Spirit and Decay

Lore Story Forum
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Palawltar’s Codex of Dimensional Structure
Unlike our ancestors, we don’t limit our thinking of the cosmos to monopole elemental phase spaces. A discredited notion rooted in ancient myths from old Arathor. A comforting, if technically incorrect arrangement of the fundamental forces of the cosmos.

One wonders if such quaint notions would have faded but for creatures like demons and the Old Gods who work primarily through a single energy type. This conflation of culture and dimensional topology holds back so many otherwise promising mages.

Put simply, the cosmos appears as a hexateron. Imagine a four-sided tetrahedron internally extruded to form a multidimensional solid with twenty planes of existence, fifteen transitory pathways, and six vertices where interferon patterns create monopolar expressions of cosmic forces.

Singular energy types are unstable according to Ogdaen’s law, and thus they bind to one or more secondary elements. The Firelands contains as much magma as it does flame, and why the holy radiance of the Sacred Flame acts as an eternal beacon.

Enough preamble! Let’s get to the fun part! Logic proofs. Let us start with a foundational equation:

Phi(M1, M2) = k * (Sigma(C1 + C2 + … + Cn) + Sigma(D1 + D2 + … + Dn))

<The rest of this tome consists of 627 more pages of symbolic logic and their proofs. Broken up by the occasional anecdote about mage tower hijinx, the debunking of a historical myth, or a truly terrible dad pun.>

This sounds like it’s describing the cosmology chart, which is based on 6 primal elements in contradictory pairs:
Light and Shadow
Life and Death
Order and Disorder

Each is associated with a type of power or force:
Light = Holy
Shadow = Void
Life = Nature
Death = Necromantic
Order = Arcane
Disorder = Fel

These then compose the planes. There are the four elemental planes:
Fire: The Firelands
Air: Skywall
Earth: Deepholm
Water: The Abyssal Maw

Then there’s the Emerald Dream and Shadowlands, which may be the planes of Life and Death, respectively.

But on the cosmology chart, there are two more: Spirit and Decay.
The Spirit Realm could possibly be just be that ghostly realm that overlays the world when you’re dead, but what would Decay be?

In the real world, “Decay” can be viewed in two ways: Entropy (Disorder/Fel) and Consumption by Others (Life/Nature)
Physical structures like buildings decay because the elements slowly wear them down and their ordered forms fall into disorder due to the laws of thermodynamics.
Living things decay because other living things consume them and their ordered forms are reconfigured into new forms that suit the predators or bacteria or other life forms that have used their nutrients to sustain themselves.

There is a third type of Decay that is not physical, but metaphysical: Spiritual Decay.
Could Spirit actually be something more like Faith? The reason even Blood Knights and Undead Priests can channel the light? Did Anduin lost his connection with the Light because he lost his Faith? Did Thrall lost his connection with the Elements because he lost his Faith, too?

In that context, Decay may be one of the most prominent elements in all of Warcraft lore rather than the one that’s been missing this entire time. Think of every time a character lost their resolve but then rallied and overcame it. The entire Battle for Azeroth opening cinematic is basically depicting both sides succumbing to Decay before overcoming it with Spirit.

Spirit also used to be a main stat on gear that improved your mana regen, and more classes relied on mana. Hunters used to need it! If spirit drives mana regeneration, which constrains how active a character can be in combat, then can Spirit be viewed as Motivation? The will of a character to act or exercise autonomy?

If so, then a realm overcome by Decay would be very subdued. There would be an overwhelming lethargy, fatigue, and sense of depression or hopelessness blanketing everything. In fact, we may have already seen the elemental plane of Decay in the form of the Maw.

I’m not a huge WoW lore nerd, so I’m posting this to see if I’ve missed something important. For all I know, there’s a whole book on this that I just didn’t know existed.

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The fun part is you are doing exactly what they were trying to convey what they didn’t want people to do—Analyze the system to death. The core point of that in game book’s obscene level of technicality was to say “This is all garbldygook and isn’t what matters, pay attention to the characters instead”.

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It’s all a bunch of timey wimey, wibbelely wobbly… stuff.

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I regret to inform you that the book is actually describing something that is geometrically possible

It’s a truncuated triangular bipyramid

https ://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/Triangulated_truncated_triangular_bipyramid.png

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Yeah, it is a thing that exists as a mathematical abstraction, but it was cloaked in language that is complete nonsense to the layman for a reason. They do not want people talking about fractals and first ones. That was a terrible mistake on Danuser’s part they are trying to backpedal on the only way they see. By making it stupidly complex so people stop asking about it.

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I think it’s walking back the “fractals” stuff while using the rigidity of the cosmic chart they dug themselves into but walking back the structural rigity to have more cosmic flexibility

aka while each vertex is a specific cosmic plane of a specific cosmic energy, each edge represents influence of each connecting vertex, so all planes are affected by and use each force its connected to

so there is “Life of Life” but also “Order of Life” and “Air of Life” and etc

(which is something, if you recall, many of us who are more Hermetically inclined were advocating for because we were worried about both the rigidity of the system and the metaphysical worldbuilding incompetence of Danuser)

edit:

In an ideal universe, this would be canon such that each Pantheon’s full membership is 1 being who is the intersection of each force with every other force, so 10/12 members per Pantheon (6 Higher Forces, 4 Base Elements, Spirit/Decay optional imo)

If anything especially to expand upon the Titans with some Hearthstone lore

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I have admittedly had my own little pet cosmology design for a bit, based on the concept of three Progenitor level beings and their spheres of influence overlapping.

https://i.gyazo.com/69a1ef5b3be816cb0853abfdd762bab3.png

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I get that it is meant to be a joke, but isn’t it ironic and weird that this is from the Arathi?

If the Arathi are supposedly written to be zealots, why are they producing overly analytical work on the nuances of magic?

I could see the joke from an Earthen.

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Very aesthetic

But yeah, don’t think it’s intentionally meant to be like “stop thinking about this”

Rather, “We realize the cosmic chart we’ve dug ourselves into is very rigid, we also realize danuser’s approach to making it less rigid was very extremely stupid, but here we are saying that all cosmic forces, which now include the 4 base elements as cosmic forces, are all interdependent”

whereas before the cosmic forces were the 6 “big ones” (which, if you recall, had their Power Rangers be very Alliance-centric) while the 4 elements were held as “inferior”/not actually cosmic/basic

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Ah. From my point of view, I was doing the opposite. If I were to do a “serious analysis” I would brush up on my higher dimensional geometries and and try to use what we know to identify all 20 planes mentioned in the book, not to mention the edges connecting them, and wondering what interference patterns might be generated.

My post was more conjecture: “What do you think is up with the Spirit and Decay ‘elements’ they implied to exist?” I was on a boring call and had nothing better to do.

imo they should’ve just made it actual gibberish, because not all of us are laypersons and the higher dimensional math is what caught my interest in the first place.

They’ve retconned tons of stuff by now. Surely they could have just had this book say, “Actually, that’s all garbage and the people that wrote it were wrong. We now know that the cosmos is NOT like that,” and then not elaborated further.

What I’m wondering is if the whole Spirit/Decay thing is obsolete now.

This was my understanding. They mention interference patterns, which implies elemental influences in superposition, some of which amplify or nullify each other, creating the illusion of the old mono-elemental planes.

I like how well this jives with conventional real-world cosmologies without straight up copying any specific one.

Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Giordano Bruno all lived in a pretty zealous society. A civilization isn’t a monolith.

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Thank ya. It was somewhat driven by Hindu cosmology, with the Progenitors being akin to the Trimurti—Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer. I sort of like the concept of a cyclical cosmos which is remade eventually.

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True civilizations aren’t monolithic, but blizzard would need to elaborate more to make that distinction. Was it written in secret? Banished for being “heretical”? There are a lot of questions that need to be answered to make that assumption.

As of now, it just seems like it is standard scholarship from the empire.

Also, it was my understanding that story’s like Galileo were more nuanced than pop culture gives credit.

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Normally I would agree, but I think this time it’s different. Side quests have improved A LOT. The team is definitely paying attention to a more narrative driven experience for the next expansions to come.

Literally folks have already decoded the big Arathi book in Mereldar which is giving us hints at the light emperor and what Arathi civilization is like.

People have complained for a while that WoW does too much out of game lore explanations and events (like the chronicle books explaining the cosmology) but here, we are starting to see true in game world building seriously on a different and better level.

It’s a lotta loose threads that seem to start bringing themselves together with the common theme of telling different perspectives from the Titans and the way the Arathi wield and use this “radiant fire” pushes forward another perspective of WoW cosmology.

I would love to see in the future this being stepping stones, possibly to a chronicle book written by the Arathi Empire after their separation.