Teldrassil was never a good idea.
There, I said it.
I hadn’t completely agreed with Shan’do Stormrage’s assessment that it was necessary to sacrifice Nordrassil — and our immortality — to stop the demon Archimonde, but it had been done. Instead of trying to regain what we had lost by trying to grow a new World Tree, however, we should have been more focused on reclaiming some of the other things we had lost. The forest now known as “Felwood”, for one. The regions of Ashenvale that had become infested with orcs, for another. If we’d cleared out the orcs from Ashenvale when we had the chance, then their so-called allies the undead might not have defiled the Dor’danil Barrow Den and killed my grandfather…
And perhaps if we had not been so determined to “not interfere with the development of less advanced societies*” (utter rubbish, given our interactions with the furbolgs), we might have been the ones to save the tauren from the centaur, denying the orcs one of their most valuable allies. The tauren could have been our allies, instead — not just the ones who’d been invited into the Cenarion Circle, all of them. Hadn’t it been my own grandmother who had argued that the existence (and sophistication) of music created by the tauren tribes demonstrated that they were a more intelligent and advanced society than their centaur, harpy, quilboar, and gnoll enemies?
But I digress. Teldrassil. It was Shan’do Staghelm’s idea. When the Aspects, especially my beloved Ysera, initially refused to give it their blessing, that should have been a clue that it really wasn’t a good idea. After all, hadn’t Shan’do Staghelm already been involved in the creation of a failed World Tree, Andrassil-that-had-become-Vordrassil up in Northrend? Like Andrassil, which had created the leak into the Emerald Dream that allowed the Emerald Nightmare to begin, Teldrassil also was corrupted.
Furthermore, Teldrassil and Darnassus had only even existed for, what, fifteen years? Twenty? Maybe thirty? Even for a young kaldorei like myself, less than a millennium old, born after the War of the Shifting Sands, that was still an absolutely insignificant amount of time. I didn’t understand how any kaldorei could truly think of Teldrassil or Darnassus as “home”, except perhaps the handful of children who had been born there.
Watching Teldrassil burn, I was infuriated by yet another Horde atrocity, and I grieved for the innocent lives that I could not save. But for the tree itself? I found no sorrow in me for the loss of a false home.
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* Yes, that is a sideways reference to Star Trek‘s Prime Directive.
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Remember, this is an RP story! Kerithian’s opinions are not necessarily my opinions!
…Okay, maybe they are. Apologies to my Night Elf friends, but Darnassus and Teldrassil have never particularly captured my imagination. I don’t dislike Darnassus the way I deeply dislike Undercity — it just never “clicked” with me (I am glad to see Undercity gone — definitely no tears there at all!). When it comes to Night Elf zones, I’ve always preferred Ashenvale to Teldrassil.
I played through the War of Thorns first as Horde, then as Alliance. I’m glad I chose to do it with my Rogue on the Horde side; I don’t think any of my other characters (except perhaps the Warlock) could have stomached doing what Sylvanas commanded. My heart ached through the whole thing, as Horde as well as Alliance.
Look, I play Horde because I want to play Tauren and Blood Elves. I don’t play Horde because I like or agree with the role they are too often given in the overarching plotlines of the game. I am tired, so, so very tired, of the Horde always having to be the bad guys. And there are those who might say, oh, but the Alliance sometimes does bad guy things too — but the Horde always has to do more and worse bad guy things. For example, the things the Horde sees the Alliance doing versus the things the Alliance sees the Horde doing in the first part of the Jade Forest storyline, or the Horde killing the Astranaar guards with a swift poison versus the Alliance using sleeping powder on the Horde guards in the captured furbolg village in the War of Thorns.
The kaldorei have now suffered a population decimation on par with that suffered by the quel’dorei when Arthas and the Scourge burned the Dead Scar through Eversong Woods and what is now the Ghostlands. The Warbringers: Sylvanas short draws that parallel very clearly. I’m not sure what I want to say about that beyond pointing it out…
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Kerithian is the granddaughter of my Night Elf Mage, Keriluna, through Keriluna’s son, Ceredion. She was born, raised, and spent most of her early life at Feathermoon Stronghold in Feralas before becoming one of the caretakers of Nordrassil during its recovery after the Battle of Mount Hyjal, then one of the vanguard on the Molten Front during the Cataclysm. The events relating to her grandparents that she mentions are described in Keriluna’s Song.
Keriluna herself survived the inferno by virtue of not being in Darnassus when it happened. When she resigned her position as one of the Temple of the Moon musicians at the beginning of Cataclysm to pursue the Arcane arts, she moved herself and her belongings to Feathermoon Stronghold — a place that had long been something of a secondary home for her — so that she could study under the tutelage of Estulan.
I didn’t actually move the character to Feathermoon Stronghold and set her Hearthstone there until a week or two ago, though, shortly before playing through the War of Thorns campaign.
On the other side of the faction fence, Kivrinne had been traveling back and forth between her home lab in Undercity and Plaguewood Tower in Eastern Plaguelands, where her on-again, off-again romantic interest Argent Apothecary Judkins resides, for some time. After her friends Parqual and Vellcinda failed to return from the events chronicled in Before the Storm, she moved herself and her belongings out to Plaguewood Tower permanently.
As with Keriluna, I didn’t actually move the character there until recently, and in this case, the nearest place where she could reset her Hearthstone is Light’s Hope Chapel.
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