They talk about how hard life is down there, how they’re slowly being killed off one by one…
So why not leave? The core way is repaired so why stay?
What’s the benefit? Living under a weird crystal sun that has major mood swings and gets you killed when it’s upset. And having angry spiders as next door neighbors… it hardly seems worth it.
Because they think the Arathi Kingdom still exists and they’re following a direct order from their king.
Didnt anduin say this is only a fraction of the empire? I thought it was implied that it does still exist.
I didn’t think there were any Arathi left on the surface. Unless, of course, there are Arathi on an undiscovered island or something.
They got teleported to a magical light rock. You can go ahead and tell the zealots to abandon this holy site.
Because they have no Mages that survived the crash which brought them there. The ONE mage that did survive, he didn’t know how to cast a portal. There’s a whole quest chain around this. And it ended badly for that one mage.
So, yeah, they’re literally stuck. They don’t know how/recall how they crashed (there was a storm) and their portal mages are dead.
moving is expensive bro
They’re not tho. They have flying airships and there’s a tunnel right to the surface.
It seems like a major plot hole
They also establish trade with the earthen during the questline, which makes it even more obvious that the surface is accessible.
If not for the part where the hostile spider army next door has functioning surface-to-air artillery, you’d be spot on.
It’s extremely difficult evacuating civilians (more to the point, orphaned children) in the best of circumstances.
Trying to do so while conducting a tactical retreat, in a war of two fronts, against two confirmed hostile enemies… and all while in an environment that switches from safe to hostile on a dime, and completely at random- with flying behemoths spawning out of thin air to boot- is all but impossible.
And you forgot to consider that they were unaware as to the status of the Earthen until just now; and were completely unsure if that was even safe harbor. None of their messengers ever made it to Dornagal.
So yeah, they are kinda stuck. This is one plot point that they go through considerable effort to make clear.
Something to keep in mind is that what we see in-game is something like at 1/10th scale for how big Azeroth really is.
This contingent of Arathi have only been in Hallowfall for a couple of decades. Faerin was a child when they arrived.
They were selling west from the “Arathi Empire” which split off from the Eastern Kingdoms a couple thousand years ago. This is before all of the game’s history has taken place. Listening to the story is that they were going to bring the Light to other people in a holy war to bring about Renilesh (their end of days).
During their trip west, a storm happened and they found themselves in the Hallowfall cavern. Though, none of this explains when they never moved to the service since they knew about the Earthen long before we (players) arrived in Khaz Algar. Maybe they felt some need to stay and engage the Nerubians.
Because they believe that crystal they are close to is sacred.
They can’t.
There’s a subplot about this with a mage trying to create a portal so they can go home.
They’ve been unable to leave with the Coreway broken.
Though theoretically nothing is stopping them now.
It does still exist, just not the portion in the Eastern Kingdoms.
They had access to the Ringing Deeps, but not Dornagol, until now.
If it wasn’t for us heroes being a diplomat the Arathi and Earthen wouldn’t even be speaking to each other. Something happened that soured their relationship and they stopped trading.
On a side note:
Faerin mentions the crystal turns purple sometimes for days but how do the Arathi know the time when there’s no daylight cycle? Their sense of time must be truly skewed.
What would players do if they left?
That mood swing really makes it hard for the people to do anything during it. They have basic civilians here. Noncombatants who will be of no help breaking through all the baddies. Only now after we have arrived they can be helped out of there, maybe.
They look it up on Wowhead
Maybe, but they seem decently advanced. They crafted air ships and built grand structures in a short time in a hostile land. It’s not unreasonable to think they keep an hourglass system for recording.