Calyx and Preservation

[DeathNoodles]

What's really been making me think is whether he's in league w/ Ascians or not, they are the source of his knowledge re: the sundering and clearly allow his designs to be carried out. In that vein it means Endless and dimensional fusion serve a purpose towards the rejoining, but I'm still lost on it. It seems to me Calyx reflects some of the desires of FF9 Garland:

"To live is to give life meaning, yet one must take others' lives to survive... Terra's souls will sleep until they forget such nonsense. They will begin a new life in a new dimension. It's a world in which life and death become one... That is the dimension in which we are meant to live, as beings that transcend life and death!"

The immortality of the Ancients is not gone into much, but I do believe knowing of this immortality (and his own health) is a spur for his actions. I do question what it means to" return to the star" of one's own will to the aetherial sea. What Preservation has developed in terms of the regulators seems like experimentation to move humanity towards that previous immortality, along with experimenting on the memories that should be washed clean from the soul in the aetherial sea. I wouldn't be surprised if the Endless were experiments towards a way of protecting the souls of the Source in worst case scenario, or harvesting souls from shards and using the key or some other method to rejoin those of the Source without causing a calamity. Didn't see Calyx coming tbh so who knows where it's going but I'm interested.

[Cleretic]

they are the source of his knowledge re: the sundering and clearly allow his designs to be carried out.

No, they were our source of this knowledge. We first learned that from Ardbert, who learned it form Elidibus, and later had Emet-Selch confirm it first-hand. All of that in a very short span of time, and exclusively on their terms.

Calyx has had a lot more runway than us. At the most conservative estimate, he's had four hundred years to put together a knowledge base that tells him that his world is the Ninth and ours is the Source. Realistically I'd say his people's history on that subject is a good few thousand years older than that: their knowledge of dimensional travel and theory traces back to the lalafel of Aloalo back in the Endless Frost, and who knows how much they knew, or from where. There's plenty of room for Calyx to learn this fact independent of the Ascians, or at least so far removed that it's effectively independent, and that possibility has a lot more potential in it than I think you're giving it credit for.

Also, the Ascian plan doesn't work or make any sense anymore, because Zodiark is dead. Any surviving Ascians wouldn't benefit from any rejoinings, because the rejoinings were primarily towards the purpose of reforming Zodiark, the only thing that actually had the power to bring back their world. On top of that, the three people actually pushing for that agenda are also dead, and all evidence we have suggests that any red-maskers below them actually cared a whole lot less about that agenda than they were letting on. (I also have my doubts that dimensional fusion like Calyx is aiming for would actually be a capable 'rejoining' for Ascian purposes, but that's kind of a tertiary problem behind the others.)

I think that it's fundamentally a mistake to immediately assume that Calyx is in some way directly in league with the Ascians, or working towards their ends; there's no proper evidence for it, and honestly, it's much less interesting than much more plausible answers at this point. I think it's both much more likely, and much more compelling, that Calyx is entirely off on his own thing, that just happens to include a few notes that make us go 'there's more going on here than just one nerd with a plan'. Him being a puppet for the Ascians would just make him Thordan 2, and we didn't even like the first Thordan!