#the embrace

World of Warcraft: Folk and Fairytales - Review and Analysis [Part 2/4]

I wanted to keep going with the story of Mu’sha and An’she and Lo’Sho and it seems like there’s another story in the book about the White Lady and the Blue child called The Embrace. I’ve had a write up in drafts for a few months now where I was going to examine all the many facets of Elune. But this fairytale book puts in the work that I no longer have to. The embrace is interesting to me because it was lore that was written to explain an in game glitch where in Cataclysm the Blue Child seems to vanish into the White Lady or vanish altogether. They added this  In Thrall Twilight of the Aspects, as a lunar event is described where the White Lady and blue child get so close to one another they “Embrace.” this conjunction allegedly happens in lore once every 430 years. 

This is what it looked like in game. 

Golden is writing what she loves here, a story that seems like it’s just as much a addition to Thrall: Twilight of the Aspects as it’s meant to be. I’m not sure how ‘canonical’ this perspective is when it comes to if it’s based on myth or fact, but there’s enough in this story to be the foundations of cosmic lore.

The Embrace - By Christie Golden 

• It was the White Lady’s duty to love and protect Azeroth with her companion the Sun. Each night the sky creates a bridge called twilight where the Sun and White Lady can nod to each other in passing. The White lady liked to look upon the peoples of Azeroth and she began to long for the closeness she saw in relationships of the mortals. How could one even find such a love? 
• She asked the stars and they responded that they turn to their families, then they all form constellations. The White lady pondered if the Sun needs love like she needs love, and the stars respond that he loves himself most of all, he doesn’t need the love of a family. There was no one to be her family, the stars had each other, and the Sun needed no one. 
• The White Lady laments that she wished she’d never seen such love and she looked down at Azeroth who may have loved her once, still slumbered. 
• the moon phases are the White Lady turning her head in sorrow. She cried and cried over not having anyone to love, and from her tears spawned The Blue Child. The White Lady and the Blue child were inseparable. One day the Blue Child began to ask the White lady about the mortals, more specifically about where they go after they die. The White Lady says she does not know. The Blue child asks the White lady if one day she could visit the mortals and the White lady says no, 
• After a while the Blue Child starts asking more questions, like what was she before she came to be? and the White Lady tells her daughter than she came to be out of tears, and that she made tall The White Lady’s dreams come true. She made the White lady happy. But the Blue child was not happy, and she didn’t know what would make her happy. 
• One day The White Lady woke up and the Blue child was gone. In a panic she ran to the Sun and asked him if he’d seen the Blue Child? The sun said no, but his proximity to her only made her more fearful, and angry and turned her face red like the Blood Moon, “when her face is red you know she is angry.” The White lady asked the stars if they could see her, they could not. The White lady began to worry that she had gone down on Azeroth among the mortal, so took her wrath out on the mortals, she burned hotter than the Sun. She caused crops to wither and grass to burn, raining down devastation on the earth. until she heard a grieving mortal mother sing about the loss of her child. This pacified the White lady, instead she shines as a beacon to guide her child home. 
• The Blue Child did eventually return to her mother, only when she did return she knew who she was, she knew what made her happy. The Mother embraced her child, and accepted her nature and knew that when her travels were over she would return to her Mother’s embrace. 

art by: Cory Godbey