Quote Originally Posted by Anonymoose View Post
The jury in my brain is still out on what I think The Key is(n't), though. It appears to me that the "goblet" portion of the artifact is the electrope interface that Preservation developed to jailbreak it, and the true artifact the Milalla possessed is the gray/orange-glowing bit within.

The swirly appearance of the true artifact reminds me of Ancient motifs, so I started with theories of Ancient production.

The fact that Preservation failed to get the artifact to work despite facing the same threats and having the same goals as the Milalla is interesting. What other condition that the Speaker met did they fail? My first shot in the dark was that by some coincidence the Speaker was themselves an Azem shard, creating a through-line with all the sun motifs in the Milalla ruins.
The thing that still makes me disagree with the Ancients as a theory on this (it resembles their stuff most of all potential contenders, but not so exactly that it's clear) is that the current skillset the key's been shown to have would be utterly worthless to them. The Ancients wouldn't have needed a way to cross shards because the shards didn't exist at their time, and the Ascians wouldn't have needed it because they could travel between shards pretty easy. So either the Ancients didn't make it, or they made it for a reason that up until now has never been stated. And that latter one sounds too sloppy for the XIV writers.

But also... uhm, can I ask for detail on 'Preservation failed to get the artifact to work'? Because all evidence I've got suggest they're actually its most successful users; the traditional millala couldn't get it working in the Storm Surge times, while Preservation got their plans rolling pretty well and pretty quickly (well, by their timescale) both the first and second times they got hold of the thing. They didn't pull off full-power dimensional fusion, but that seems like it's more because it's a really big process that they were stopped from doing both times.