Quote Originally Posted by Anonymoose View Post
That's a major place "so vague a lot of things work" kicks in. The Ascians are called the Bringers of Chaos. And Chaos is required to bring Zodiark.

...

In the beginning, before myth and legend, before Light and Dark, there was but the sea.
It does get difficult when you try and go back to the root of creation, even with science. While the Big Bang is a widely-accepted phenomenon, what the universe was like before then is still a giant question mark there is seemingly no way to answer. But I digress.

Chaos is a major figure in I as the first and last major opponent you fight in a certain sense of the word, and is the origin of the time loop the world is stuck in. His Ivalice incarnation is a shout-out to this version, called "Walker of the Wheel" because he's been killed and resurrected countless times by the gods (Occuria).

In VII, Chaos is originally just Vincent's ultimate Limit Break, but his existence is expanded upon in Dirge of Cerberus: he's essentially a grim reaper whose purposes is to kill everything in the event of a catastrophe, so as to send their spirit energy to Omega Weapon (in that 'verse, a sort of interplanetary ark for the Planet's Lifestream).

However, Chaos also exists in the Fabula Nova Crystallis sub-series, albeit as a primordial force more akin to how it's portrayed in Greek myth than as an independent character. There it just is, and is used by Etro to give humans hearts, but becomes problematic when unleashed on the mortal plane because it breaks down the laws of reality. It's Caius' intentional doing so that leads to the apocalypse, more or less, as witnessed in Lightning Returns. Or so I heard. I only played 1/2 of the original XIII before I got bored.

Back to the point - in Greek myth, Chaos is the primordial force that has always existed, but it was only when other things came out of it that existence properly began. Things are only defined by their opposite, or "And God said: let there be light." Before then there was no such thing as darkness, that's just what there was. There was no disparity. The introduction of the light defines darkness - "shadow is not cast, but born of [light]." Then, if Hydaelyn is the goddess of light and order to Zodiark's darkness and chaos, my current best guess is that she took Zodiark's power, formless aether, and sorted it out to shape the world we know today, and Zodiark created the Ascians as a sort of dying curse to kill Hydaelyn and return his power to him. Zodiark is "dead" because Hydaelyn sorts his essence, raw aether, into the elements we know make up everything in the world.

That makes the Ascians' goal of wreaking as much havoc as possible make sense, kind of - by destroying Hydaelyn, the planet, they're weakening the goddess and her ability to filter aether into the elements that make up the world. Then chaos will return and with it, Zodiark... returning everything to a zero world, where there is no life and no crystal to give life, a la IX's Necron.

... I'm tired and frustrated the servers be down. Incoherent rambling, toss off Darksteel Foil hat.