Names for Tempering

[Anonymoose]

At that point in time, though, how did the Garleans perceive the Eikons to be beatable? By genocide of the beastmen? Did they have access to the ultimate weapon then? If a primal was summonable without the seal being broken, than that seems anticlimactic - there was no point to break the seal, really.

As far as the Empire knew then or knows now, the Primals truly are unbeatable, technically, no? You can conquer the summoners until they can no longer summon, you can trap the essences with ancient technology, but you cannot destroy them as yet we've seen. The Garleans suffered massive casualties putting down the primals of the East when they conquered Othard and they didn't want that to happen again in Eorzea. Lahabrea didn't come to Gaius in Ala Mhigo to reveal Ultima Weapon buried beneath it until after the Calamity, it seems. The breaking of the seal was likely accidental. All the Garleans wanted was to take control of the aetherial super-confluence at Mor Dhona to stop the tribes from harnessing it, but Midgardsormr awoke and called forth a host of dragons large enough to challenge the Garlean armada - the seal wouldn't have broken if Midgardsormr didn't crash Agrius into Silvertear Lake and set off the massive ceruleum explosion. Hell, there's no indication so far that they even really understood that a seal was there or what it did.

my theory is that there was some sort of elder primal in the region of Ala Mhigo

Unless it happened after Silvertear, that's one of the few possibilities I can think of. I've stopped trying to figure it out. For all I know, the Ultima Weapon still had a Primal in the tank from the Third Astral Era and someone shook it loose in that whole civil war and Garlean occupation (probably not, but with a door open that wide, why speculate too seriously?)

The summoner quest line shows evidence that that Allag were capable of summoning elder primals as egi - so a conclusion would be that they were able to defeat elder primals in battle.

That quest line actually makes me question if an elder primal is anything but a primal from a bygone era. For instance, if Garuda was trapped in the Ultima Weapon and forgotten until long after the Ixal went extinct and then she was released - would she be an elder primal? Was there anything special about Belias aside from the fact he was another era's fire primal? All that questline really showed us was that the Asians could, it seems, via the soulstone of long-dead Allagan summoners, bring back the memory of a primal whose summoners, too, were long gone.

I think they wanted all this to be kind of vague, lol.