New primal questions... Spoilers!!!

[StarDrake]

Yeah, Fractal really throws some curveballs about the origins of species, among other things - there's an amazingly powerful implication that the Ixal are entirely genetically engineered and their skyborn "paradise" was originally their slave pen in Azys Lla. It opens up all sorts of worm-cans about how many races are "naturally-born" (we can now only absolutely say that about dragonkin, hyur, and elezen) versus how many might be the result of Allagan engineering gone wild. There's a similar insinuation that the Vanu-Vanu are originally from Azys Lla, too, or if not, that the Ixal are the result of horrific genone tampering on Vanu subjects. As with all things Allag, however, the remove of five millenia makes it a bit hard to nail down until something is stated directly. (What Azys Lla is better at for now is giving us a real good look at how Allagan society functioned and behaved...)

And yes, a "primal" is little more than an aether-ghost given form by the desire of the living beings calling it forth from the Lifestream. Ravana called Shiva a goddess because he sees himself as a god and knows Shiva to be the same manner of creature as he.

The question at this point is whether the Archbishop and his knights all possessed the Echo as well. All thirteen of them were capable of summoning using their own bodies as the vessels and they were all able to remain in full control, even entering and exiting the transformation at will. The only way I can see that being at all likely is if the ascians gave them all the Echo as they did with the sahagin priest yet I don't think it's ever explicitly stated.

It is not. One can also infer that Thordan and company were going to Azys Lla to look into methods of better controlling their own primal forms, among other things (like tapping into the Triad for more aether so they didn't have to bleed the land).

Another quite possible theory stems from Thordan and the Heaven's Ward having that kind of "meta" knowledge about what primals are - because they seemed to know upfront what the true nature of the beings known as "primals" were (and thus had plans to provide Thordan with aether sources other than just draining the land, for example), it's possible the Heaven's Ward members took "primals" into themselves... in image of themselves-as-Thordan's-Twelve. Note, for example, that their names don't change when transformed. So does it really count as tempering if you get tempered to yourself? Final Fantasy metaphysics! How do they work.