The Nature of the WOL (Spoilers)

[Alleo]

There are many things about this timeline that make it quite likely that the myriad Spoken races all existed PRIOR to the Sundering. Would the Dissenters have taken such a drastic step if the life they were preserving was nothing more than trees and deer? It's POSSIBLE that they were environmental extremists of that sort, but I find it far more likely that this new life included new intelligent races - basically, the races we know, such as Kobolds, Hyur, Roegadyn, Sahagin, and so on and so forth. All of these races, then, existed PRIOR to the Sundering, and this is how they all wound up existing across all Thirteen Shards. Now, it could certainly be the Ascians' perspective that there was only One Race (that mattered) prior to the Sundering, and so they weren't LYING, exactly, when they told Varis of this.

Additionally, I do not believe that all intelligent life forms contain a piece of an Ancient's soul. The population of Ancients was decimated (first by the Calamity, then by the horrendous sacrifices to Zodiark), so it seems unlikely that there were enough Ancients to provide a soul fragment to every living person - and even if there were, what happens when that limit is eventually reached, and another baby is born? No, it seems more likely to me that the majority of people are "new life" of the sort created by Zodiark and protected by Hydaelyn. Souls in this system do not persist intact, but are instead dispersed into the Lifestream upon death and become the source for new souls. The Sundered souls of the Ancients exist within this system, but remain intact, occasionally being reborn into new bodies with no recollection of their prior lives.

I agree (and I hope that we one day get an answer to that ingame) that either the other spoken races started to exist because Zodiark brought back new life (I doubt if they existed right next to the Ancient ones before that because Emet said that this was their perfect world) or maybe each Ancient one had their own form thus they could be the anchestors of each race. (Since they can imagine quite a bit of stuff, so maybe having to wear robes and masks was their way to also not be negative towards each others look?) So either they wanted to kill other sentient or even sapient life or maybe this would have included future Ancient ones too.

And I agree it also makes sense that not everyone would be an Ancient one if the other races existed at that time. But we should also not forget that death was not something that common to them (it still did happen but probably not that often and not of old age either) and yet they still had children. We simply dont know if there was some sort of lifestream before that, thus new souls getting born all the time, or if this was something which only happened afterwards.

I wonder if those who souls were Ascian once are the ones with the Echo? I mean we are originally led to believe Hydaelyn gave special souls the Echo but ALL Ascians have Echo.

I know its probably nitpicking but Ancients are not necessarily Ascians, while all Ascians are Ancient ones. The 14th for example was never an Ascian, because they left, thus only the 13 people of the council are Ascians, anyone else might be an Ancient one. But I also wonder if having the echo might mean that one could have been an Acient one. Maybe that is why Elidibus says that we would take their side if we knew the whole truth about the echo? That he believes that anyone that knows that the Ancient ones once existed would suddenly decide that mass genocide of whole worlds are fine?

But if those that possess the echo were all Ancient ones (and there are quite a few who have that) then it shows that the Ascians are really ready to kill even them to get their old ones back.