Quote Originally Posted by Eyvind View Post
The Alpha issue ties in with a larger issue: is everything alive a discreet sundered soul with specific pieces out there? Because the way the scions understand it - as Alphinaud explains in Il Mheg - most souls dissolve into the lifestream and only a few strong souls (including presumably us) maintain cohesion after death.

Either the scions are wrong about how this works, or the detail that every lifeform is gaining ether creates a conundrum. After all, with lifestream theory, there are countless new souls being made, and if they're new what are they rejoining with? Random aether? In that case Alpha could be included.

I guess a third possibility is that there is a discreet unit of aether, an aether atom, which was sundered, and each one gets rejoined. Then Alpha is out of luck again.
I'd imagine it's random re-attachment, unless the original form is there and readily recognisable (e.g. a soul characterised by the Echo), where the original cannot be "found".