Just a random thought I had, and I apologize if it’s a dumb one, but Shadowlands is the afterlife for mortal souls, right? And as far as Azeroth is concerned, all mortals were created by the Old Gods and their gift of flesh.
So mortality is a creation of the void, at least where our world is concerned, right? I mean, we’re not seeing the souls of titan constructs, or mechagnomes, or stuff like that. Vrykrul souls kinda dance around this realm, but they’re not directly coming here either, right?
So without the Old Gods, what souls would be here to power it? Where would the stores of anima be coming from?
The Nightfae story hints that there was a time before mortals, so I assume animals and other creatures are also coming here. But it seems nowadays to be entirely based on mortal souls. So maybe the void has been playing the long game with this thing? Slowly infiltrating the Shadowlands with mortal souls the way it did the Emerald dream?
Just random thoughts I had about the relationship and where this is going, and why Il’gynoth would have so much insight into things like the boy king sitting at the master’s table, and how we serve the same master and stuff.
If you exclude the Tauren, the Trolls, the Night elves, etc sure.
I think it’s safer to say that the curse of flesh effectively “negated” the titanic aspects of the ones they touched, turning them into normal, fleshy beings. Or at least that is how I view it. You don’t see stone lifeforms naturally occur, with the exception of Earth elementals, who aren’t “alive” in the same sense.
I wasn’t aware that the Trolls and Tauren weren’t created by the old gods. I assumed the Yaungol were similar to the Vrykrul in how the sub races descended.
Hmm.
Well I guess that negates one theory. Interested to know why not many Trolls or Tauren are seen as corrupted by the old gods, since they are flesh as well. I know there are cultists of them, but you’d think they’d have been gotten to first and it would’ve been a bigger deal in those cultures.
But mortality is created by the old gods, servants of the void, because it’s easier to corrupt, right? I wonder if we’re serving as a trojan horse for the void.
The Trolls and Tauren subspecies were natural races. Well, as natural as can be on a world like Azeroth. Probably a bit of arcane influence from the well of eternity, but outside of that they are life based.
They were never stone to begin with. And not everything that is fleshy is void related, far from it. The Titan’s children are simply considered “cursed” because they are no longer stone or metal, not because they are of the void, which they aren’t.
In the effect of making the Titanforged races mortal, sure. But that was just the effect of removing their titanic aspect. Neither the Trolls nor the Tauren, nor the Elves, are naturally immortal. The Elves simply became immortal because they found the fount of arcane energy that was the well of eternity. It would be more correct to say that immortality is an aspect of the Titans, and that is what was taken from the Titan’s children.
That was undoubtably the Old god’s plans. Remove the Titan’s influence from Azeroth, and sway those living on the planet to their cause. Pity all their planning and foresight could not save them from a bunch of loot hungry vagrants.
There are several different categories of mortals on Azeroth:
Those that were created by the Old Gods, like the aqir and their descendants (mantid, nerubians, etc.).
Those that were created by the Titans, like the titan-forged and their descendants (humans, gnomes, etc.).
Those that arose on Azeroth naturally after the Titans ordered the planet, like trolls and the anthropomorphic descendants of Wild Gods (tauren, furbolg, etc.).
Those that came from other worlds like the orcs and draenei.
Only the first and second categories have had explicit Old God interference in their evolutionary history.
Chronicles tells us that life in the universe was seeded by ‘shards of fractured Light’, rather than the Void, which would give rise to elementals and eventually other forms of life on other worlds. Whether that continues to be true or is dismissed as a misunderstanding on behalf of the author of Chronicles is anyone’s guess, however.
Regardless, it appears as if mortality is independent from the Void, or at least, as independent as it can be when reality is influenced by all six cosmic forces to some extent.
There are also those mortal beings whose species originated as elemental life forms, and changed into flesh when exposed to the proliferation of Life energies caused by the world-soul’s spilled blood. Which is arguably similar in concept to how the descendants of the Breakers on Draenor became flesh through exposure to the released energies of the slain Sporemounds.
Dragons/protodragons are the most notably stated native example of this on Azeroth, but theoretically any number of species that emerged from the planetwide explosion of organic life (including trolls or tauren) might ultimately have descended from elemental precursors that became flesh.
Said Light also had Life Energy in it before the clash back when it was a great sea of Light and Life as the Chronicle put it.
Basically Light and Life clashed against the Void and as shards of Light scattered across the Cosmos they dispersed the Life inside them leaving only the Light they embodied to become Naaru.
The Chronicle incidentally doesn’t exactly state where the Titans came from merely stating that they are more extraordinary than the Naaru(after describing the Naaru’s origin).
The SL gets souls from everywhere. That soul river in Oribos pouring into the Maw isn’t just Azeroth, it’s souls coming from worlds all over the universe. So there’s no shortage of anima.
It’s unique lore(as far as I know) to Warcraft, but the Old Gods turning robots into people never really sat well with me. Just seems less logical the more everything is explored. The Shadow/Void tentacle monsters turned robots into living creatures… Okay.
It would make sense if the Old Gods weren’t tied to nothingness. I don’t know why they did that. Old Gods would fit better into the Life cosmology. You know, uncontrolled growth. Being the giant flesh bags they are.
It’s not so much that they turned the titan-forged into flesh and blood. It’s called the Curse of Flesh because of its primary symptom to the observers.
The actual process seems to be that Yogg-Saron’s Curse effectively broke down structural safeguards (called “matrix destabilization” in titan parlance) that were built into titan-forged to prevent the natural process of elementally composed life forms turning into flesh in the presence of concentrated Life energies. So by destabilizing those safeguards, the Curse rendered the titan-forged - themselves composed of earthen elemental material - vulnerable to the same process that affects elemental organisms when sufficiently exposed to high Life energy concentrations, i.e. the process that caused elemental dragons to become protodragons on Azeroth and each subsequent evolution of Breakers to become increasingly organic on Draenor.
So as entropic agents of the Void, a Curse that breaks down and destabilizes something’s resistance to change is rather in keeping with the Old Gods’ nature.
Since when is metal turning into flesh natural? I don’t mean to attack you, I know some of the lore supports, but it doesn’t make sense. Like with Dragons, that’s another issue I have. We learned they were once elementals and turned into flesh beings, but they also call ‘players’ mortal, like they are somehow above them. Yet, Ysera went to stink town too. Because Elune stepped in, not sure how she has any say in this.
But that just just pile on how convoluted everything is. Titans reforge worlds, Old Gods corrupt it, and they goto the Shadowlands to fuel Life beings.
Because they can drive the fleshy people into madness and slavery, and that doesn’t work so well against robots.
It doesn’t really make sense with your average dragon, but the Aspects were immortal in that they did not age. Malygos and Deathwing would have lived forever if nobody had killed them.
Even average dragons had something like functional immortality.
Both Korialstrasz and Tyranostrazs were active in the War of the Ancients through to the modern times.
In the WarCraft universe, it would seem that when an element-comprised life form (which, with them being shaped from stone, includes titan-forged) is sufficiently exposed to concentrated Life energy, that exposure often causes a gradual transformation into organic material.
Hence why the Life energies of Nature blooming on Azeroth turned the likes of stone, wind, etc. elemental dragons into protodragons, while the spreading of Life-charged spores from the slain Sporemounds on Draenor caused Grond’s stone descendants to become increasingly fleshy.
In WarCraft, this is seemingly just part of how Nature works. The proliferation of Life energy brings with it the propensity for producing organic life in the form of flesh, plant matter and the like. The Curse of Flesh basically rendered the affected titan-forged susceptible to that process.
The dragons call us “mortals” because while the Aspects were still empowered, they were kept basically ageless (in theory they might have eventually died of age, but Tyranastrasz being Alexstrasza’s first Prime Consort and living until after the Second War suggests he may have been elevated from a protodragon, so whatever the projected natural lifespan of a normal dragon was with the Aspects empowered, it’s possible that few if any have ever actually reached it.) With their power lessened and the Aspects made mortal, it’s unclear now if they’ll age more rapidly than before or if reasonably young dragons can still expect to live for tens of thousands of years.
That’s notwithstanding Bronzes, who theoretically might be able to still operate with what amounts to functional immortality by traversing the Timeways. (And really it remains somewhat unclear why past versions of Nozdormu and his flight couldn’t potentially visit our time with their powers still intact.)
In that case than Yogg-saron is a minion of Life and not a minion of the Old Gods because it was he who cursed the Titanforged with The Curse of Flesh.
Don’t get me wrong, I really find the lore you present interesting because it would change all known lore about the Old Gods and the nature of the cosmos if it was true. I kind of want what you are saying to be true because it makes a lot of sense that Life emerged from the Shadowlands as nacasnt spores.
Something to keep in mind is that while they have their own particular powers unique to their realms, every cosmic force frequently uses their power to manipulate all of the tools within reach when interacting with the Great Dark, i.e. the overlapping “intersection” wherein they all coexist in balance, even if those tools technically fall into the sphere of another agency.
Hence we have the Burning Legion utilizing enslaved voidspawn as warlocks do, despite being at odds with the Void. Or the titans using their knowledge, magic and technology to categorize, define and shape stuff from every cosmic force in the process of reordering a planet.
Yogg-Saron wasn’t a minion of Life; organic life was just perceived as easier for him and the other Old Gods to corrupt and subvert than the rigidly Ordered makeups, so he weakened the protections that the titans had built into the titan-forged so they would eventually “devolve” into forms more readily susceptible to his and the other Old Gods’ influence.
The metallic and earthen titan-forged were specifically built to be resistant (albeit not 100% immune) to the Old Gods’ influence and physically capable of overpowering their creatures. Organic life lacks that inherent resistance and durability, so allowing the Life energies of Azeroth’s blooming biosphere to turn the former into the latter was, in Yogg-Saron’s estimation, reducing his captors into a weaker form of life that could be more easily subverted and eventually overthrown by him, his brethren and their swarms of minions when they finally escaped.
And he was both right and wrong. On the one hand, we wouldn’t have stuff like the Twilight’s Hammer Cult running around with armies in service to the Old Gods if the world was still dominated by titan-forged armies whose loyalties couldn’t be so readily swayed, and its more generally a lot easier for their aqir and n’raqi to butcher squishy humans and dwarves than it was to do the same against the original metal vrykul and stone earthen. On the other hand, stripping that rigid adherence to purpose has allowed the free will, creativity and survival impulse of the resulting mortal races to compensate in a billion other, unanticipated ways for their acquired physical frailties.
The cosmic forces bleeding into one another does make absolute sense. So does organic matter trying to destroy non organic matter. It really makes me wonder who or what created the Titans.