*Spoilers* Anyone feel joining Emet would have been better

[redheadturk]

Again, that plan was built out of twelve thousand years of torment and despair. It was very likely not their *original* plan.

[Cleretic]

Again, that plan was built out of twelve thousand years of torment and despair. It was very likely not their *original* plan.

And again: no it wasn't. We meet them and learn about their plan twelve thousand years after the Sundering, but as far as we can discern, they spent basically that entire twelve thousand years causing them. We don't know timeframes for the first three, but we can estimate:

It was about one thousand years between the Fourth and the Fifth Umbral Calamities. and then roughly fifteen hundred between both the Fifth and Sixth and Sixth and Seventh. (Brief time between the Seventh and intended Eighth is known to be a statistical outlier and so cannot be counted). So we've got ballpark figures for about how long it takes to set up a Calamity; conservative guess then says that the first Calamity was nine thousand years ago (if the thousand year gap is normal), and more plausible liberal guesses say somewhere over eleven thousand (if the fifteen hundred figures are more typical). Then we have to factor in the amount of time it would've taken to prep the first Calamity, which means we have to tack on another thousand to fifteen hundred years, and--oh crap, the math is saying they might have started immediately after the Sundering.

And THEN we need to take the Thirteenth into account; there was a failed Rejoining before the first Calamity. We have no estimates on how long that attempt would have taken, but we know that there wasn't work on the Source for it. Knowing that they didn't know exactly what they were doing at the time, we have to assume a slow process on that one, so even the conservative guess says they might've started their plot damn near immediately.