Eastern Kingdoms Mogu

The Titans have created a whole family of stone creatures, all of varying morphology as well as faculties. The core Titanic races are commonly mentioned as earthen, gnomes, vrykul, tol’vir and mogu. Most of these creatures have been discovered in multiple sites, including earthen in Uldaman as well as Ulduar, or tol’vir were found in Uldum and Ulduar (even though the Ulduar tol’vir were converted by Nerubians and then the Scourge into Obsidian Destroyers). However, some of those creatures are curiously found, at least presently, in only one of the sites. One such example are vrykul, of which there is little trace outside of Northrend, as well as mogu who appear only in Pandaria. But there is a theory that it’s not true, and finds of these races in other sites are simply missing. One of these could be the kvaldir, found commonly in the South Seas, possibly coming from a facility further south, perhaps even Uldaman, as well as the common among scholars theory of the Eastern Kingdoms Mogu.

There is very little in terms of factual evidence for them, thus it remains just a theory based on circumstantial evidence at best. However, my analysis of some of the unexplained finds in the Eastern Kingdoms could prove the validity of this theory. I posit that Karazhan, the powerful tower of mysterious origin, was either built by migrant mogu who left Pandaria before Lei Shen’s rise, or an even more curious possibility – that Karazhan was a titanic facility which housed Eastern Kingdom’s stone mogu which were cursed with flesh just like their Pandarian cousins, but remained at the site and turned it into their fortress and capital.

Here, I would like to call upon Adair Ronnet’s Book of Legends of Stormwind to a tale he recounts from the then far southern reaches of the Kingdom of Stormwind (the book predates the First War by nearly a century). According to that tale, a lone human boy from the Elwynn Forest got lost in the woods and met a race of large, muscular brutish-looking creatures in a poorly explored part of Redridge Mountains. The description of these creatures greatly resembles an orc, ogre… or a mogu. The creatures in the story are violent and want to eat the boy, but as Ronnet himself guesses, the story might have been “expanded” to fit better in the narrative structure the storyteller wanted to tell. Adair Ronnet doesn’t know if the creatures were real or just a fabrication, but their similarity to the mogu humans met decades letter cannot be discarded.

Another interesting clue lies within Karazhan itself. There, in one of the oldest rooms lies a peculiar fresco which has been recently described as “little orc cherubs floating in the sky”. As the fresco was restored during Medivh’s reign in the tower and might have been modified to his particular tastes – or to his visions of Draenor – I managed to find in old books predating Medivh the pictures of the same fresco from before the restoration. Although it’s in a particularly poor state there, one can definitely make out the bodies and coloration of the depicted creatures – which still look very much like the orcs – painted far before Medivh ever contacted Draenor. I ask – what else does a fanged, stout, green creature resemble? And my answer is, a mogu.

Here is my theory of what we’re dealing with. Karazhan was possibly a Titanic facility, of which mechanisms are presently either buried deep underground or lost in the frequent repossessions of the tower. Deep in the bellows of the Karazhan facility were, among other creatures, stone mogu, which were in time afflicted with the Curse of Flesh. Unlike the Pandarian Mogu, these remained in the place of their birth and re-purposed it to serve as their fortress. From there, they spread across the southern Eastern Kingdoms and maintained some kind of state (or a network of city-states) which is now found in archaeological evidence as the pottery from the mysterious Deadwind Culture, whose racial make-up is only guessed by modern scholars as early humans or trolls.

The question is now, if there were indeed mogu native to the Eastern Kingdoms who called Karazhan home, what happened to them? In my opinion, they simply went extinct for natural reasons. We know the Deadwind Culture met a period of rapid collapse and abandonment of their stone structures, but with the lack of humanoid remains, we cannot know if they were killed by a disease or an invasion (possibly from the troll empires). Whatever malady decimated them, must have left them in a weakened state with only small groups of survivors clinging to their former holdings far in the mountains – one of which could have been found by the boy from Ronnet’s tale. By the time of the First War, they were very possibly completely extinct, or the few remaining ones bred with the newly arriving ogres and melded into the Deadwind ogre populations that way.

I’m aware it’s a far-fetched theory, based on disconnected evidence and joined with only my unfounded speculation. For that reason, I do not present it as fact or expect others to treat it that way, but I think it’s worth considering among the wider archaeological community of Azeroth.