Let's play a game: Save the Ancients!

[Cilia]

This thread is going to devolve into The Same Goddamn Argument and three people are gonna spend twelve pages brow-beating us about Venat being bad.

By my last count it was up to like, 6 or 7. Anyway...

In order to "save" the Ancients, it would be necessary to accept the flaws and transience of Amaurotine civilization.

The biggest flaw we saw, and the one that led to Meteion (and thus the Final Days) was its more or less mandate that everyone subscribe to its "Life and Death in Service to the Star" ideology. Anyone who disagreed or went against this ideal was seen as somewhere between strange and evil; Hermes, Venat, and Athena are all oddities among their people in their own ways for not acting in lockstep with the ideas set forth by the rest of their civilization, and all had a dramatic impact on things due to them finding Amaurot's ideology incompatible with their own and being unwilling to conform. So long as deviants are treated as strange at best, unacceptable at worst, even if we went further back in time to stop Hermes from creating and dispatching the Meteia... another Hermes would just come along someday to cast the die in his place.

Tying in to that is my second point, that being the idea that Amaurot would (or more pointedly should) exist forever. Again, even if it hadn't been Hermes (and Venat in turn) someone would eventually cast the die and make returning to "the good old days" impossible. Heck, the only reason it was even able to exist as a shattered shell of its former self was thanks to Zodiark. Even if the Convocation's plan worked, even if Venat told them about Meteion and they came up with a successful plan to stop her... the Final Days would forever leave their mark on history and impact decisions going forward. The reality of the situation is that once Hermes cast that die there could be no going back and again, even if we stopped Hermes from doing so, someone else would inevitably succeed in his place. Even if Venat hadn't sundered Etheirys, the Amaurot of eld could never last forever.

The only way to save the Ancients as a species would be to let Amaurot die when its time came, whether that be sooner or later, recognize why, and build something better. Clinging to the memory of its glory only led to death and suffering; only by moving forward could they survive. Many more of them elected to live in the past (or die for it) than not, which is why Venat did what she did. The rest is history.