Yes yes, Shadowlands Lore, boo-hiss, let’s move on.
The strange and, quite frankly bizarre creatures known as the Devourers encompass insect-like creatures, hulking ape-like brutes, two-headed giants and bizarre, floating humanoids with too-long limbs and alien mindsets. We’re told that Devourers are the original threat that the ‘Undead’ of Maldraxxus were originally created to combat, an ever-present and eternally-hungering threat to all of the Shadowlands, and one that only came back when the Shadowlands began to run out of anima, and the Maldraxxus Houses began to fall to the Jailer’s insidious plans for all of creation.
But … there’s something weird about them that has been eating at me since we first encountered them, all the way back in Shadowlands.
All but the insectile, and lowest of the pecking order, amongst the Devourers drop curious items upon defeat. Almost every single one of the sub-species barring the insects drops bark, branches or stalks. Plant-matter. And one of the things with the Shadowlands is that Ardenweald was one of the first Realms within that Plane to be created, or rather re-created from the natural matter of the Plane, through the Words of Domination, to create the Shadowlands as we know it today.
Devourers are said to be natives of the In-Between, the cloudy void between the various Realms of the Shadowlands, and presumably the barrier between the Shadowlands and the other Planes separated from the Material Plane, our level of reality, requiring specific routes to pass through safely, as we saw with the Shadowlands funneling anima to other places which seem color-coded to the other Primal Powers. The Blue of Arcane, the Gold of the Light, the Green of the Fel.
To most denizens of the Shadowlands, the Devourers are seen as beasts and vermin at best, and deadly threats at worst, being able to drain the anima from a region with shocking speed, with the rates increasing dramatically depending upon the type, size, number and age of the Devourers in question. But in Zerith Mortis, the Oracle, a First One Construct left behind to aid us by the enigmatic First Ones, declares that the Devourers once had purpose, and served the balance, but something has altered them.
Narratively speaking, the first place we encounter Devourers is in Ardenweald, the 2nd oldest Realm of the Shadowlands and the first place where the Words of Domination were used to reshape the raw matter of the Realm to suit the Winter Queen’s needs. And those trees’ roots reach deep into the cloudy depths of the In-Between, and with every other realm, the first time we encounter a Devourer, or an area infested with Devourers, the first thing we notice in the environment?
Trees. Be it branch, root, stem or bark, Devourers are found anywhere there are trees in the Shadowlands. The insect types are found almost exclusively in Ardenweald, near where the Gorm are, and elsewhere, again, near the trees, and in regions where the Battle Pets have a large concentration of insect-types to be caught.
My theory is that the Devourers aren’t entities with forms, or at least, not anymore. They were, at one point, a natural species that dwelled in the In-Between, before the First Ones came and built Oribos and then the satellite Realms of Ardenweald, Maldraxxus, Revendreth, Bastion, Korthia and even the Maw. Devourers were artificially introduced to Zerith Mortis and immediately began corrupting once they began devouring First One ‘energies’ and creatures, almost turning into static, as if something was interrupting their very bodies.
Devourers are the result of spirits native to the In-Between that were warped by the Words of Domination and shunted into a purely spiritual form, starved of their natural food-source and reduced to an animalistic state for the majority of their kind. If this is because they rebelled against the First Ones, or were experimented upon and it failed horrendously, and the First Ones cast them out to hide the truth, we may never know. But those spirits were able to come back and manifest by taking over matter from whatever they could possess and turn it into a form of their own.
The easiest forms would be from the Trees of the Shadowlands, which already are deeply entrenched into the In-Between, and the insects that fed off of those trees, be they Gorm, beetles, wasps or worms.
And we’ve also seen that a Soul can exist even without its anima, as we witnessed in Revendreth when a Venthyr tried to pay the anima tithe by draining the last soul in their care and completely stripping it, rendering the soul unable to move on, and rendering its countless centuries of suffering and atonement for its sins meaningless since without anima, it could not be turned into a Venthyr or be sent onwards to the Afterlife it was meant to go to.
We don’t know what happens to a ‘native’ of the Shadowlands when they are slain. A previous theory of mine was that, with the Shadowlands being in a state of ‘drought’, their essence would be immediately consumed by the Realm for whatever scraps of anima remained bound to it, like a drop of water in the desert’s sands. But what if that’s not true? The spirits of the Shadowland ‘native’ races, the Venthyr, the Sylvar, the Night Fae, the Kyrian, when they die, their ‘essence’ is absorbed into the Shadowlands, but their ‘soul’, stripped of all anima and filled with regret, violence, anger and most importantly, hunger, is drawn down into the roots of the nearest trees and shunted into the In-Between before it can taint the Shadowlands.
This explains why Devourers always show up at times of great violence, cause tremendous disaster when they do appear, are relentlessly hungry no matter how much power, be it anima or otherwise, that they absorb and can freely shape bodies for themselves from the substance of trees and the raw materials of whatever Realm they manifest in, be it silt, muck, or otherwise.
They are the lost children of the Shadowlands, tormented and ‘altered’ by the Anima Drought and the machinations of both the First Ones and Zoval, and we still don’t know what the Jailer saw that made him declare all the works of the First Ones to be false and flawed.
And if my theory is true about the In-Between and it being not just the barrier that separates all the Afterlives from each other, and the Realms separate from each other and from Oribos, but also separates the Void, Light, Arcane, Fel, Life and Death from each other with an impassable barrier of ‘Nul Space’, a true absence of anything that can hold and ide away anything that tries to move through it without Gates at both ends of the destination to create a ‘path’ through it like we see around Oribos and what allows players to fly between Realms in the Shadowlands, then things get even worse.
The Devourers are just how extra-planar souls stripped of their anima re-manifest in the Shadowlands. In the Twisting Nether, we’re told Demons are simply re-absorbed by the Fel and need powerful magic to avoid this fate at the moment of their death. What would Devourers who arose in the Twisting Nether look like? In the realm of the Void? Life? The Arcane?
Are the Devourers this mysterious ‘7th Force’ that supposedly stands in opposition to the Six Primal Powers we are familiar(?) with, or are they a side-effect of the First Ones plans breaking down over millions of years with no oversight or maintenance done to their great experiment with all of reality? And if the Devourers are indeed the anima-stripped souls of the extra-planar natives of the Planes being drawn back, either by their hunger forcing them to manifest or by that hunger leading them to large stockpiles of anima, then what happens now that we’ve restarted the Machine of Death, and mortal souls and all the anima they possess, are being shunted back through the multiverse while the Devourers are still actively propagating in the Shadowlands?
We’ve seen them be able to manifest even in hidden, nameless pockets of reality in the In-Between, and they feed on any form of life or magic they can find.
What happens when the Devourers in Zerith Mortis get into some Azerite? What will they become, and what happens when the blood of our World Soul makes them the best, or worst, version they can be like it did to so many other things?
This has just been a brain-worm that’s been eating its way through the brain for years now and I had to get it out while I could.
What are your thoughts?
