The Long Night
Hello everyone, I’m going to make a post with a little brainstorming and a little just writing down what I think I have established about a time period I’m calling “The Long Night.”
What brought this about?
In trying to come up with a backstory for Ouron, I wanted to try and get a grasp on how old a High Elf typically lived for. To try and figure this out, I consulted the Chronicle vol. I, and the artifact history for Felo’melorn and came up with an odd problem.
Dath’Remar has two successive heirs between himself and Anasterian, and Anasterian’s verified age is somewhere in the ballpark of 3,000 years minimum (Troll Wars took place 2.8k years BDP, and Anasterian died at an already old age to Arthas during the Third War). So far so good? Okay? Elven king gets old around three thousand years old. Great.
Except Anasterian is king a measly four-thousand years after the founding of Quel’Thalas in 6,800 BDP!
So the nagging question popped up in my mind: WHAT HAPPENED TO THE TWO OTHER DUDES (peoples, don’t need to be dudes)?
Neither of them seem to have lived to old age, the Amani didn’t have a serious rebellion until much later, and suddenly by Anasterian’s time the Council of Silvermoon is considered the ruling body of the Kingdom. (p. 129 and 131 of Chronicle) So what happened, and what were the lives of these two rulers like. INQUIRING MINDS JUST GOT TO KNOW!
But since I can’t find anything about either of them, I made stuff up.
My Headcanon so far So let’s think about the high elves so far, right? Highly gifted magisters, essentially brought into exile by wanton use of magic all because their god-queen was too extra. They spend a lot of time in exile before they finally found a new kingdom and BAM! New architecture! New rules! New names! We can be as crazy about magic as we want, let’s turn the sky into summer/autumn forever because winter sucks! Maybe build some runestones so we don’t break the world again.
My thought is that this is a highly experimental time within their society, it just has to be some kind of renaissance for the Highborne in so many ways, but why did they make Dath’Remar king? The last super-ruler they had was a very very bad idea indeed, why risk it again? Well that’s easy enough to answer: he literally saved them all from a horrible mana-addled death. Props where props are due.
But what about when he dies? Does his successor keep a lion’s share of power? What’s to stop the new guy from being Kael’thas from pulling a power play over the rest of the Kingdom and becoming a new, pink, Azshara?
So what if the people decide they’re going to govern themselves? That they’re going to create a Council of Silvermoon to govern affairs, how well would that sit? Would that be an affront to Dath’Remar’s legacy? Would they stand to be any less corrupt? Why do two Sunstrider kings live such short lives compared to Anasterian approximately around the time this new council is formed?
GOOD OL’ CHUCKY UNO IS THE KEY. (THIS IS A LINK)
Woosh! There’s civil war! WHAM! You’ve got conflicting loyalties! BOOM! A parliamentary body is seizing power! Ptchoo - I’m inserting drama because I’m a sucker and the noises make me feel dynamic.
Quel’Thalas is still standing when Anasterian is king, so the kingdom probably didn’t collapse. The Amani don’t APPEAR to have sacked the kingdom either, so whatever conflict may have happened, it COULD be contained within the Kingdom. Queue intrigue, secret police, backstabbing. All the things that set up the control state we found in the start of The Burning Crusade has to have come from somewhere, so why not here?
So a lot of my writing hopefully is going to play around with this time period looking for perspectives, but please if you like this idea I would love to see any contribution. This is essentially a free space, you know where you end up but how do you get there?! It’s like Rogue One but (hopefully) less awful.
That’s all I have, tata~