[SPOILERS] The Fate of Ascians

[Jaywalker]

There seems to be a single fact people here are skipping over, Emit-Selch himself has said ascians view the inhabitants of the Source and the 13 shards as not being alive.

So it may entirely be possible that they get taken into the lifestream and split up to join Hydaelyn's order as new people. But yes the possibility also does exist that dead is dead.

Thought about this for a bit, two things that are throwing me a little. First, I think the question will be explored on how the Ascians are incorrect about us not really being alive. They need to have good intellectual reasons behind their arguments as millenia-old (if tempered) scholars, but that doesn't mean they've reached the right conclusion. The Ascians are pretty biased in their own right.

Second thing is, the "dead is dead" idea seems like it rolls very specifically in the vein of "dead is oblivion, nothingness, being erased from existing in the most complete way possible". That concept is very specifically nihilist, and to me feels like it would be a bizarre exception within the FFXIV universe and would also not fit with the tone of closure, peace, and even beauty when Emet-Selch died. Those things are subjective yeah, but I mean they had had him dissolve upon death into a collection of scattering lights to pretty music.

Why would Lahabrea come back? Elidibus confirmed that he was dead. He got eaten by Thordan, and since Ascians are just pure aether without bodies, a primal should be able to eat them easily.

In fairness that's not totally accurate--it's been confirmed that aether and souls are separate and that the soul can re-gather aether post-death sometimes if their will is strong. If Thordan hadn't been destroyed, let alone immediately after eating Lahabrea, I'd have been pretty positive he was just 100% out by virtue of primal aetheric digestive juices or whatever eroding whatever will lingered in his soul. Rn I'm personally ??? on the whole thing, he could be basically anywhere and in any state. For all we know he basically got the equivalent of spiritually projectile vomited when Thordan died.

Something else nagging at me, there might be a way to free the souls of the Ascians who sacrificed themselves to fuel Zodiark without demanding the sacrifice of new creation. Thing is, Zodiark isn't the star itself so much as artificially ascribed will provided by Amaurotines specifically to combat the Terminus event. If Zodiark is destroyed, theoretically at minimum the souls contained within Zodiark would be dispersed back into the life cycle.

The problem then becomes that no one really knows, definitively, what caused the Terminus event. We as players have theories and speculations but the characters in-game have no idea and we don't know as players if our theories are correct of not. If conditions have not otherwise changed for the Amaurotines in particular, there is no reason to think the Terminus event wouldn't just resume.

And because the Ascians haven't been considering the newer races as truly alive, they haven't been able to consider that the way to avoiding Terminus might full well lie in accepting limitations. Everything in their plan seems like it ties to a "have our cake and eat it too" philosophy where they've just been trying desperately to avoid dealing with Terminus and what it might mean for them long-term. They're very change-resistant.