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Know Your Lore: Resurgence of the Infinite Dragonflight
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. Long ago, the Titans empowered five dragons with unique abilities and powers, entrusting to them the protection of Azeroth itself. While each had their own specialization with its own odd foibles, none were as strange as the task set to Nozdormu. Aman'Thul, Highfather of the Pantheon, entrusted Nozdormu with the task of watching over time -- to guard the myriad paths of time and keep them pure. A strange task, to be certain, and one with a heck of a lot of power involved. To keep Nozdormu from abusing that power or thinking that he answered to no one, he was given the knowledge of the exact moment of his demise. Yet somewhere in one of those myriad timelines, this apparently wasn't enough. Somewhere, somewhen, Deathwing prevailed and brought about the Hour of Twilight, leaving Nozdormu a haunted, twisted version of his former self -- a version that cared little for the restrictions or rules bestowed by the Titans, and cared much more for preserving his own skin and preventing his own death. The twisted version called himself Murozond, first of the Infinite Dragonflight, intent on bending time and changing events solely for the purpose of evading his inevitable demise. We defeated Murozond in End Time, and prevented the Hour of Twilight from taking place. But have we actually saved Nozdormu? Have we secured time itself?
The Infinite Dragonflight in Stratholme
We hit on this one with Mount Hyjal before, but Ironcog brings up an interesting point: why exactly are we going to be mucking around in the old city of Stratholme via the Caverns of Time? In Escape from Durnholde, we're obviously trying to make sure Thrall gets out of the prison camp, and the Infinite Dragonflight is fighting to stop us and ruin history. Same deal in the Black Morass -- the Infinite Dragonflight is trying to keep Medivh from opening the Dark Portal. But in Hyjal, the dragonflight is nowhere to be seen, and we're basically just time tourists. You'd think the Bronze Dragonflight would want us to stay out of there.Of course, we don't exactly know what's happening in the Stratholme of the past -- maybe the Infinite Dragonflight is causing problems there that we need to stop (or, even better, maybe we'll get to see an as-yet-unknown reason why a Paladin of the Silver Hand, headstrong as he might have been, decided to slaughter an entire town even before he was under Frostmourne's corruption -- maybe there's more to Arthas than we saw in Warcraft III).But hopefully the Infinite Dragonflight storyline will be continued in some way -- mucking about in time isn't exactly safe, so there should be good reasons the Bronze Dragonflight sends us back to these past events. Watching history firsthand is fun and all, but the lore of the Bronze Dragons falls apart completely if they just start opening up theme parks in the past.
