Quote Originally Posted by Gemina View Post
[snip]
Yeah G'raha was from an alternate future on the Source. He was powerful enough to bring everyone back in time, but as far as I can tell that wash pretty much the only option available to him - and everyone else trying to stop the end of the world. I haven't read the short story I think got mentioned earlier? But like... Idk what else anybody could have done to stop the next series of calamities, or even if anybody actually knew how heavy the Ascians' hand was in what happened to them. Hope was alive but things sure looked grim. I definitely can't blame people for wanting to stop G'raha and hoping they could recover their own world, but I also don't think they stood much of a chance. Pessimistic as that sounds.

As for stopping the calamity, they did kinda explain the gist of it. I'd have to go back and check some things for details but my understanding was that the first being consumed by light and rejoining would flood the source with light aspected aether, which has the effect of stalling the flow of aether in living things. Black Rose has the same effect by stopping the flow of aether in the body, so an imbalance in favor of light aspected due to the rejoining would catastrophically enhance the effects of Black Rose and turn relatively small scale disaster into worldwide calamity.

Saving the first prevents the source from being flooded with light aether, which means the black Rose is horrible but not catastrophic. All this seems to have also indirectly changed how things went back home on the source too - I'm really not sure how things would've gone down with Zenos and co if we weren't away on the first with all of the scions, but I'm pretty sure Estinien and Gaius wouldn't have teamed up and (this is wild speculation here) there's every chance it would've been us on that mission, and us who faced Zenos - and maybe won, so the poison wouldn't be destroyed? Or something? Who knows how things actually went down in the alternate future, but whatever the case things are definitely different now thanks to G'raha and company.