Quote Originally Posted by Lady_Silvermoon View Post
Correct. Souls are not corporeal aether. That's why I clarified that the Endless, cannot and do not run off souls. They run off life force, which is corporeal aether. From the souls entry in our codex:


People conflate and confuse what people with the regulators are doing and what's happening in Living Memory. But the people of Living Memory are not memory aether grafted onto souls as that would be ghosts and they could have just been that in the first place, be much sturdier for it and not needed any resources to maintain it. All you'd have to do is keep them from going to the aetherial sea and they would have continued on forever. Even a city of ghosts would have been a less stupid plan. But the memory aether is removed from the soul and sent to Living Memory, while the soul is packaged into a soul cell and sent to the lower levels for distribution to living citizens. So if what she needed was souls, extracting memories from them and sending them to the other place makes no sense. She's making their physical bodies out of the stuff physical bodies are made out of. If she was making them physical bodies out of souls, well souls are eternal. She could have just left them on their original souls and none of this would have been necessary.
Then isn't that even worse? Without souls, they're less than ghosts, they're just aetherial residue or to use Montichaigne's analogy, just floating ink that used to be written to a page and now has to be constantly maintained through sucking out life aether. This makes the Endless no different than the shades of Amaurot or even familiars like a carbuncle. They're just recreations that only resemble life. I had thought the users referring to them as chat bots were going a bit too far but it seems that's exactly what they are. They're simulacra devoid of the actual pieces that make something alive and without a supply of life force they become monsters.

I saw someone say that this whole thing is much clearer in Japanese. I wonder if there's some sort of translation difference here with what's going on and if the English community are the only ones who keep on saying the Endless were "genocided".