Not a fan of Paenaemonium part 2

[Lyth]

There are a lot of missing pieces at the moment.

If Lahabrea's primary concern was the wellbeing of his son, then his decision to kill Athena would have simply followed from that. And yet he decided to merge his soul with Athena in front of the boy, the main question on his mind being 'Did Athena truly love me?' So the murder of his wife wasn't really predicated on concern for his son's well-being, but rather the fact that she simply didn't love him. Otherwise the question itself would be irrelevant to the action that he took. Lahabrea spends a lot of time talking about Athena's 'influence' on Eric, without actually outlining how she did it.

Likewise, why seal away his own memories of the act? Emet and Igeyorhm had suspicions, but they would have no way of reading his memories since they were excised and safely stored in crystal. He deliberately withheld information from the rest of the Convocation and the people of Amaurot. And not only that, he tried to have Pandaemonium destroyed with his followers still inside only when there was a risk of the truth coming out. There's also the question of what he did with the red crystal with his sealed memories. Why not turn it in to the Convocation and be honest about the truth? It just seems a bit convenient to blame Athena as the source of all the evil in Lahabrea's pure, pure heart when the only thing that we can go off of is his word. Every story has another side to it, and we'll need to hear Athena's to judge for ourselves.

[Necrotica]

Sweet we are back to everyone who doesn't agree with me is a troll.

WHAT DID ATHENA DO?

Experiment on her son. Influence her son. How? With what methods?

"Well we saw..."

Oh that magical vision conjured by Lahabrea. Clearly we can trust him.

I am amazed at how trusting you all are. That was not us using the echo to see the truth. That was a magical retelling of events created by a VERY questionable source.

[sidurgu-12]

Sweet we are back to everyone who doesn't agree with me is a troll.

WHAT DID ATHENA DO?

Experiment on her son. Influence her son. How? With what methods?

"Well we saw..."

Oh that magical vision conjured by Lahabrea. Clearly we can trust him.

I am amazed at how trusting you all are. That was not us using the echo to see the truth. That was a magical retelling of events created by a VERY questionable source.

theyre memories projected by two different people, one of who did it against his wishes.

[myahele]

Since some souls in the lifestream can observe whats going on in the surface, I wonder if that's what our Lahabrea was doing when he died?

Could he have set up events so that the memory crystal to be discovered, knowing that WoL will investigate and travel back in time? Maybe Lahabrea plans on uniting both crystal to be whole again?

[sidurgu-12]

Since some souls in the lifestream can observe whats going on in the surface, I wonder if that's what our Lahabrea was doing when he died?

Could he have set up events so that the memory crystal to be discovered, knowing that WoL will investigate and travel back in time? Maybe Lahabrea plans on uniting both crystal to be whole again?

it is possible. though my money is on athena setting up a long game in a bid to return.

[YianKutku]

Sweet we are back to everyone who doesn't agree with me is a troll.

I do not understand the "sweet" part of this sentence.

[Hurlstone]

Sweet we are back to everyone who doesn't agree with me is a troll.

WHAT DID ATHENA DO?

Experiment on her son. Influence her son. How? With what methods?

"Well we saw..."

Oh that magical vision conjured by Lahabrea. Clearly we can trust him.

I am amazed at how trusting you all are. That was not us using the echo to see the truth. That was a magical retelling of events created by a VERY questionable source.

At this point I do not see why we should not trust him. This is not the Lahabrea we know. This is him before he and his kin had to endure the horror of the Sundering and the centuries of loneliness that came after. Just like with Emet and Elidibus, they are yet to be the monsters they will become. Sure, what we saw was via magic and not the Echo (Anyone else think we are a bit too reliant on that?) but we spend the story chipping away at his stubbornness before we finally get told the story of what happened between him and Athena, and to throw that away just to have him be the maniaca "I lied mwahaha!" villain we expected… would be a waste. It also goes against the trend of recent expansions as humanising the Ascians.

As for Athena, she broke a major taboo in Ancient society, in that she put herself before the star. In doing so she manipulated Lahabrea into giving her control of the facility so she could conduct inhumane experiments and it seemed very clear to me that she was gonna torture or kill her child. Why did she do all this? We do not know the full story yet, but we will in time. I am 99% sure she will appear in the final act of this story and perhaps even be the final boss. My hope is its not simple “Yeah I am evil haha” and that they manage to bring her down to a more sympathetic level. The idea of defying the star and seeing an Ancient wishing to instead concentrate in ones own endeavours is one worth exploring, though perhaps not in a case where said person is also torturing their child, but we shall see.

[Seraphor]

It was a whole lot of telling and not enough showing.

All we really get are Athena saying she would watch the world burn to make herself a new one, which is a pretty extreme sentiment but without the means to back it up means nothing.
Plus Lahabrea sharing her mind and deciding whatever it was she was planning was abhorrent, though we don't know what that is.

[Iscah]

Oh, I know. But I'd like the chance to throw some stones at Elidibus once we'd confirmed that was who we were talking to. The fact he hasn't committed horrible crimes yet doesn't mean I don't hate him for doing them in my past which is his future. (Time travel's funky like that.) Let me hold a grudge!

Seriously, why? He's innocent at this point. You can't harass someone for something they're going to do but haven't yet.

If anything, you're going to cause a time-looping start to him being a nastier person.

[EaraGrace]

On the one hand merging souls has to be very intimate experience, leaving those involved with feelings and desires that could irrevocably change a person. This would in theory necessitate extreme action if one really wanted to isolate and remove those influences, justifying Lahabreas decision.

On the other hand, the Eden raids showed a similar event happening with Gaia and Mitron, which was resolved without said splitting. While one could argue that Gaias memory problems protected her, she would in theory have the memories of the merger and thus still would have been impacted by Mitrons desires right? Yet her rejection of him, and embracing of Ryne, was enough to completely undue that, suggesting it isn’t as clear cut as Lahabrea made it seem. I think this suggests that there’s a more complicated picture unfolding here than simply Lahabrea vs Athena and he was a lot closer to becoming Hephaistos than he’d like to admit.