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Know Your Lore: The aqir and their descent, part 2 -- Nerubians
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. We covered the ancient aqir and their qiraji descendants last week. What we didn't really cover was the group of arthropods who headed north, enslaved the Ulduar region's tol'vir and founded ancient Azjol'Nerub. From the time of their expulsion from the central part of the ancient supercontinent of Kalimdor by the Gurubashi and Amani trolls, to their defeat and subordination of those tol'vir, and up to their recent near-total destruction by the Scourge during the War of the Spider, the aqir offshoot calling themselves nerubians have existed apart from their southerly kind. While the qiraji serve C'thun, the nerubians seem wary of the Old Gods and their Faceless Ones, even when gripped by the Lich King's undeath. Furthermore, while many nerubians ended up in the service of the Lich King, forcibly resurrected by him, it's telling that the nerubians were immune to the plague of undeath and waged a war against him for over a decade, only losing when they found themselves trapped between the servants of the Old Gods and the dreadlords that at the time served as the Lich King's advisors and jailors. Their immunity to the plague did not confer immunity to undeath when directly raised, and so Anub'arak, last king of the nerubians, ended up a slave like much of the rest of his race. As of the pre-Cataclysm world, nerubian undead can be found in the plaguelands serving alongside the Cult of the Damned as well as in Northrend itself, while the battered and hateful remnants of the empire of the nerubians are so desperate that they'll accept help from the races of the Alliance and Horde.
Ask a Lore Nerd: Of Nerubians, Dwarves and Titans
Welcome to Ask a Lore Nerd, where each week blogger and columnist Alex Ziebart answers your questions about the lore and history of the World of Warcraft. Ask your questions in the comments section below, and we'll try to answer it in a future edition. I'm going to get this out of the way right off the bat since I know I'll get a dozen people asking again this week: Yes, Know Your Lore will be coming back, it is not gone forever. I promise. I will pinkie swear on it, even. Come on, who wants to pinkie swear? Anybody? Anybody?Aler asked..."On the topic of the Nerubians and the Qiraji, is there any relation in the lore between the two? Or are two insect civilizations coincidental?"There's absolutely a relation between the two. They hold a common ancestry. Both the Qiraji and the Nerubians are offshoots of an even more ancient race, the Aqir. Way back when Azeroth was still very primal, and Trolls were the top dogs. There were three major players in the world: The Amani Trolls, the Gurubashi Trolls, and the Aqir. They warred for thousands of years. Thousands. It was a war of attrition on the grandest scale possible, and all involved more or less broke under the weight of their losses.
Know Your Lore: Hakkar the Soulflayer
Welcome to Know Your Lore, where each week Alex Ziebart brings you a tasty little morsel of lore to wrap your mind around. Sweet, sweet lore. Mmmm. Today we're going to take a step back from out pre-emptive study of Wrath subjects and look at something a little more old school. We'll get back to catching up for Wrath of the Lich King soon enough, don't you worry about that. I'm far too excited about the expansion to not come back to it soon.Today we're going to look at Hakkar the Soulflayer, not to be confused with Hakkar the Houndmaster which apparently came first in the lore, but I don't really care which of them came first because the Blood God (that one's the Soulflayer) is way cooler. What the Soulflayer actually is is largely a mystery. He's a god, certainly, but Azeroth has many flavors of gods and demigods. He is probably just a Loa god, but our buddy Brann Bronzebeard seems to think he's more than that. Specifically, Hakkar might be the son of an Old God.
Know Your Lore: Azjol-Nerub
With Wrath of the Lich King and the return of the Scourge to the spotlight, an old friend comes back along with them. The Nerubians! We haven't seen much of them in the World of Warcraft yet beyond being undead lackies, they have a long, quite interesting backstory. We saw a little more in Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, but their story goes even deeper. In the big picture of Warcraft, their ancestors predate all but the Trolls, and maybe even them.In the beginning there were the Silithid. Insectoid horrors that crawled forth from the Well of Eternity just happened to grab the interest of the Old Gods. The most notable of them so far being C'Thun. C'Thun crafted avatars of war from the Silithid, twisting them into humanoid soldiers. These avatars became known as the Aqir. The Aqir are best described as 'evil' though that is always in the eye of the beholder.The Aqir were one of three super powers in the world at the time, roughly 16,000 years prior to the Orcish invasion of Azeroth. The other two came in the form of the Troll Empires of the Gurubashi and the Amani. The three clashed repeatedly, and the Trolls only managed survival by forging a loose alliance between their empires. The Aqir civilization of Azj'Aqir held up quite well, their war lasting thousands of years, and no ultimate outcome ever came to fruition.
