Quote Originally Posted by TheMightyMollusk View Post
Huh. (Do we need spoiler tags when the thread's explicitly about the end game?)

Honestly, I still don't see it as a connection with Azem themselves. Azem never would've needed a device to travel between reflections, because they didn't exist. (And we know Azem was sundered, because the WoL is a reincarnation of their shard on the Source, so they couldn't have just made it later or something.) A mystery to (hopefully) be explored later, I suppose.
Personally, I think that chalice has the ancient (or at least Ascian desundering) next holder of the seat of Azem in it. My thought process is that after Azem went off not choosing a side in Venat vs Convocation, they started searching for a new Azem, and found one, but the world was sundered before the process could finish. Or at least it was too soon for Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus to go back to calling Azem by his previous name.
I'm mostly basing this on the fact that the chalice has a chunk of what's clearly white auracite in it. Perhaps the rest of the machinery is there to keep him from escaping, like they should be able to do with white auracite.
There's also the possibility that it's a reincarnation of Venat's soul. Maybe after being reborn in the 2nd (or whichever shard Alexandria is on). Time flows differently, so she could have been reborn immediately after being eaten by Zenos, then released back to the aetherial sea after he died. I like to believe that she manipulated the flow of the aetherial sea just a bit so her soul would sunder itself after dying. It feels like what she would have wanted.