The fate of those who became Hydaelyn

I'm going to continue this in the replies since I'm going over the character limit.

This is sort of a follow-up to a thread I wrote a few years ago back before Patch 6.1 was released. It had to do with a plot point that had been clarified in a recent Live Letter when someone asked Yoshida what Hydaelyn meant when she said that not even her soul would remain as she was dying. Yoshida explained that due to the difference in the number of sacrifices used to create Zodiark and Hydaelyn, the aether comprising the souls of Hydaelyn's sacrifices would need to be used in addition to their corporeal aether in order to give her a fighting chance against Zodiark. This meant that Venat's followers had to expend their entire souls during the battle with Zodiark, and Venat met the same fate while she was fighting the Scions, having kept her own soul in reserve for that moment.

Well, in the patches following 6.0, the lore surrounding Hydaelyn's sacrifices got changed somewhat. We discovered that being sacrificed to Hydaelyn doesn't actually have to consume the sacrifice's entire soul. The first sign we got of this was in the Omega: Beyond the Rift quests in Patch 6.15, when the Watcher explains that he isn't just a simulacrum of one of Venat's companions, but that he was actually created from the essence of that companion after he had already sacrificed himself to create Hydaelyn. Myths of the Realm took this further by revealing that the Twelve are actually constructs created from fragments of the souls of Venat's followers.

Taking all of this into account, it's clear that what Yoshida said about Venat's followers having expended their entire souls to defeat Zodiark is untrue. There had to be some fragments left over. The reason why this happened isn't clear. Perhaps Venat purposefully tried to preserve her followers' souls during the battle with Zodark, or perhaps it just happened that way naturally. We know from the short story A Friendship of Record that the members of Venat's faction were under the impression that "not even their souls would remain" when they agreed to summon Hydaelyn, so I suspect the latter.

What do these revelations mean for Venat? Is it possible that, like her followers, some of her soul managed to remain intact even after she sacrificed herself to ensure the Scions would be able to defeat Meteion? Is it possible that she isn't quite as gone as we were initially led to believe? Personally, I think the answer to that is a resounding "maybe."

First things first, something that's worth mentioning is that Venat didn't actually expend all of her soul's aether during her battle with the Scions. If she had, she likely would've dissipated the moment she was defeated, which didn't happen. She managed to hold on for a few more minutes, long enough to give the Scions what they needed to find Meteion. This wouldn't have been possible if she was already completely depleted of aether. Judging from the fact that she was in an extremely weakened state even before this point in Endwalker, relying on Krile to do her bidding like she did with Minfilia, she probably had little to no aether left to use apart from her soul by the time the Scions reached her. All things considered, there had to be at least a small piece of her soul left after the fight.

One of the last things Venat does before her death is infusing Azem's crystal with some of her own aether so we could use her power in Ultima Thule. Given what I've already established, this aether had to be from her soul. After we used her magic to bring the Scions back from the dead, Hydaelyn's aether leaked out of the crystal, and something interesting happened. As it drifted away, we heard Venat's voice giving us one last bit of encouragement. After the conclusion of Myths of the Realm, in which the voices of the Twelve convinced Oschon to follow his heart after giving their aether back to the star, this scene where Venat's voice could be heard feels a bit different. Maybe some of her will managed to survive within the sliver of herself she gifted to us. Perhaps it's just wishful thinking on my part, but I still wanted to put the theory out there.

By the way, this isn't entirely related, but something I mentioned in the earlier thread is the possibility of there being a law of conservation of aether in the FFXIV universe like there is a law of conservation of matter and a law of conservation of energy in the real world. We now know for a fact that this is true. It was established in the Endwalker patch MSQ that voidsent on the Thirteenth are able to reform even after being devoured by other voidsent for their aether, provided that the one who ate them is killed. This wouldn't be possible if digested aether was just destroyed. Another piece of evidence for a law of conservation is the Twelve's plan to return their aether to the star by diluting their essence through battle, which wouldn't have worked if the aether they expended was just destroyed.

One of the things I come back to a lot with these kinds of questions is the components of "spiritual aether" in terms of memory/identity, raw life force, the immutable essence of a soul, etc. Any one of them might be called a "soul" by the characters even before taking the wobbles and retcons into account.

Thanks to Solution Nine we even have a better grasp of how identity and raw life force can be separated. I wonder what effect mixing and matching has on them. Let's say you take the part of someone that is their immutable essence - their shard of an Ancient in modern days - and you stuff it full of the memories of a life lived by another [body + immutable shard] combo. Does that have any practical difference at all? It would be a little odd if no, considering when we've seen multiple lives lived by the same shard there's clearly some shared characteristics if not outright identical phenotype. (And that beast souls having an effect is a whole sublevel of plot.) I wonder what, if any, silent ways that nudged Alexandrian history as people spent and reloaded souls like ammo.

I think my current theory is somewhere int he ballpark of that the Twelve simulacra were generated from memories and perhaps a fragment of their aether, somewhere between how the constellation stones worked and how primals work. Remember, Hraesvelger consumed Shiva, but a fragment of her being of some kind was still available somewhere for Iceheart to construct into Shiva. Koji Fox compared it to only having a few real dinosaur bones and filling in the rest of the skeleton with your own fabrications.

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Originally Posted by Anonymoose

One of the things I come back to a lot with these kinds of questions is the components of "spiritual aether" in terms of memory/identity, raw life force, the immutable essence of a soul, etc. Any one of them might be called a "soul" by the characters even before taking the wobbles and retcons into account.

Thanks to Solution Nine we even have a better grasp of how identity and raw life force can be separated. I wonder what effect mixing and matching has on them. Let's say you take the part of someone that is their immutable essence - their shard of an Ancient in modern days - and you stuff it full of the memories of a life lived by another [body + immutable shard] combo. Does that have any practical difference at all? It would be a little odd if no, considering when we've seen multiple lives lived by the same shard there's clearly some shared characteristics if not outright identical phenotype. (And that beast souls having an effect is a whole sublevel of plot.) I wonder what, if any, silent ways that nudged Alexandrian history as people spent and reloaded souls like ammo.

I think my current theory is somewhere int he ballpark of that the Twelve simulacra were generated from memories and perhaps a fragment of their aether, somewhere between how the constellation stones worked and how primals work. Remember, Hraesvelger consumed Shiva, but a fragment of her being of some kind was still available somewhere for Iceheart to construct into Shiva. Koji Fox compared it to only having a few real dinosaur bones and filling in the rest of the skeleton with your own fabrications.

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Something I wonder about is if the process of Venat recreating her followers from the pieces of them she had left could be compared to trying to recreate a computer program with missing or corrupted data. I have a personal theory that the Watcher was the first of Venat’s companions to be remade as a construct, and that the reason why he seems to have so few memories of his past life compared to the rest of the Twelve is due to him having been created before Venat perfected the process.