Quote Originally Posted by ObsidianFire View Post
Which in my mind puts the plan to restore the world by sacrificing more Ancients to Zoidark and the plant to free the Ancient souls sacrificed to Zodiark by sacrificing more future souls to Zodiark in a very different light. All primals need aether. All primals want aether. The goal of people who have been tempered is to keep their primal supplied with aether.
That is the case with current primals...but isn't it suggested that this is a result of the relative lack of aether from the summoners of the shards/source when engaging in what turns out to be creation magic? The Ancients seem to have been capable of creating entities fully, with more powerful ones requiring more aether to complete...

But the constant need to feed on aether that we see in our primals seems to be a result of what is essentially an incomplete "concept" that is brought into creation. We don't have the innate aether needed to summon a creation the way they could (otherwise even their robes would be sucking aether from the land), and as such the creation (primal) is simply trying to complete the process using the aether it can find elsewhere...which is something the Ascians know and count on as part of their plans.

Zodiark and Hydaelyn also don't seem to be described as needing to continue to feed, but rather to need energy for specific purposes - summoning, fixing the world, etc.

So while it is entirely possible that Zodiark wouldn't return the souls in exchange for an equivalent amount of aether and simply enjoy the new meal, I'm not sure we can say that either work the same way as our primals, seeing as how the current use of the creation magics that are now known as primal summoning have some very specific shortcomings compared to the techniques employed by the Ancients.