Dragon Isles[1] (also called "Dragonflight Announce Cinematic")[2] is the introductory theme and cinematic for World of Warcraft: Dragonflight, first showcased during the Dragonflight expansion reveal livestream on April 19, 2022. It depicts the expansion's main setting of the Dragon Isles emerging from their 10,000 years of concealment.
The shadows of dragons fly over the top of the Beacon in the direction of the storm. A group of titanic watchers watch their departure.
Alexstrasza: We entrust our ancestral home to you, the Watchers.
The lead watcher turns a dial, causing the structure at the top of the Beacon to open. Dark clouds immediately appear and move across the sky, casting the Dragon Isles into shadow, showcased with shots of the Waking Shores and Azure Span. Watchers stationed on the ground fall dormant, the glow fading from their eyes as they stand still like statues.
Alexstrasza: Let the land slumber, hidden even from our own eyes. You will feel our return in the waking of the land. Then you must light the Beacon of Tyrhold, lest the path home be lost to us... forever.
A close-up is shown of the face of a dormant watcher standing on the shore.
NOW
The scene abruptly changes: the camera remains stationary, but after 10,000 years, the watcher has become slightly eroded and overgrown with plantlife. Suddenly, he stirs to life and looks out at the horizon. He turns around to look at a fellow watcher standing some distance away, but the latter's face has crumbled and he remains unmoving. The watcher turns around, looking up at the Beacon of Tyrhold in the distance, and his face changes to one of resolve. As he walks up the shore toward the mountains, flowers bloom and lava starts moving in the cracks in the ground. A gate into the interior of the Beacon opens for him. As he enters, he walks past another dead and crumbled watcher. As the ground shakes and more lava bursts out of the earth, the watcher climbs the seemingly endless stairs to the platform at the apex of the Beacon, where he discovers that the lead watcher who activated the structure in the distant past has crumbled like the rest and now sits dead on his throne. The lone watcher tries turning the dial to light the Beacon, but it fails to activate and remains dark. The watcher instead forcibly climbs up the side of the tower, even as his weight causes some of his handholds to periodically break away and his own stone body starts to crack in places. Reaching the top, he grabs the two halves of the orb crowning the Beacon and—with great effort—starts bringing them closer together. As the orb halves get closer and energy crackles between them, a pillar of light shoots down into the base of the Beacon, causing the titanic mechanisms to start turning. More of the watcher's body starts to crack and fall apart from the exertion of strength, but he finally succeeds in snapping the orb together. Light immediately bursts out of the Beacon into the skies, where the clouds quickly disperse. The watcher is thrown backwards by the shockwave and falls helplessly down toward his death. Looking at the activated Beacon as he falls, the watcher closes his eyes and accepts his fate, but the moment before he crashes into the platform below, Alexstrasza herself swoops out of the sky and catches him in her claws, saving his life. As she wheels and soars through the sky, countless more dragons of different flights appear out of the sky and swarm over Valdrakken, the city surrounding the Beacon. Water crashes forth along the city's waterways.
Alexstrasza: The world is healing... but her fate is yet uncertain. Together, we shall be Azeroth's protectors once again. Here, the new age of dragons shall begin.
As the myriad of other dragons circle through the skies, Alexstrasza lands on top of a tower, drops off the watcher at her feet, and roars triumphantly at the sky.
Notes
The dead, faceless watcher of the cinematic can be seen in-game right near the Alliance landing in the Waking Shores.
