Know Your Lore: Through The Dark Portal Again

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

Okay. Up front and with no fanfare - we're going to spoiler country. Huge, gigantic, terrifying spoilers for Warlords of Draenor and its Tanaan Jungle opening experience aplenty. I'm not going to waste time being coy or making cryptic statements about which guy is doing what. I'm going to drop spoilers, lots of them, like a rockslide so if that's soething you don't want to read, this is not the post for you. I've now burned an entire opening paragraph warning you about these spoilers, so you have absolutely no excuse for not avoiding them if you're of a mind to. '

Warlords of Draenor opens with a crisis at the Dark Portal. A new threat, a massive armed force of maniacal orcs have stormed the Portal and poured out into Azeroth, destroying both the Horde and Alliance bases in the area and making alliances with the local ogres. Once this threat is dealt with, it becomes clear that as long as the Portal remains open on the other end, the threat will continue. And so, once again, Azeroth must send forces through the Portal and onto an alien world. All of this is very familiar, and yet, once they set foot on the other side, these heroes of Azeroth find not the blasted and surreal Hellfire Peninsula, but rather the Tanaan Jungle, as terrifyingly lush as it was in distant memories of the time before the Rise of Gul'Dan's Horde.

What interests me here is that the nominal head of this enterprise is the Archmage Khadgar, who is certainly one of the oldest, most powerful and most respected mages on the whole of Azeroth. It's certainly a suitable choice, because when the forces of Azeroth led the charge through the Dark Portal and to the red world of Draenor after the Second War, Khadgar was there, too. Indeed, this earlier expedition (the Alliance Expedition) saw some of the Alliance's greatest heroes step through the Portal and onto a very different Draenor - one twisted and rendered nearly unlivable by the warlock magics of the old Horde.

The story of that Expedition is one we've told before. Without belaboring it, Khadgar and his allies Turalyon, Alleria, Danath Trollbane and Kurdran Wildhammer led the Expedition to Draenor, fought Ner'zhul and his Horde of Draenor, and ultimately sealed the Dark Portal just before Ner'zhul managed to tear Draenor apart by recklessly using powerful magical artifacts to open several more portals. Khadgar and the others were trapped in the resulting shattered world of Outland for many years, until the Doom Lord Kazzak used another potent artifact to reopen the Dark Portal and retreat back through it.

Thus, Khadgar is uniquely suited to leading another Expedition to another Draenor. For the Archmage, there is a kind of dreadful symmetry at play here. Yet there are also many changes. To start with, this Expedition was at least initially composed of both Horde and Alliance forces - we can clearly see Thrall and Maraad battling side by side on the steps of the Dark Portal leading the charge. And once they get through the portal, things get interesting.

For starters, the difference between the Dark Portal on the Draenor side and the original is that this time, it's powered directly by warlocks. Originally it took a mighty working between Medivh (possessed by Sargeras) and the entire Shadow Council (following Gul'dan's orders) to open the Portal, since both sides needed to be created and opened. But this time, the Draenor portal is intended to open onto the already created Dark Portal on our Azeroth, and so instead of the mighty ritual of before, a new power source was utilized. Three powerful warlocks of the Shadow Council, Teron'gor, Cho'gall, and Gul'dan himself, instead serve as the Portal's power source. This raises many, many questions. How did the Iron Horde know how to do that? How did they capture three of the most powerful warlocks of the Shadow Council like that? (Gul'dan we see helpless at the end of the Warlords cinematic, but the other two are as yet a mystery.) However the Iron Horde gained this knowledge and built the Dark Portal (did Gul'dan have a notebook with some totally awesome Dark Portal sketches in it?) the fact is clear that they did build it and found a way to use the three warlocks to power it.

And so, the Horde and Alliance forces that came through it to stop the Iron Horde were forced to do the unthinkable - they released the three most powerful and evil members of the Shadow Council in order to prevent them from powering the Dark Portal. Then, of course, the survivors of the Expedition are forced to battle their way through the Iron Horde's stronghold, making their way through a coliseum and slave pens, before finally battling their way to one of the Iron Horde's own massive superweapons and using it to destroy the Dark Portal. Having accomplished this, the Horde and Alliance forces go their separate ways and establish their own competing capitals and strongholds on the world of Draenor, because all that successful cooperation we just did should be rewarded by internecine warfare between two forces that want the exact same thing, to stop the Iron Horde.

Also, frankly, I still don't understand why we didn't just rip Teron'gor, Cho'gall and Gul'dan into little tiny pieces. Wouldn't that stop the Dark Portal and benefit us in the long run? Sometimes I wish I could explain things to my character.

Putting that aside, one thing remains - the naaru are involved in the plans of the Shadow Council and the Iron Horde alike. In Shadowmoon Valley, Ner'zhul uses a fallen naaru's void stage as a weapon against the draenei of the Temple of Karabor, focusing Velen to sacrifice himself to restore K'ara to the light cycle of the naaru. Similarly, Cho'gall does so at Oshu'gun at the behest of Gul'dan. This raises many questions as well. One of them is this - in our timeline, a group of naaru led by A'dal was summoned in their dimensional ship, Tempest Keep, by Archmage Khadgar. The exact same Archmage Khadgar who just walked through the Dark Portal to this Draenor.

It wasn't the draenei of our timeline that summoned A'dal. It was Archmage Khadgar, the very same Archmage Khadgar who now finds himself in a new timeline, one where fel magics are being used to help enslave naaru to use them as living weapons and where Velen himself had to sacrifice himself to stop the void-cycle threatening to destroy his people. In other words, what is the Archmage waiting for? He should get on the horn to the A'dal of this world, and while he's at it, he should make clear that under no circumstances should they leave Tempest Keep with a skeleton crew so that one of their own can get kidnapped and used as a power source by blood elves even if that did work out okay the last time.

All sarcasm aside, this is a very strange place for Khadgar to be - trapped on a Draenor which is under siege from a relentless threat to not just its own world, but Azeroth as well. It's a case of deja vu for the powerful mage and he's brought us along this time, hoping we can perhaps do better - hoping that we can not only forestall the destruction of our own world, but of Draenor as well.

While you don't need to have played the previous Warcraft games to enjoy World of Warcraft, a little history goes a long way toward making the game a lot more fun. Dig into even more of the lore and history behind the World of Warcraft in WoW Insider's Guide to Warcraft Lore.