Was going back and reviewing old cinematics and quests because we know Azshara and Xal’atath are going to be relevant either towards the end of the War Within or in the Twilight Expansion, and this cropped up.
Before the waves completely crush the capital of the Kaldorei Empire, Azshara hears a woman’s voice, telling her to ‘let go, it is over’.
She refuses, her barrier collapses, and the waters drag the capital to the bottom of a newly created ocean, along with Azshara, her Highborn who did not rebel against her ‘deal’ with the Legion, and the citizens who had survived the Demonic armies purging all mortals from her Empire.
The next voice she hears in N’Zoth. Male, multiple voices at that, talking to her and laughing over the top of themselves at some points, before merging into a single voice again.
But who was the original voice she heard? Was it Xal’atath, or Elune? Or some other player we have yet to meet?
We’ve seen Elune take a hand shepherding her people to the Afterlife before with the Burning of Teldrassil, we now have several theories on how the World Tree caught fire so quickly.
Could be the Azerite ammunition, there’s certainly a lot of ground that even a small amount of Azerite could unnaturally expand the effects of whatever it was exposed to, be it to harm or heal, and flammable munitions could easily have caused a runaway fire-storm between the Azerite-imbued flames and the Nature-magic within the World Tree. We also don’t know if the World Tree’s roots reached down far enough to touch into a vein of Azerite, solid or liquid, since almost every other World Tree reached down deep enough to touch on Old God nonsense or drink deeply from Leylines so powerful it made the World Tree wildly unstable.
It could have been Sylvanas using her entropic magic to subtly fan the flames, considering both Thalyssa and Jaina both mention they could not detect her magic in the aftermath of the Mak’gora that killed Saurfang. Death magic to dry out and kill the tree, which made the flames have a much easier time of consuming the World Tree. We also know that Negative Spirit-Energy can be used to force compliance upon Elementals and Elemental Spirits, and that could have been used to force the Horde’s explosive/incendiary ammunition to consume Teldrassil at the shocking speed we saw in the Battle for Azeroth expansion.
And then there’s the theory that Elune fanned the flames herself because she heard the Winter Queen’s plight and saw fit to send thousands of powerful, nature-inclined Souls to her estranged Sister as both a peace-offering and way to help stabilise the Anima drought, and to release the Kaldorei from a world seemingly locked into an endless cycle of genocide and race-wars. I don’t think this theory is accurate, but there’s enough hints in the Ardenweald Story to suggest that Elune might have made the whole thing happen as quickly as it did to save her sister, and thought using her ‘favored children’ to do it would be the best way to save the Winter Queen and her realm.
But back to the topic, whose voice was that?
If it was Elune, this could have been a precursor to the Burning of Teldrassil, with the loss of tens of thousands (if not more) of Kaldorei, amongst the other races, streaming into the Shadowlands at a cataclysmic rate, Elune might have seen fit to try and ‘spare’ her favored children by giving them a swift and merciful end, freeing them from the torment of the Legion’s twisted Fel magic and delivering them to the serenity of the Shadowlands, and with Azshara trying to ‘save’ her Empire, and the people who served her lavishly within it, and the Well of Eternity consuming itself and going out of control, all that awaited them was the agony of failure and death.
Furthermore, the longer Azshara lived, the more likely it was that she’d cause even more harm to Azeroth and her people. Convincing her to die and let it all end only benefitted both Elune (who appears to be a Life-Pantheon member, if not their Prime, like Aman’thul is the Prime of the Arcane-Pantheon and Zovaal was once the Prime of the Death-Pantheon) and the Primal Forces who squabbled and bickered over the slumbering World Soul within.
Alternatively, we know Azshara had access to a ton of powerful relics, many of which we used in Legion and, even after being corrupted and rendered supposedly inert by absorbing and containing the entropic energies contained within Sargeras’s sword, Gorribal, were still potent enough for Azshara to use at least one of them to entrap us in her palace, Sharas’dal, the Scepter of Tides, being what she used as part of the ritual along with the Tidestone, one of the ‘Pillars’ we spent so much blood and sweat to get, and use, to seal the Legion off from Azeroth once and for all.
Good job, Dalaran. Khadgar and the rest of the Council of Six left the protection of the Cathedral of Eternal Night to Jobbers.
There’s a good chance that Xal’atath might have been in possession of one of the Highborne, if not Azshara herself, and was waiting for this moment to try to sway the Queen of All Elves into her service, but its more likely that the consciousness sealed within the dagger wanted freedom more than servants to carry it around, as it used us to collect three artifacts of power, lied to us about the Naga wanting to use them to create a powerful ritual, and instead sold them, and us, to N’Zoth as payment for freeing her permanently from the confines of the Black Blade.
But if it wasn’t Elune, or Xal’atath, who was it? Alleria mentioned after N’Zoth’s death and defeat at the end of the Battle for Azeroth expansion that she heard new voices in the chorus of madness in the back of her mind, it might be some new Void-aligned entity, a new ‘Old God’ waiting to be launched at Azeroth to finish the work its predecessors failed at repeatedly, or it might even be the source of the voice that both Thrall and Anduin heard in the reveal-trailer for the War Within Expansion.
What are your thoughts?
The blood runs thick on the altar tonight