Some wild speculation about a certain macguffin from 7.0

[mallleable]

Yeah, the idea of 'why would Azem or or the Ancients need such a device' is partially what prompted me to fall down this rabbit hole as well as a more thematic lens. Dawntrail is a story with themes of legacy, burden, and grief, and we've been exploring those themes with the new characters. But where does The Warrior of Light fit in? We've already basically accepted that we carry on the legacy of Azem since Shadowbringers, and will continue to do so as represented by the summoning crystal. So what if this new thing is actually a burden-? And that is where the idea of it being like a weapon that Azem could not destroy, and they could only partially neutralize it during one of their adventures. And to continue being reckless with this house of cards, maybe the seal is why Preservation couldn't access its full power. With the seal, its only capable of dimensional travel, but with out the seal it's capable of things like dimensional fusion. Spooky stuff.

[Cleretic]

Yeah, the idea of 'why would Azem or or the Ancients need such a device' is partially what prompted me to fall down this rabbit hole as well as a more thematic lens. Dawntrail is a story with themes of legacy, burden, and grief, and we've been exploring those themes with the new characters. But where does The Warrior of Light fit in? We've already basically accepted that we carry on the legacy of Azem since Shadowbringers, and will continue to do so as represented by the summoning crystal. So what if this new thing is actually a burden-? And that is where the idea of it being like a weapon that Azem could not destroy, and they could only partially neutralize it during one of their adventures. And to continue being reckless with this house of cards, maybe the seal is why Preservation couldn't access its full power. With the seal, its only capable of dimensional travel, but with out the seal it's capable of things like dimensional fusion. Spooky stuff.

I do like the idea that this is perhaps a weapon by intention, honestly, or at least a tool of malice; perhaps the dark truth is that Preservation were closer to its intended uses than anyone else, and it's a tool of invasion and conquering rather than exploration and travel.

I'm not sure if it's true or if I believe it, but I think it's a valuable thought exercise. Like, can we definitively rule this out? And honestly, I can't.

How do we know that the only thing it can do or even if the only thing it was meant to do is interdimensional teleportation? Nuclear fission in our reality has been used to make weapons of unimaginable destruction but currently we mostly use it to heat water into steam. Considering what we know about both the writers as well as our Azem, it could very well be the Ancient version of the Ironworks' increasingly intricate kettles and originally designed to derive energy from an artificially created pocket universe in order to heat water to make tea but as a side effect and some tweaking it can open portals to other realities.

Basically my thought there is 'if it was first intended for some other important thing, they would've hinted at it'. The key's only ever described as a tool capable of doing this one specific thing, so reasonably, that's its main thing. It being originally intended for something largely irrelevant and later got discovered to also be capable of dimensional travel would be a bit of a pointless 'that's nice'-level extra, given the important part of that story is likely the person who found it was capable of dimensional travel. Sure, they could add this extra wrinkle, but that's not where the key's origin story is. Its origin story is either its invention or discovery as a tool of dimensional travel, because that's the lead interesting part; it doesn't really matter if it happened to also be a pretty good stapler pre-Sundering.

I don't think it showing the symbol of Azem is a smoking gun for Ancient-ness, either. As has been said a few times in this subforum, we've actually got a pretty limited scope on it doing that; it did that when we produced the Azem crystal, it's entirely possible it'd show an entirely different symbol if we pulled out another Convocation soul crystal, or even, say, the Pictomancer job crystal. But even if it is specifically intended to project that symbol, that's not necessarily a sign of its creator, it could be a sign added in by people who revered this person and their symbol. Those people could even be post-Azem; we know some Ancient-era figures survived as legends, would it be so weird if 'the Traveler' did too?