So I had been doing some pondering about Chronicle’s account of how the Kaldorei came to be, and it has been bugging me. The Zanadlari have been subjected to powerful arcane energy fields for tens of thousands of years and they didn’t evolve into elves. They just became buff chad trolls with glowing magic eyes. So, obviously there is more to it than that.
That is when it occurred to me the difference could be the Tear of Elune itself. We know after Azeroth was shaped by the Keepers according to the Titan’s plans the Pillars of Creation were lost and became scattered. What if the Dark Trolls found the Tear, and through it first communed with Elune? Prolonged exposure to its power through religious rituals may have over time changed them into something resembling Elune herself, the Kaldorei.
Curious what others have for thoughts on the matter.
they did, but thats just a well of arcane power. The Zanadlari have been around intense Arcane power for a vast amount of time and it never had that effect on them, so I do not think its as simple as “lots of arcane power”
Honestly I think its just a difference of scale. A magic well’s power to mutate is clearly on an entirely different level than any other magical power fields that have influenced evolution around Azeroth. Just look at the Nightborne and High Elves.
It is clear that the Dark Trolls (and other for that matter) have communed with Elune, or the Loa Lun as the Lun’alai as they would presumably refer to her, but I don’t think they did so through the Tear.
Ive been trying to explain why the night elves happen to look just like the Keepers of the Grove, and Cenarius himself, as well. The lower half is obviously his father… so his upper half is Elune?
I dont know if it was RPG material or not but I swear I remember reading at one point if you drank or tried diving into the well you sort of just… exploded/incinerated from the power
This is me also trying to make lore cohesive, also. Chronicle has no account of the Pillars of Creation as they had not been thought up yet, much less understanding that Tears of Elune are artifacts granted by Elune herself directly.
99% sure that’s RPG since some moonwells are made with diluted WoE water and we have canon dwarves or trolls bathing in a moonwell at one point in some canon material
IMO if they do “Dark Trolls drank the WoE whereas everyone else didn’t” it would be a neat foil to Orcs drinking demon blood.
My only headcanon is that since the mural in the Tomb of Sargeras has the Tear of Elune on a staff, the Staff of Elune that became the Scythe of Elune was originally the staff that held the tear.
Aren’t moonwells just blessed fountains meant to hold small bits of Elune’s power? I think the big difference is that the well was just such a huge piece of raw power added to Azeroth you can’t really compare it to the lvl of influence the Zandalari were exposed to. Like it’s the leftovers from the Titans removing an Old God from the planet that almost tore it apart. The scale is the tipping point.
I mean not just, they contain some arcane water from the well of eternity underneath the world tree at Hyjal. The moonwell must also be blessed by nature and the light of Elune, so they’re pretty much a triple whammy.
I seem to recall that the first well of eternity also pretty much dwarfed the other three big wells in size and likely in power (i.e. the second well, the sunwell and the nightwell), so there’s likely an element of that.
There is a couple rather roundabout thing related to the elves which have a potential to be something interesting.
There is a very peculiar part from Warcraft 3 (and not altered in the reforged version). For the reference:
(relevant part)
Blindly they built their kingdoms upon stolen knowledge and conceit…
However, that could not refer to humans, because they were taught by the high elve. And here it gets tricky. First of all, the exact details of their journey are not known, so there is a room for something not yet revealed to have a role in how they became who they are.
Secondly, appearance of the high elves attributed to their transformation after they were exiled. However, the dancing high elf statues could be seen in both Tomb of Sargeras, and Well of Eternity dungeon. So, how can there be such imagery if that kind of elves supposedly could not exist during the pre-Sundering days?
2nd thing is the story about Azshara. Specifically: why she changed so much. She was about the most devoted worshipper of Elune up until “something” happened. And then suddenly we see no more Elune in relation to Azshara (who abandoned whom is not clear), a rapid expanding of the Empire, imagery of night elves using Pillars of Creation ( 1) how did they get them? 2) why was Aegis used against dragons?), a statue in Nazjatar, depicting Azshara with similar markings as Tyrande got as a night warrior.
Azshara is a mystery, a fun and potentially great character.
But, going back down to earth, yes, those stories have potential to be something amazing, I am not sure I want to see the current team dealing with them. Not after I saw how the night warrior part was handled, or how they follow up their “mysteries” (who / why burned the tree™ and such) with underwhelming reveals.
There was once a tribe of Dark cave Trolls, and that tribe was living in the mount Hyjal caves. They were living peaceful life there for many hundreds of years.
But once, in a sunny day, they suddenly took all their belongings, and decided to leave their warm home. They have traveled HALF of the world, to live in the forest, like their cousins forest Trolls.
But, magic waters of the nearest lake have transformed them into a new creatures, with a body similar to Cenarius (Elune’s son). And since the day one, those new creatures started to worship Elune, the real half titan that really exists.
So, why trolls really decided to do this? And why in Azeroth history only 2 races were transformed by the magical waters (taurens and elves), and both those races were in love with Nature (Elune by the way is a half Titan of the Nature pantheon)?
I actually do believe, that it was Elune and Cenarius who convinced trolls (and maybe taurens also), to live at the magical lake. It was done in purpose.
I remember that Naaru in Legion have told us, that Illidan was chosen by the Light and Darkness long before he have even born. But Illidan is one of the old Night Elves, who came almost from the start. So, some one have choose Illidan before Night Elves race was even created.
Night Elves defiantly are not just some accident…
I don’t think just worshipping Elune over time would have been enough to transform them, since the Lun’alai Have been doing that for thousands of years and remained Zandalari.
A Tear of Elune might have had that effect, but do we know the whereabouts of that particular Pillar of Creation at that time? It kind of seems to me that if that artifact was prominent during that time period then it would have been mentioned.
We do not actually know the whereabouts of any of the Pillars of Creation; Blizzard simply qualifies them as being ‘lost’ for a long time to explain why the Chronicles never happens to mention them.
I don’t believe it was worship itself that caused the change, but perhaps power unleashed during religious rites from the tear did so. The other option is the Tear of Elune + the Well made a gateway Elune manifested out of directly, and she then shaped the Kaldorei out of the Trolls herself.
That might help make sense of why the Dark Trolls thought she ‘slept’ in the well during the day. And how they conveniently look so much like natives of the plane of Life such as Cenarius. Also, apparently Elune has a plan for the Kaldorei, which might indicate she has had a hand in how they evolved from the get go.
The Well of Eternity’s waters being deadly to directly touch was from the WotA novels. So while technically canon unless otherwise stated, it’s hard to say if the Devs have remembered that detail.
It’s also possible that their deadliness might have been symptomatic of the waters having become darkened and chaotic from overuse by the Highborne. Which could explain why the calmed and balanced waters beneath Nordrassil aren’t lethal, as Alexstrasza told Malfurion that as long as the World Tree warded the second Well, its waters would never become clouded and violent as the first one had.
That said, I get the impression that the Well’s waters aren’t just arcane energy. The way life bloomed explosively from exposure to the radiating energies creates the impression that as Azeroth’s life-blood, the Well’s waters are probably also supercharged with a bunch of the concentrated, life-giving Spirit that the world-soul had been accumulating.
Which could explain why the effects of its mutations from direct and prolonged exposure living on the Well’s shores differed from those of being around plain old ambient arcane energy or even the diluted effects of the spilloff from the initial wound.
Closest I could think of is on the staff weilded by a person in Azshara’s clothing:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/zqQLw
The glass is broken, but the part with Aegis can be seen in Cathedral of Eternal Night
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/VdOLEN
Chronicles mention a use of the Well:
All that remained of the scar was an immense lake of scintillating energy that the keepers would call the “Well of Eternity.” Thereafter, the power of this wondrous fount would be infused in the ailing world, helping life to take root and bloom across the globe.
Which works well with another part about the Pantheon:
The titans of the Pantheon came to realize that order was crucial to finding others of their kind. On each world they encountered, they employed techniques to ascertain whether a world-soul was present. The Pantheon would first pacify the world’s raging elemental populations. Then, they would reshape the world, forming great mountains, fathomless seas, and roiling skies. Lastly, the titans would seed myriad life-forms across the newly ordered world. In doing so, the Pantheon hoped to call forth the world-soul and help bring it to maturity. Most of the time, however, the worlds visited by the titans proved inert.
Why would the “life” they seeded would require such “help” - I have no idea.
Supposedly world-souls would suffuse with energy the worlds where they are present. But whatever we have on Azeroth was hevily modified for not fully known reason.
It gets even odder when you know there is a formal pantheon of Life now, whose job would presumably be to see to it that life was seeded and thrived across the cosmos.
There is a number of things which do not quite align between the expanded cosmology and the chronicle telling of things.
Circumstances on Azeroth (namely the Old Gods) led to a sequence of events that culminated in organic life taking root on its own by way of the wound that resulted from the extraction of Y’shaarj.
Had that not happened, the lion’s share of the Spirit on the planet would have remained in the world-soul, and the Pantheon would have probably had to artificially seed the surface with life as they’d done elsewhere, as doing so is portrayed as instrumental to encouraging the growth and maturation of a slumbering titan.
As old as the lore is, we learned from the Discs of Norgannon back in Uldaman that the implementation of life form “matrices” on worlds was something the titans used with regularity in the process of reordering worlds.
Azeroth (and technically that first Old God-corrupted world Sargeras cleaved) was an unusual situation; the titans usually couldn’t tell at first if a given world had a titan inside, and their reordering was geared toward promoting the growth of life to hopefully incite a response from a world-soul inside. Most of the time they only found out if a world-soul existed at all by whether or not they detected a response to the proliferation of life they nurtured on the surface.
On Azeroth, they discovered right away that there was a world-soul because they’d been drawn to the planet by her tormented nightmares thanks to Old Gods infesting the planet, as Sargeras was similarly drawn to that first infested world when he discovered the Void Lords’ plans.
That said, they would still have probably seeded life there, had the wounding of the planet not occurred as it did and life not bloomed as a result, because promoting life on a planet containing a world-soul seemingly benefits the development and eventual maturation of the slumbering titan within.
Moreover the process regularly starting with a quelling of raging elementals (rather than that being unique to Azeroth) suggests that the elements being violently contentious without outside justification (like corruption or something) is recognized by the titans as a symptom of a planet potentially (though not definitively) containing a world-soul, as it’s indicative of an imbalance of Spirit, pointing to a possibility of said Spirit being hogged by a nascent titan. So while unusual circumstances drew them to Azeroth, ordinarily they may have looked specifically for worlds where the elements were running amok to varying degrees, seeing that as a red flag that such worlds were more likely than others to contain a titan.
The thing is, the titans are the only pantheon thus far that seems to be localized to the Great Dark, so they can do everything there hands-on (well, “hands-on” through their machines and constructs.) The cosmic forces of Life, like Death, presumably have to operate according to some form of rules and limitations due to their domain being separate from our own.
I dunno, even before Sargeras malfunctioned Demons were still terrorizing the Great Dark. The Old Gods and Naaru seem to be representatives of the Void and Light respectively. Elune seems to ignore any rules on the matter when it is important for her, also.
It just would not surprise me if like seemingly every cosmic force who noticed Azeroth that Elune (as Life) were to of put their own agents on Azeroth in the form of the Kaldorei.
