Tales from the Dawn #3: "A Question of Life" (Hermes)

[Lauront]

There is an almost stubborn refusal to acknowledge what her motives, as now clearly articulated in the short story (and the Q&A), actually are.

Personally, I can't see how people can place any reliance on what the Ascians planned to do with the final stage of the Rejoining as an indication of what was involved way back then. The Sundering is a massive shift in circumstances, and we know they intend to wipe the slate clean to restore their people, with the specifics of how it'd play out, vague. The only constant is that there will be a sacrifice of life to that end. Nowhere is it implied that it necessarily must be actually sapient life and, more specifically, ancient life.

Going back to the logistical side of things - and ideas that are more actively speculative on my part - Hythlodaeus's speech suggests to me that the initial life that reappeared after the second sacrifice was, on some level, kind of primordial. "Tiny lives sprouting." Ancients generally have no control over souls and what becomes recognized as authentic life, but the Ancients do have the capacity to shape and guide life force into vehicles that may be more likely to gain those things, based on patterns and research - do you use your creation magicks to form an elemental sprite, or a goobbue, or something like Meteion?

In that sense, even without there being already-existing people, the debate over "do we use the new life to restore our brethren, or to pave the path to a future potentially without us" still makes sense. The second sacrifice provided the star back with the spark and energy for life, and now the Ancients are in the position of deciding how they will raise that life - on a path to evolve to basically livestock, or a path to become sapient beings. Because once again, Venat is a character whose motivations are rooted in ideology, not materialism. She would be arguing for a future where saving their people trapped in Zodiark is sub-optimal versus preparing and nurturing the form of a future generation that could inherit the star from them altogether, because she values the process of "passing on one's legacy to the future" as a self-justifying and morally correct principle.

That ended up less truncated than I intended. Oops.

As per this translation previously posted by Lurina, given that it is Zodiark seeding the star with life (which we know from Elpis would involve the propagation of creations suited to receiving a soul), it would not surprise me in the least if the primal is what was spawning templated creations (namely, animal and plant life, and similar) using stored up concepts, which would then reproduce in the usual way. I agree with your take on how this may have played out, i.e. her faction presenting these entities as being potentially apt to develop sapience if guided through the right evolutionary course, maybe drawing on her encounter with the WoL to add further contours to this narrative. Alternatively, a narrative of make do with those survivors and let the wilderness be populated by the new life as it reclaims it. Her faction's main goal is to get her people to stop the third sacrifice out of the fear that restoration of their civilisation would result in their stagnation, or worse (and of course, her own direct fear is the Plenty and Meteion.) Using such a narrative to stall and buy time until she was ready to summon Hydaelyn is the most logical way of parsing the event to me. My take on it is her answer is to preserve the timeline as is required and provide her followers an adequately persuasive narrative to stall towards that end.