The Ethereals
The Ethereals are a race we’ve encountered plenty since our time on Outland during the Burning Crusade, but their modern appearance is not what they have always been. Prior to their modern bandaged forms, they were the native people of K’aresh, an arid and vibrant planet ruled over by the Ethereum. Led by Nexus-King Salhadaar, their planet thrived across its many species… until it was discovered by Dimensius the All-Devouring.
As a being of the Void, Dimensius has a singular goal: the consumption of reality itself. At the time, the people of K’aresh debated over how Dimensius had discovered their planet, but the reason for his presence paled in comparison to the threat he posed. When he discovered K’aresh, Dimensius first acted by opening countless gateways into the Void and the Twisting Nether, barraging the planet in void and arcane energies alike.
One of the races of K’aresh worked quickly to defend their cities against Dimensius’ attack, but while their barriers managed to shield them from the power of the Void, they were unable to prevent the raw arcane power from destroying their corporeal forms and infusing their souls with energy. Now known as Ethereals, they bound their souls by enchanted bandages, allowing them to use their new forms to fight back against Dimensius.
After years of conflict, Dimensius eventually grew powerful enough to manifest an army of the Void, forcing the Ethereals to flee K’aresh and journey into the Twisting Nether. Now driven by revenge, Nexus-King Salhadaar and his Nexus-Princes twisted the Ethereum into an instrument of vengeance against Dimensius, utilizing their remaining resources to hunt the Void Lord down and gather enough power to defeat him.
Not all Ethereals agreed with Salhadaar’s actions, however. Seeing the Ethereum’s actions as increasingly dangerous acts of madness, a handful of Nexus-Princes chose to leave and form their own cartels. Some, like the Consortium, became traders who journeyed to places like Outland to benefit from its riches, while others, like the Protectorate, formed in active opposition to the Ethereum and the threat they posed to their people.
Most of our encounters with the Ethereals across Outland came either from amicable trading with the Consortium, or hostilities with the Ethereum in places like Auchindoun. The most relevant of their stories happens in Netherstorm, where we find the Protectorate in the midst of investigating the Ethereum and their recent actions. After some digging, we find that the Ethereum have done the unthinkable: in their efforts to defeat Dimensius, they were turning themselves into Void creatures.
With their operations in Netherstorm led by Nexus-King Salhadaar himself, the Protectorate considers it an opportunity to eliminate the Ethereum once and for all. After destroying the machines used to transform them, we take the fight directly to Salhadaar, and ultimately defeat him. The Protectorate then turned their gaze to other matters, but Outland was not the last we saw of void ethereals.
During our fight against the Legion on Argus, we encountered another group of void ethereals, the Shadowguard. Drawn to the city of Eredath by the void-corrupted naaru L’ura, the Shadowguard attempted to use her power to plunge Argus into darkness, but with the help of Alleria Windrunner and Locus-Walker, a void ethereal with control over his mind, we were able to stop them.
In more recent times, void ethereals have continued to show up. A group known as the Netherguard tried to corrupt the Sunwell and transform a group of elven scholars into a new group of ethereals but were thwarted by Alleria, who took the now-altered Void Elves under her wing. In the lead-up to The War Within, the Shadowguard appeared once more, this time in the service of Xal’atath both to attack Ulduar and taunt Alleria within Telogrus Rift.
During her exploits in Undermine however, Xal’atath was thwarted by void ethereals rather than being aided by them. Instead of serving her like we (and Gallywix) assumed, a void ethereal named Phase-Thief Azir undermined (hah) her ongoing schemes by stealing the Dark Heart and escaping through the Void. Our final shot of The War Within’s ongoing story shows Azir holding the Dark Heart in front of a vast, void-broken planet, one that is almost certainly the remnants of K’aresh.
With Xal’atath’s place in the void’s hierarchy as the Harbinger of Dimensius and the upcoming relevance of K’aresh, it all brings up a question: who is Dimensius, and why is he so important?
Dimensius
Dimensius the All-Devouring is an entity known as a Void Lord, one of Warcraft’s strongest cosmic entities. They are the highest echelon of power within the Void, above even the Old Gods, but that power comes with limitations. As beings of pure dark energy, they can only manifest physically for a short time, but even those small periods can have devastating consequences. The most well known of those consequences was on K’aresh, but Dimensius has attacked other planets as well.
Long before the Draenei’s millennia-long exodus, they can recall the tale of a naaru named T’uure. In its quest to protect the people of the universe from darkness, it traveled from planet to planet to lend its aid, and eventually found itself on the planet of Karkora. Seeing the planet facing a similar dilemma to the Ethereals of K’aresh, T’uure chose to expend its life force to shatter into fragments, sending out a holy nova across the planet that washed away the darkness and banished Dimensius back to the Void. T’uure’s remaining shards would one day be found by the draenei and transformed into the Holy Priest artifact, but Dimensius himself has ties to a very different priest artifact: Xal’atath.
Very little is known of the relationship between Dimensius and Xal’atath, only that she is known as his ‘Harbinger’. Long before her imprisonment within the Blade of the Black Empire, Dimensius bestowed upon her a staff known as Voidsong, Stave of the Harbinger, the purpose of which is unknown. What is known, however, is that Azeroth is not the first planet Xal’atath has visited.
During her attack on Alleria and the void elves of Telogrus Rift, Xal’atath’s presence is thwarted by Locus-Walker, who knows her by name, and from a time before she held the title of Harbinger. Likewise, he explains that the Ethereal homeworld of K’aresh once experienced the voices of the Radiant Song in the same way Azeroth is today… just before it was destroyed by Dimensius.
Despite his relationship to Xal’atath and her ongoing schemes, The War Within is not the first time we’ve encountered Dimensius. In fact, we fought Dimensius back in The Burning Crusade, alongside the Ethereals of the Protectorate. Shortly after Nexus-King Salhadaar’s defeat, they turned their eyes towards the nearby Mana-Forge, where Dimensius was in the midst of opening a Void tear to enter into reality. Using that vulnerable state to their advantage, they cut Dimensius off from the Void, and subsequently killed him.
Like many things with the Void however, his death in Netherstorm wasn’t quite the whole picture. According to Xal’atath, that was merely a fragment of the Void Lord not fully manifested, and his true self still remains at large… with his gaze now seemingly locked upon Azeroth.
Xal’atath whispers: I long for the day our masters can truly pass into this realm. You have only seen fragments, shadows; the faintest of echoes. Ask the Ethereals what one of these manifestations are capable of.
What Comes Next?
Thanks to Locus-Walker’s revelations, we know now that Dimensius was drawn to K’aresh due to the presence of a Worldsoul slumbering at its core. The fate of that Worldsoul is unknown, but it’s clear that Dimensius now has a similar interest in Azeroth. With Xal’atath as his Harbinger, he seems poised to usher the void onto Azeroth just like he did on planets like K’aresh and Karkora, and there’s no better place for a gateway to the Void than in Quel’thalas.
The various magical wells of Azeroth have been used time and again as portals to facilitate the invasion of Azeroth by greater cosmic forces. The original Well of Eternity was used during the War of the Ancients to usher in the Legion and nearly summon Sargeras himself to the planet, and the Nightwell of Suramar was nearly used by Gul’dan to open a rift to Argus during the most recent Legion invasion.
But while both of those fonts of power are now gone, the Sunwell still remains, a font once used to summon Kil’jaeden to the world during the climax of the Burning Crusade. That invasion was thwarted, but in its place, the once-corrupted Sunwell was infused with the core of a dying void naaru and used to rekindle it into a font of Light. That Light has offered the blood elves a cure for their addiction to magic, but the naaru’s core at its heart also poses a new vulnerability to corruption.
That vulnerability was put on display in the lead-up to Battle for Azeroth when Alleria visited her homeland again for the first time. Intent on seeing the Sunwell again after a thousand years, she tried to touch its sacred waters — and in the process, attracted the attention of void ethereals looking to use the Sunwell as a gateway. That incursion was prevented as well and its culprits defeated, but the Sunwell was nearly corrupted in the process, stalled only by the timely intervention of Rommath, Thalyssra, and Alleria combining strengths to close the portal.
With the Ethereals at the forefront of our ongoing fight against the Void and Midnight rapidly approaching, the two concepts are bound to intertwine, and the question of what ethereals we might encounter remains as well. While Nexus-King Salhadaar was defeated by us in Netherstorm, he had transformed into a void being at that point along with many of his fellow Ethereum cohort. Phase-Thief Azir may have stolen the Dark Heart from Xal’atath, but his title does not suggest that he is the leader of the void ethereals fighting against Xal’atath. Perhaps Salhadaar or some other Nexus-Prince still remains to lead the Ethereum in their quest for vengeance.
There are many potential ways for the Ethereals to clash with Dimensius and his schemes for Azeroth in the coming days, but one thing is clear: both will play a vital role in the ongoing story of the Worldsoul Saga. Let us know how you think these story threads will all tie together as we approach Midnight!
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