Who is Galakrond? Why was he so fearsome the Titans themselves intervened to destroy him?

With the advent of the Dragonflight prepatch and the Legacies shorts, one question is on the minds of many World of Warcraft players: who was Galakrond? Why are we seeing and hearing the name again, years after the novel Dawn of the Aspects revealed his true story — and well after his defeat? Is it possible that we’ll see Galakrond in Dragonflight, perhaps even as the end boss of the expansion?

Despite having seen and heard quite a bit about Galakrond over the years, there’s still quite a lot we don’t know about this ancient proto-drake or why it became so notorious among its kind.

So what was Galakrond?

There are many rumors among Dragons about this ancient beast. His enormous skeleton remains in what is today called the Dragonblight, and may well have been the first to have been left in what would become a sacred burial site for Dragonkind. The Dragons say he was larger than all five of the Aspects combined, that he was so vast that the only thing that could really be compared to him was, well, him. And they say that from Galakrond came the original five Aspects themselves.

In a way, this could even be seen as true. But nothing is simple about the origins of Dragonkind, the Aspects, or Galakrond.

In the primordial past of Azeroth, after the defeat of the Old Gods and the ordering of the world by the Titan-Forged, the Proto-Drake ancestors of Dragonkind lived and squabbled and hunted. The majority of Proto-Drakes were still at the dawn of sapience, becoming intelligent slowly, but there were those among them that had already begun to show signs of their future mental development. These drakes had already begun to form a society of sorts, able to converse with one another and even take action for their common good.

Galakrond was the patriarch, and then the terror that darkened the skies

Chief among these was Galakrond, known far and wide among Proto-Drakes as a sort of mentor, who hunted alongside the others and assisted them in their struggle for survival. Had he remained so, perhaps we would today not have Dragons as we understand them, but a race of benevolent Proto-Drakes on their way to evolving further.

But something happened to Galakrond — something dreadful and abhorrent.

The once good-hearted Proto-Drake became a fearsome predator of his own kind, sending other Drakes fleeing at the very shadow of his coming. He became massive beyond Proto-Drake reckoning, a creature who cast an area into darkness with the mere sweep of his goliath wings. Worse still, the creature that Galakrond had become was constantly writhing and mutating, loathsome tentacles and fleshy pseudopods erupting from his giant body and being reabsorbed constantly. Those Proto-Drakes who were unfortunate enough not to escape Galakrond, meeting their death at his mighty jaws, were subject to a fate that made death itself seem a mercy. The regurgitated corpses of these victims would rise from death as loathsome mockeries of life that existed to serve Galakrond and spread madness and hunger with their infectious bites.

Soon, Proto-Drake society was torn on what to do about Galakrond. Most sought to flee, a few sought to placate the beast, and still others wanted to attack the beast head on.

We still don’t know what transformed Galakrond. While observing these events thousands and thousands of years later, Kalecgos observed the Titan Watcher Tyr made cryptic statements to the original five Proto-Drakes who would become the Aspects — Neltharion, Nozdormu, Malygos, Ysera and Alexstrasza — that somehow he might have been responsible for Galakrond’s change, that things had not gone as planned. But that’s all we know.

Galakrond was the nightmare the Aspects were made to stop

In the end, despite the presence of those Proto-Drakes who viewed Galakrond not as an existential threat but as a sign of their ultimate destiny, the five Proto-Drakes and Tyr managed to defeat Galakrond and end his threat, sending his mammoth corpse crashing to the Dragonblight at the cost of Tyr’s own hand. Galakrond bit it off, a sign of just how powerful the creature truly was, that it could permanently injure one of the Titan-Forged entrusted by the Titans themselves with protecting Azeroth.

It was this experience that led Tyr to offer to the five Proto-Drakes the patronage of the Titans themselves. Going to his fellow Titan Watchers, Tyr made the case for elevating the five. While the Titan-Forged had been entrusted with Azeroth, they were not of the world, and were slow to act when threats rose to the nascent planet. Despite opposition from Prime Designate Odyn, the other Watchers ultimately agreed with Tyr and his plan to elevate the five Proto-Drakes to a position of authority and power in defense of Azeroth. Together, they reached out to the Titans, who granted a share of their power to the five, transforming them into the first True Dragons, the Aspects.

The terrifying legacy of the first Destroyer

Not all Proto-Drakes were willing to follow these new beings. Some viewed the Titan-Forged like Tyr with suspicion. Others viewed the Dragons not as their future but a fate forced upon their kind. Still others clung to a reverence of Galakrond and viewed the Aspects not as heroes, but as murderous usurpers. While many indeed followed and supported the Aspects, these dissenting voices would coalesce into a faction dedicated to opposing them, going so far as to tap into the disgruntled elemental forces once defeated and sealed away by the Titan-Forged at the dawn of creation and calling themselves Primals.

The legacy of Galakrond lives on in these Primals and their opposition to the Dragons, the Aspects, and the Dragonflights. Sealed away when the Dragon Isles were depleted of magic, they now rise again as the world rediscovers these lost isles — and troubling references to Galakrond come from their mouths, arguing that the hopefully long dead beast was a harbinger of what Azeroth’s true destiny was.

Are they right? Worse, is it possible that Galakrond’s terrible shadow will once again darken the land and fill the sky under its wings? It’s possible that the Dragonflights will need all the aid their mortal allies can provide if the original terror of all Dragons rises again. Before Deathwing, before the Sundering, before the Legion, Galakrond was the first time Azeroth nearly died since the ordering of Azeroth, the first Destroyer.

Originally posted October 28, 2022. Updated November 10, 2022.