in Alexstraza, the mourning former Queen of Life taking to the whimsical whelps almost instinctively, and they to her.
- Multiple Flight Whelps: The relic is able to switch and swap around the various traits in the eggs to create dozens of new whelps … of various flights. Several of each Flight, a mix of genders, and the future of the Dragon Flights is restored … but Wrathion holds the trump-card. I could easily see this being used to push Wrathion’s agenda by dangling hope before desperate Dragons wanting their children to live and their bloodlines to continue, who have watched their Aspects give up on their species and who refuse to do so in turn.
- Black Dragon Whelps: With Wrathion himself as the template, the artifact is able to ‘adjust’ the eggs, burning quantity for quality to create a half-dozen purified Black Dragon eggs at the cost of scores of Twilight Dragon eggs … and they hatch and immediately start driving Wrathion mad as he realizes they didn’t just copy his bloodline, but himself. Male, female, it doesn’t matter, each is convinced that they alone are the salvation of Azeroth and that they should be the Earthwarder. After several sibling scuffles, Wrathion manages to assert himself as the true, actual Earthwarder, much to his humanoid underlings’ amusement, but the other Black Dragons each insist they be given a portion of the world to oversee directly and complain continuously that if Wrathion could do all these things when he was just a newly hatched Whelp, why do they have to stay under lock and key, why can’t they have minions, how come this and how come that until Wrathion flees in search of adult interaction before committed infanticide just to get five minutes of peace.