Is Hythlodeous unsundered?

His soul and memories were in Zodiark at the time of sundering, but soul and memory are two separate components in the lore regarding souls now. Soul aether was used (and I would say consumed) to build and power Zodiark, while it seemed the memories were stored, as shown on Mare Lamentorum when they swarm us. Zodiark was split into pieces, but that was his body, made up of the energy from their souls.

So, do we think that the memory component of the Ancients he stored was sundered as well, or no? Since Hythlodaeus had no corporeal or soul aether at the time, was he (and the rest of the Ancients sacrificed to Zodiark) actually sundered? Were there 13 copies of each of their memories made and put on each shard?

I think its much more likely that their memories remained whole and just stuck with the main body of Zodiark on the source, counting as a part of that shard of Zodiark since they were technically inside him. After all, Zodiark sundered into pieces, not replicas of himself like Emet's powerpoint in ShB showed the Sundering did to normal people. Arm in one shard, part of a torso in another, etc. So, he wasn't evenly distributed.

So, the idea of his head (or w/e body piece), plus the memory aether from the sacrifices stored within it, all counting as one piece of him and sticking together as a mass in the source makes sense to me. And thus Hyth and what remained of the other sacrificed Ancients at the time were not technically sundered by Hydaelyn.

But I wanted to know what you guys think. If their memories weren't sundered, it might have interesting implications when it comes to their reincarnation.




EDIT: I spelled his name wrong and it shall forever live on in the title. I am Shame.

Zodiark's being was split up, but it was comprised of the souls of individuals. It's likely that the individuals comprising his split pieces were at least spread across the dimensional gaps, but they were unsundered still because their souls weren't the direct target of the Sundering attack.

It is a bit strange to me, when analyzing it, that Sundering Zodiark had the ramifications of Sundering every life on the planet, but not the lives within Zodiark. There's probably enough wiggle room with the nebulousness of it to make a case about it, perhaps Zodiark's aether was so thick that it protected the souls inside from degradation or maybe part of the souls within him did get Sundered, and Hyth was just deep enough that he was untouched.

Orrrrr, because we told Venat that we'd met Hythlodaeus's soul, she somehow controlled the attack so that it obeyed the script like with how Emet, Lahabream and Elidibus escaped its effects as well.

I feel like it's pretty clear that Hythlodaeus wasn't sundered, and what happened with the souls within Zodiark was essentially that the collection was split up rather than the people within it. Picture it like dividing a crowd; you're going to end up with smaller collections of people, but you're not going to end up with fractions of those people (unless you're extremely bad at it).

It does seem a little weird that Zodiark seemed to be sundered differently like that, but Zodiark was already different to everything else that was sundered, in terms of scale, makeup, and intention. Zodiark was already going to require a fundamentally different approach than everything else, so it makes sense that he has a different end result.

...or maybe it is the same process, and that's just what it looks like when the amount of souls inside a thing being sundered is greater than 'one'. Again, Zodiark is different to everything else that got hit, so we can't exactly prove otherwise.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Alleluia

So, do we think that the memory component of the Ancients he stored was sundered as well, or no?

---

Hermes was sundered, and it sounded like his soul had been through the cycle of life and death several times before it was inherited by Amon. Yet Amon could vividly recall memories of his past life as Hermes, even before he even had the opportunity to use the Convocation stone that Emet later gave him. Lahabrea tore his own soul into two (self-sundered?) in order to cast away his feelings for Athena, and yet he still was able to recall the events within Pandaemonium even before he went back and reabsorbed his lost soul fragment. And we also know from Mitron that any individual soul fragment of a previous Convocation member can be used to reinstate them.

I suppose the conclusion that you might draw from this is that while a soul stores memories, it's not corporeal. So you probably can't say that the physical locus at 'X' encodes 'Y' data the way you could, say, a hard drive or a gene. The memory is probably an aether signature that is part of the soul and all its fragments, similar to how Venat demonstrates how you can read a memory from the land without any soul present to speak of.