(ShB Spoilers) Didn't Hydaelyn, uh...

[Absimiliard]

Just a quick note, here - it is strongly likely that it was not all non-intelligent life. The Spoken races exist on all Shards, and that means that they were around prior to the Sundering. The New Life the Council hoped to sacrifice included these intelligent races - but being mortal and ephemeral as they were, the Council saw them as lesser life forms (I mean, the wretched things all die in a century or so anyway - what kind of existence is that?), and thus not worthy of consideration.

It is quite unlikely that the Dissenters summoned Hydaelyn merely to preserve some trees and deer. There were almost certainly intelligent races included in the reckoning.

The sundered souls of the Ascians are also present in every shard. There are even fragments of ten of the thirteen Convocation members spread throughout all, as it is those individuals Emet-Selch and his ilk targeted for indoctrination via teaching them about their original selves, their purpose, etc. There is a not insignificant amount of anecdotal evidence suggesting that the Spoken races are indeed a direct result of the sundering.

I don't think this is true - most people possess mortal souls that dissipate into the lifestream once they die (level 50 MSQ quest "What Little Gods are Made Of").

The sundered Ascian souls are processed by the lifestream just like anything else. Every death casts them adrift in the lifestream to have everything they acquired during that mortal life stripped away. There is really no way for the characters, in-universe, to differentiate a sundered Ascian soul from any other type of soul. We cannot prove or disprove the idea of most Spoken having originated with the sundering at this time, though there is some supporting evidence scattered through Norvrandt.

We don't know that Zodiark didn't do other things to tempered Ascians other than making them mindless slaves. Maybe they became unable to do anything that would harm their god and they end up rationalizing this to themselves.

Agreed.

If we take what Emet said at face value, then yes. Still, this doesn't mean that being shattered is all that bad. There's also that pesky problem of creation magic - if we were to rejoin and stand on equal footing to the Ascians, then we might be in danger of causing another calamity in the same way as the first one.

The original calamity wasn't just their powers going out of control, though. A noise originating deep inside the planet caused them to start losing control. This loss of control sparked fear, and the fear caused their already out of control powers to begin running rampant. Whatever Zodiark did to fix the world should probably still be in place unless Hydaelyn decided to undo it for some reason.

Good point. I guess instead of just making plants and animals, Zodiark also created new intelligent, but mortal, life. Now we're talking about ending a mortal life to bring back an immortal one (assuming this was possible). Seriously, that is one explosive moral dilemma, although tempering complicates things. The more I think about it, the more I hate how this was brought up in ShB because it's one of those thought experiments that will never happen in the real world but still makes you feel horrible about weighing the value of life.

We currently have no evidence that anything Zodiark created was sapient.