How do ascians come into existence?

[Anonymoose]

I see that your main job is LV57 at the moment, so I'm going to mark spoilers starting at LV60 (just in case).

While little concrete information exists on the red-masked overlords (they have immortality via a mechanism like, if not identical to, the Echo; their souls manifest as orbs of living dark aether; they can retreat to an interdimensional rift between the corporeal world and the void via dark crystals; their true(r) current forms are monstrous rather than the robed Hyurans they present themselves as), I think the three biggest clues are the black-masked underlings raised by Lahabrea, Lahabrea himself, and Elidibus.

PATCH 3.40 SPOILER (Minfilia)

As Hydaelyn's emissary, Minfilia and Elidibus now stand on roughly equal footing. In German, there's even a neat little moment in 3.4 where Minfilia gives the same speech Elidibus did in 2.1, but with altered phrasing. Whether Elidibus was ever mortal, however, up for grabs. Still, their similarities should be some clue.

The black-masked underlings achieve immortality much like the Sahagin elder, retreating from one corporeal vessel and fleeing into another. However, unlike the red-masked overlords, they seem to lack the strength required to force themselves into a living vessel, only the the nearby dead. They also seem to lack crystals of Darkness, and thus they cannot retreat to a place between worlds where their "soul orbs" will be safe. Killing them without a body nearby seems to be true death for them.

My hypothesis is that these black-masks are mortals given powers of Darkness; slowly corrupted by it, slowly addicted to it, until they are twisted by it and given the power that is (or is just like) the Echo. Between the way Tristan (SMN story arc) behaved once given tainted power, and the way Elidibus (allegedly) gave the Echo to the Sahagin elder, it feels like Occam's favorite theory.

PATCH 3.40 SPOILER (Warriors of Darkness)

The Warriors of Darkness are similar, but with fewer limitations. Using Hydaelyn's Echo and Her Crystals of Light, they are able to take their all-but-immortal souls through dimensional barriers just like the red-masked overlords, who use Crystals of Darkness.

Lahabrea is also a rather big clue. Just as the black-masks of this world say they were raised by Lahabrea, 2.1 and 2.55 revealed that Lahabrea is said to be one of only two overlord-level Ascians raised from our world (The Source). There is another interesting hint in 3.00 which I will be very vague about here. Lahabrea exposes certain potentials of the Echo, only to have those abilities somewhat muted by the Warrior of Light.

PATCH 3.00 SPOILER (Being Less Vague about What Lahabrea Does)

Lahabrea uses the Echo's removal of the boundaries of the soul to fully fuse with the soul of another Ascian, taking on a form that is much closer to one of their "true" forms. The Warrior of Light forces these souls back apart into two discrete beings.

The German version of the client, as hinted earlier, is a bit more specific and clear. In most versions, when these powers of the Echo are muted, Lahabrea refers only to being forced into walls. In German, he explicitly expresses rage that he would be "forced into the confines (borders, limits) from which Zodiark saw [him] freed".

My hypothesis is that the overlords are mortals raised from the worlds from which they come, one from each. You'll learn more about what that means in 3.1's content, but for now let's just fall back in 2.55's assertion that only Lahabrea and Elidibus are from here. I believe that they each have an ability to act within their own world that the others lack, explaining why Lahabrea is the only one ever credited with raising black-masks on our world. (Elidibus is an emissary with a different role than his black-robed brethren, and it makes sense why he'd be from here.) The fact that he claims to have been raised by Zodiark and was freed from the walls of the soul suggests to me that he was once one of Hydaelyn's mortals ... but that need not be true at all. He could be something in-between, perhaps he was even once one of the "gods" that exist in mortal memory. But he seems to be something that once had a limited, singular, unique, discrete soul until it was raised from those limitations by Zodiark.