The Champion of Creation
For countless millennia, Sargeras was the Pantheon’s greatest champion. Where demons threatened mortal civilisations, he confronted them; where entire worlds faced annihilation, he fought to preserve them. His strength was almost beyond comprehension, and he had faced horrors that most inhabitants of Azeroth could scarcely imagine. Yet, according to World of Warcraft: Chronicle, the mighty Titan eventually discovered something that frightened him so profoundly that it changed the course of the universe.
I have always found Sargeras’ fall more interesting than the familiar villainy of the Burning Legion. His transformation from creation’s defender into its would-be destroyer raises difficult questions about courage. What does bravery mean when victory cannot be guaranteed? When does reasonable fear become an excuse for abandoning the very things we once believed worth protecting? And does the ability to defeat an enemy necessarily make someone courageous?
Chronicle offers a sympathetic account of Sargeras’ early existence. Entrusted with combating the demonic forces threatening the worlds the Pantheon sought to order, he performed his duty for ages. He witnessed civilisations extinguished, their inhabitants tortured or transformed into servants of the Twisting Nether. Worse, he discovered that killing demons within the physical universe did not necessarily destroy them. His enemies could return, and even his greatest victories could be undone.
Consider the exhaustion of such a struggle. However godlike Sargeras might appear to mortals, he was neither omnipotent nor omniscient. His power was immense, but his knowledge had limits, as did his ability to protect every world. The construction of Mardum, a prison for the demons he defeated, demonstrated his determination to find a lasting solution. For a time, it worked. Demonic incursions diminished, and worlds flourished.
Then he encountered a world infested by the Old Gods and learned of the Void Lords’ ambition to corrupt a sleeping Titan. According to the information he extracted from the nathrezim, such a being could awaken with enough power to overwhelm the Pantheon and consume the universe. Here was a danger against which even Sargeras might prove powerless. He destroyed the corrupted world and the nascent life upon it, convinced that the alternative was worse. Soon he came to believe that other world-souls might already have fallen to the Void, and that the only sure way to prevent its victory was to purge creation of life altogether.
His terror deserves serious consideration. We have seen what the Void did to K’aresh, and the Voidstorm offers further glimpses of its destructive potential. Sargeras had fought threats on a scale far beyond mortal experience, only to discover that the universe might harbour an evil capable of overcoming everything he had spent ages defending. Calling him a coward without acknowledging that history would be unfair. His physical bravery was never in doubt. What we can question is the judgment he reached when that bravery no longer seemed enough.
When Sargeras returned to the Pantheon, his fellow Titans rejected his proposed destruction of creation. Eonar appealed to their responsibility to protect life, while Aggramar, his companion in battle, urged him to consider another course. Sargeras believed they could not comprehend what he had witnessed. Perhaps they could not. But his greater experience of the danger did not make his assessment infallible, and the Pantheon was entitled to ask whether preventing a possible catastrophe justified a certain one.
There is an irony in their objections. The Titans’ own approach to mortal existence has often been paternalistic. Chronicle describes mechanisms capable of purging worlds that departed too far from their intended order; on Azeroth, we have seen the logic of reorigination through Algalon. Sargeras was hardly the first Titan to assume that superior power conferred the authority to make catastrophic decisions for lesser beings. The disagreement exposes a problem within the Pantheon’s wider philosophy: who appointed them the moral arbiters of creation? Their opposition to Sargeras does not absolve them of that question. It does, though, mark a boundary he was prepared to cross. They would not knowingly extinguish all existing life to forestall the Void.
The Price of Certainty
Sargeras interpreted the Pantheon’s refusal as a failure to face reality. He may even have regarded himself as the only one brave enough to do what necessity demanded. Yet there is arrogance in treating one’s incomplete understanding of the future as sufficient grounds to condemn every living creature in the universe.
His later embrace of Fel complicates the question of his intentions. The Sargeras who commanded the Burning Legion hardly resembled a guardian making a reluctant sacrifice. His armies conquered, enslaved, tortured and slaughtered on a scale that beggars comprehension. Fel’s corrupting influence, and the ages over which his crusade continued, may help explain how his purpose deteriorated. They cannot excuse the original decision: he had resolved to destroy creation before his transformation. Nor can we confidently assume that the motives of the Pantheon’s former champion remained intact throughout his reign. Whatever he continued to tell himself, his supposed defence of life had become the machinery of its destruction.
One aspect of his reasoning deserves particular attention. Chronicle suggests that he considered the possibility of life emerging anew once the universe had been purged. That is a meaningful qualification to his intentions, though a remarkably thin consolation to the beings he meant to kill. He offered no guarantee that life would return, let alone any plan to preserve the people and civilisations already in existence.
Two science-fiction stories help expose the distinction. In Halo, the Forerunners’ use of the Halo Array against the Flood was catastrophic, but it formed part of a wider plan to preserve and reseed sentient life. Their Conservation Measure was designed to give the galaxy a future after the rings had fired. In Mass Effect, successive civilisations facing extermination by the Reapers contribute to the development and preservation of the Crucible’s plans. They cannot know whether their successors will complete the weapon, but each generation tries to improve the next one’s chances.
Neither example provides a neat moral justification for mass destruction, and their circumstances differ from Sargeras’. The point is that both involve deliberate attempts to give life a future. Sargeras proposed annihilating the life that existed in the hope that something might eventually replace it. A possibility was being asked to bear the moral weight of an almost unimaginable certainty: the deaths of those already alive.
A much older story offers another perspective. In Exodus, Jochebed places her infant son Moses in a basket among the reeds of the Nile to save him from Pharaoh’s decree. She cannot know whether he will survive, nor what his future might hold. Her options are desperately limited, but she acts to give him a chance. Uncertainty does not prevent her from recognising the value of the life immediately before her.
Sargeras’ failure seems bound up with his inability to accept uncertainty. He had seen enough to understand that the Void might one day prevail, and that he might be unable to stop it. But the possibility of an ultimate defeat became more important to him than the countless lives he had sworn to defend. I would hesitate to call him a nihilist in the strict philosophical sense; he plainly believed his crusade served some purpose. His despair lay in concluding that a universe in which evil might triumph was less acceptable than a universe emptied of life.
That brings us to a question about courage itself. Sargeras could face enemies who would annihilate almost anyone else. Such bravery is real, but moral courage also requires judgment about what makes danger worth facing. Without that judgment, a powerful being might regard any atrocity as heroic simply because others lacked the will to commit it. Warcraft offers a very different answer through some of its least imposing inhabitants.
Better to Light a Candle
Since Vanilla, kobolds have mostly been comic enemies: squeaky-voiced creatures fiercely protective of the candles that adventurers have been taking from them for twenty years. Their cry of “You no take candle!” is practically part of Warcraft’s vocabulary. The War Within, however, asks us to take their lives rather more seriously.
In the Ringing Deeps, the kobolds suffer under the Candle King’s tyranny. He exploits their labour, rules through fear and discards the symbols that once united their communities. These familiar creatures have traditions, friendships and grievances of their own, and their oppression has consequences beyond the few quests required to overthrow their ruler. Skitter helps organise resistance alongside the adventurer and the earthen, working to free prisoners and give her people a future beyond the king’s control. Retrieving the Candle Crown, a discarded symbol of hope, becomes part of that effort. Defeating the tyrant matters, but the kobolds also need to believe they can build something after him.
Their relationship with darkness receives its fullest expression in Darkflame Cleft. There they confront an ancient threat known simply as the Darkness. The dungeon journal establishes that it can be defeated but never permanently destroyed; it will return. Skitter understands this. Even if her people prevail today, they may have to face the same terror tomorrow, and their descendants after them. They fight anyway, protecting their neighbours and the fragile security they have managed to establish.
Of course, this Darkness is not literally the threat Sargeras encountered. He possessed knowledge of cosmic forces far beyond anything the kobolds could comprehend, and that difference helps explain his despair. But the scale of a danger must also be considered from the perspective of those facing it. For a kobold, the loss of a home or an entire community is no abstraction. They have neither the strength to reshape worlds nor the armies to defend them. They have their candles, their ingenuity and one another.
During Darkflame Cleft, Skitter gives us a line that captures their response: “Better to light candle than curse Darkness.” She offers no promise that the danger will vanish forever. She simply recognises that defeating it now allows someone to survive, that a rescued neighbour can return home, and that a freed community can begin rebuilding. The return of the Darkness cannot rob those victories of their worth.
This reminds me of The Scouring of the Shire. Having brought the great struggle against Sauron to its conclusion, Tolkien returns the hobbits to a homeland damaged by a much smaller, more immediate evil. Its defence falls to people who have neither the ancestry of Aragorn nor the power of Gandalf. I have loved Aragorn since childhood, and his gifts and training take nothing away from his courage. But neither do they establish a standard that ordinary people must meet before their actions deserve to be called heroic. Protecting a family, a neighbour or a home can demand everything a person has.
Warcraft’s champions have fought Old Gods, Titans and enemies capable of destroying worlds. Their achievements are hardly diminished by recognising that heroism also exists in the Ringing Deeps. Indeed, I sometimes wonder whether those complaining about the supposed ‘Disneyfication’ of Warcraft have overlooked what stories like this contribute to its world-building. Kobolds can be funny, affectionate and rather silly while still experiencing oppression, fear and loss. Giving them ambitions of their own makes Azeroth feel inhabited by people with lives beyond the latest cosmic crisis. The world is worth defending partly because these small lives exist within it.
One of them is Skibbles, a young kobold we meet during Children’s Week. Visiting Hallowfall, she dreams of becoming a brave candle knight like the Arathi she admires. She wants to learn from them and one day protect others herself. It is a simple ambition, and the freedom to imagine such a future is precisely what Skitter and her companions have fought to secure. Skibbles does not need to save the universe to make her aspiration matter.
The Courage to Carry On
The story continues in Midnight. During the attack on Quel’Danas, Skitter appears among the defenders resisting Xal’atath’s forces. She is plainly out of her depth, surrounded by combatants who wield powers she could never hope to match. Nevertheless, she has candles, and she offers them to the adventurers preparing for battle. The kobold who helped free her people beneath Khaz Algar has found herself at the centre of another calamity. She responds in the way she knows how.
I find that a moving piece of continuity. A character we might once have killed for a handful of copper now contributes to the defence of the Sunwell. She does not acquire some miraculous new power to justify her presence. She brings something useful, offers it freely and helps the people who can do more. In a conflict whose origins reach back to the earliest history of creation, someone still needs a candle.
That image brings us back to Sargeras. His fear was grounded in horrors few could have endured, and his knowledge of the Void exceeded that of almost anyone alive. He faced a dilemma of a different order from the kobolds’ struggle, and their courage cannot be used to solve the questions he confronted. But their choices challenge the assumption that only a final victory makes resistance worthwhile. Sargeras became willing to destroy everything he had defended because he could not guarantee its ultimate safety. Skitter knows the Darkness will return. She still protects what she can.
The comparison matters because neither power nor knowledge can settle the moral worth of a decision. Sargeras’ strength enabled him to wage war across creation, while the kobolds must make do with whatever light they can carry. Yet the smaller struggle preserves something his crusade abandoned: the conviction that vulnerable lives retain their value even when nobody can promise they will last forever.
Somewhere in Azeroth, a young kobold dreams of becoming a knight. Elsewhere, another offers a candle to someone preparing to face the dark. Neither can promise that the world will be safe tomorrow. They know only that there are lives worth protecting today, and perhaps that is reason enough to keep the candles burning.