Skyborne

The Skyborne call themselves shen’dorei, “the hidden people”. According to Blizzard their ancestors were rebels who fled Eldre’Thalas after the War of the Ancients. Eldre’Thalas was the city of the Shen’dralar Highborne, and it stands today as Dire Maul in Feralas.

After the Well of Eternity was lost, Prince Tortheldrin meant to drain the power of the demon Immol’thar to keep the city alive. Highborne magi and the city’s other kaldorei citizens opposed it, fearing it would open a door for the Burning Legion.

According to the Warcraft Wiki the rebellion was led by a masked leader whose name was never known: the Shal’nan, “the Veiled One”. The rebels sabotaged the building of Tortheldrin’s crystal pylons. When the ritual went wrong during a raid, arcane creatures poured into the city, and the Shal’nan was the only survivor of the final confrontation. The rebellion, by the word of several sources, ended in defeat.

The same wiki tells the flight like this: the Shal’nan led his people to the port of Eldre’narr on Feralas’s western coast. The magisters had orders to kill the rebels but did not interfere, and the rebels took ships and sailed west into the unknown. Other sources only say they “fled across the sea”; the port and the details rest on one account.

The fugitives at last reached an unknown land ruled by primordial elemental spirits. According to Blizzard they struck a bargain with the wind spirits, who anchored their island home in Skywall, in the Elemental Plane of Air.

The Warcraft Wiki tells the pact like this: with Tortheldrin’s fleet on their heels, the wind spirits lifted a piece of land into the sky and hid the rebels from their pursuers and from Azeroth. That land became Zephras Isle. Icy Veins and MMOexp also write that the island was lifted into the sky.

How long ago this was, the sources do not agree. Blizzard says only “thousands of years”. Icy Veins places the pact about 7,300 years ago (BDP); the wiki’s High Order entry speaks of “10,000 years”; and the spirits’ vanishing is put “a few centuries ago”. This page treats none of them as certain.

With the spirits’ gifts the Skyborne built a small but lively civilisation. According to the wiki the Shal’nan stepped down at the groundbreaking of the Shrine of the Four Winds and handed leadership to a council of democratically chosen provincial leaders; over the centuries the people grew lighter and slighter than their kin on the ground. The blue skin called Sky-Touched is said to have appeared about five generations ago.

In the shadow of the story stands the Windlord, Al’Akir. According to the wiki the spirits avoid speaking of him, and some Skyborne doubt he exists at all.

The Skyborne are one people with two sides: the High Order in the Alliance, the Windshapers in the Horde. Blizzard ties the split to a disagreement over where the people should turn after the spirits vanished.

The Windshapers descend from the first shen’dorei to receive the spirits’ gift of “skysight”, and they follow the trail of their lost elemental mentors. By one account their roots reach back to the city’s ordinary kaldorei citizens; that appears in a single account only. The High Order descends from the Highborne scholars of Eldre’Thalas and wants to recover lost arcane knowledge, so that the shen’dorei can survive without depending on spirit patrons.

After the spirits left, the two groups became rivals. According to the wiki the High Order grew wary of the spirits’ motives while the Windshapers took questions as an insult; the High Order reached out to the Kirin Tor, the Windshapers to the Earthen Ring, and the tension turned violent. The island’s militia, the Peacekeepers, try to keep the peace under Captain Valennia Stormfist.

On who heads the island’s council the sources differ: the wiki lists High Elder Talaanis Shadowsong as missing, while Warcraft Tavern places an elder in Valanaar and spells the name differently. Tavern also names Rathiril Sunlance as the High Order’s Elder; no other source confirms it.

It was the spirits that kept Zephras Isle aloft for thousands of years. When they vanished the island began to unravel. Each step shows one moment of the crisis on the Zephras Isle map.

According to Method, a Skyborne-only portal in Dalaran opens to Stormwind. The Horde side has no portal: there is no quick way to Orgrimmar or the Valley of Trials.

Zephras’s place on the Azeroth map is symbolic: the island lies in another realm, in Skywall.

Eldre’Thalas, the city the Skyborne fled, is today a dungeon in Feralas called Dire Maul. The two names that started the story are still there.