The Ancients still deserved better, after everything

[geekgirl101]

I get what you mean. It's sad that the Ancients were wiped out by events they didn't even see were going to happen and couldn't understand why. We are the survivors, we are what's left of the Ancients with our souls sundered and our aether weakened that we cannot use creation magicks in the same way they did. The likes of Venat and Elidibus are lost to us forever. Emet-Selch could come back reborn as one of us if he wanted since his soul wasn't obliterated like the other Ascians we've encountered, but he explicitly expressed his desires not to.

Venat made the decision not to tell her people about Meteion because if they had succeeded in changing the past it would've created a paradox where we never would've existed to warn her about the Final Days in the first place. Elidibus warned us for that very reason before he gave up his last remnants of his soul to open a gate to the past that we were not to try to alter the past nor prevent the Final Days from happening. In fact just before his soul was obliterated he recalled us visiting him in the past stating that it was a warming memory that he had forgotten, so even before we learned we could go there a version of ourselves had already been into the past and set in motion the cycle of events that would lead to us needing to go back to the world unsundered. Also Venat recognised that up until the Final Days they had been living in a utopia that risked becoming stagnated and that true peace shouldn't just be a given but something that's earned through overcoming hardships.

As for Hermes he believed all life had the rights to live even if it meant destroying everything else and developed an emotional attachment to everything. He could not accept the standard ways of his people who would create and unmake creations without remorse or regrets and once they believed their work was done would give up their own lives for someone else to fill in their place. The other Ancients were far too occupied with duty and acceptance of their ways to notice how unstable he was becoming and put their bets on him becoming the next Fandaniel would occupy him enough to forget his troubles. He secretly created Meteion to question what does it mean to live on other worlds but when his answer was that there was no other significant reason for living it pushed him over the edge and he sided with Meteion's judgement that to exist was to suffer. Even though he was reborn as a sundered Ascian the question still haunted him and with each rebirth he felt even less about life and longed for the cycle of death and rebirth to come to an end.