After leveling up a new character, I sat through the intro quest where Kacelgos meets Khadgar and saw something a bit interesting.
As Kacelgos walks through the hallway, I noticed there were 5 torches on the sides of the wall.
There was an Old God quote about Five Torches to light our path and the Lord of Ravens will turn the Key…
Moving past this point in the cinematic, I noticed that Khadgar was sitting at an interesting point in the Tower, he was sitting in front of a Shattered window, much like the shattered stain glass windows we see throughout Aberrus.
7 Floating books (one in his hand) plus the Seven floating candles in Aberrus.
This shattered window overlooks the Blasted Lands, which not only has the Alter of Storms (“coming storms” was referenced in the video) but also overlooks the Dark Portal.
In one of the expansions we got:
Added to the zone. 5 dead skeletons camped around an Old God obelisk.
Not only that, but we also now have the Naga invading from the South…
It originally opened a connection between Hellfire Peninsula on Draenor now Outland and what used to be part of the Swamp of Sorrows, now the Blasted Lands. it was closed by Khadgar just prior to Draenor’s destruction and th en reopened on Azeroth’s side at the start of the Burning Crusade.
As to how it works… you walk through… it’s use activated. It has no controls or settings or anything like that it’s no more directional than a rail line.
As to the second question. If plot demands, otherwise, no.
The initial opening of the portal carved a tunnel through the twisting nether between the two planets. This cataclysmic moment was the “hard part,” as it were: once it was completed, the actual portal structure itself became of secondary importance. Remember that the Dark Portal’s physical form was destroyed after the first war but Orcs could slip through anyway and they managed to rebuild it.
None of this has anything to do with the void, and so I really don’t think there’s any reason to think that the Dark Portal would be helpful in opening the kind of pathway you’re talking about.
On top of that: we already did the “The Dark Portal goes somewhere else now” thing in WoD. Doing it again would be narratively lame.
And obviously, if you make wild assumptions about every instance of the number five that you see in-game, you’re not going to get anywhere. I seriously doubt that there are any hidden messages of that kind seeded about.
The Dark Portal seems to be semi-unique as portals go insofar as once activated, it’s self-sustaining until something actively shuts it down, possibly because rather than being fueled by a caster or mechanism on one end, it may have been “anchored” to the planets’ leyline junctures on both sides as a cycling power source loop by Medivh and Gul’dan. Hence the fel depletion on Draenor’s end causing the Blasted Lands to form on Azeroth’s, and the risk of Draenor exploding happening to Azeroth as well if Khadgar hadn’t closed the portal at that time.
The only similarly “permanent” portal that doesn’t collapse without someone holding it open is the Legion’s portal in the Broken Isles, though since traveling through it took us to Kil’jaeden’s ship instead of Argus itself, one side of it may be less permanently anchored to a specific location on the Legion’s end.
The archways are what allow the Dark Portal to operate as a “door” between the planets; if they’re destroyed there remains the original “rift” by which the two worlds are more or less permanently linked, though using the rift alone to cross over is more complicated, as it isn’t visible to the naked eye and has to be actively “held open” with additional magic in order to physically pass through without the portal constructs providing a stable point of entry and exit.
One portal does not work without the other. They are linked through strong magic and must be maintained with some sort of energy. Souls were used to power the gateway from Draenor. By my knowledge, only one side of the portal must be powered for both to work. In terms of the portal’s properties, ignore alternate Draenor, it doesn’t really make sense.
Yes, if there was another end of the portal within the Void. It can’t just be opened up anywhere. Though, with how Blizzard is taking the lore recently, it could one day.
How other points-of-origin tapping into the Dark Portal works is still kind of unclear. When the Iron Horde linked their Dark Portal to Azeroth’s, it was never solidly established whether it caused Outland’s to just become unusable, or if one could still travel one-way from Outland’s side to Azeroth’s even while entering Azeroth’s side took one to AU Draenor (which would have meant an unpleasant surprise for anyone unwittingly trying to come home from Outland, only to suddenly find themselves standing among the Iron Vanguard.)
Ostensibly Azeroth’s side either became properly redirected to Outland’s Dark Portal again once AU Draenor’s was destroyed or the Horde and Alliance have since maintained some degree of third-party portal access to Outland, since Thrall’s family, Saurfang and the Forsaken pursuing him traveled there between Legion and BfA. Moreover Sabellian’s brood returned from Outland in answer to the call of the Dragon Isles, though the speed with which the beacon summoned the flights during the DF cinematic raises the possibility that the dragons could basically teleport there in answer to said call, meaning theoretically Sabellian and his followers might not have needed any portal at all to return.
Since the Dark Portal traverses the Twisting Nether to bridge the vast physical distance between Azeroth and Draenor, one might speculate that since the Nether has been utilized as a sort of permeable “intermediary” realm before through which the Void was able to breach places like Netherstorm and Nagrand, theoretically a situation could perhaps arise in which it - or even another of the cosmic planes - could break into that “bridge” from within the Nether and use it to invade the worlds at either end.
At this point, it’s unknown if a new “other end” of the Dark Portal could intercede from such a place as the Void like the Iron Horde’s Dark Portal did, or if the Dark Portal’s nature can only be paired to another portal of like nature on a similarly physical planet that’s also at least partly located within the Great Dark.
Well, I think souls my lad, but I could be wrong, I stopped reading wow books after Chronicles, and stopped reading Chronicles after they friggin’ retconned it.
Gul’dan utilized a large number of draenei souls to contribute raw power to his side of the Draenor Dark Portal, but Medivh didn’t have the same source on his end, so that may have been a consequence of Gul’dan contributing his part of the process via fel magic - which feeds on souls to fuel itself - while Medivh’s arcane spellwork wouldn’t have needed the same resource and could have just drawn upon his own massive energy reserves as the Guardian. Also once the Portals were both fully established they became self-sustaining, so there was no further need for additional sacrifices to keep them operational.
The Iron Horde was still continuously feeding souls into theirs to keep it open when we arrived in AU Draenor, suggesting that without Medivh’s involvement, they didn’t have the necessary power and specific knowledge to permanently stabilize their Dark Portal. So they had to keep funneling additional souls through Gul’dan, Cho’gall and Teron’gor, who as fel magic users could burn the souls to fuel the magic that was keeping their Dark Portal active.
Thanks, this was mainly what I was wondering. To the best of my knowledge, Azeroth has a few main portals still active. The Nightwell, the Sunwell, the Dark Portal and I would assume any Emerald Dream Portal.
While this is a bit of a tinfoil hat post, given these “clues” I was just wondering if the Dark Portal was a bound link between the two worlds and couldn’t be used for any other purpose or opened by any other means.
While the Sunwell feels like a more prominent location for summoning in the Void, especially given the storyline at the end of Legion involving Alleria, I didn’t know if that set up could be used as a distraction that ultimately lead into Khadgar summoning in the Void from somewhere else.
(assuming Iridikron and Xal’atath were some 200 iq villains)
