So, I have had this creeping thought grow in me throughout my playthrough of TWW campaign. Is Xal’Atath N’Zoth? Do we have confirmation we will indeed meet a fifth Old God in this saga? Xal’Atath and N’Zoth are connected in various ways. Xal’Atath has manipulated people into being where N’Zoth needed them when he needed them there. Both seem to be powerful, but not quite as powerful as some past foes (N’Zoth being outright stated as the weakest of the four Old God’s of Azeroth and Xal’Atath chasing the Dark Heart so intently and being as upset as she was at the end of Chapter 5 when the thing happened) and both being master manipulators.
Xal’Atath epitaph is Blade of the Black Empire, we know the appearance we see isn’t hers and neither was the dagger form. How farfetched is it to think that part of N’Zoth was used to create an object that could be outside the prison to help him manipulate mortals. For all we know the dagger form of her has been around since pre-WotA, which would make her nearly as old as Malfurion as well as… Wait, hold up… The fish that N’Zoth sent to Azshara after the well exploded didn’t have a name… COULD that have been Xal’Atath’s first appearance?
Ok, tin foil hat moment aside, I’m serious about the beginning stuff. There are so many similarities between Xal’Atath and N’Zoth, what do y’all think the odds of her being him are? A La Marica/Radagon
So, here’s the only reason I can’t accept this as THE explanation for her. We have been told by lore that Void Lords cannot manifest in our plane of existence, that’s why they made Old God’s and being like Dimenscious. So, according to the lore she cannot be a Void Lord herself or a manifestation of one. Then again, according to lore the Arathi were feared and highly respected humans that could certainly figure out how to fly up a flight of stairs with their massive air fleet soooooo maybe this is the Expac lore gets thrown to the wind.
We have all been told several times that Teldrassil was the first world tree only to have that retconned several times.
There’s also the consideration that Xalatath HASN’T manifested yet, or they are unable to.
She certainly seems to be a being that is intangible at will. But just like they did with almost every other bit of established lore pre-shadowlands (rest in a piss filled grave), I would tentatively forget everything you knew about the void lords.
Except Chronicles 3 has released since then and confirmed these things and expanded on Old God lore, which is where the idea of a fifth Old God stemmed from. There is an art page depicting the Old Gods with a mysterious fifth we haven’t seen or heard about yet. So, we can’t forget the lore we know to be confirmed since the time you’re talking about.
The first rule of any avid lore enjoyer is to completely and utterly disregard the chronicles because they are absolutely guaranteed to become irrelevant by the end of the expansion’s raid cycle.
Edit: If it doesn’t come from Brann Bronzebeards lips, its not canon.
No, I think Xal’atath is a Void Lord whose purpose is to check if the Old Gods were performing their designated functions of preparing Azeroth to be consumed by the Void.
So what I think happened is that she arrived in Azeroth through the Beledar, saw that the Old Gods decided to rule over Azeorth instead of fully corrupting it, they noticed her presence and plotted against her, eventually trapping her inside the blade, so she couldn’t report back.
If the black blood is hers it means her real body is probably trapped somewhere nearby leaking like yoggy into icecrown but the titans only recorded 4 when they showed up so she was already gone by then.
The zones between Kalimdor and Pandaria; right between 2 old gods homes one of which is Y’Shaarj who was stated as the strongest of the old gods. Could have been a territorial dispute where him and C’thun wanted more space so they got xala out the way.
Theyve flip flopped the 5th old god thing since like vanilla so id say shes a manifestation of that and now that we’ve let her out and removed her competition shes trying to speed run azeroths corruption.
