Rejoining question SPOILERS

[Con_Carne]

I have a question about this, though maybe they doesn't have an official explanation yet.

In their first attempt to Rejoining, the Ascians made the Thirteenth to be consumed by darkness, turning it into a Void and its people into Voidsent, so it was a failure and the Thirteenth was not Rejoined.

Then, ¿what is the difference with the Rejoining of the First? The First was about to have the same end but with light and Sin Eaters instead of darkness and Voidsent, until we came. ¿Why the First would have Rejoined while the Thirteenth didn't?

[Zackneifein]

It wouldn't have rejoined.

The Flood of Light was exactly what the Ascians wanted to avoid in the First

Emet-Slech plan was to send Loghrif with a servant of Elidibus, make of Ardbert and his companions the Warriors of Light, and make them win agaisnt the servant of Elidibus just enough that the Rejoining would be possible but not enough to trigger the Flood of Light.
It failed when Ardbert didn't followed exactly the plan, battled and killed Loghrif (by doing that, they won so much over the Darkness that it triggered the Flood).

But Minfillia stopped the Flood and the First didn't became like the Thirteenth (and it was a good thing for us as much as for the them), so the Ascians made another plan that led to the creation of Vauthry.
Since the Light in the First is linked to the "stagnation", by doing "nothing" against the Sin Eater like Vauthry and Eulmore, the Rejoining would have happened sooner or later (like it happened in the Exarch future).

[LineageRazor]

There's actually still quite a few unknowns. For example, how does Eden tie into this scenario? Eden is pretty explicitly stated as being the source of the Flood of Light - but it's ALSO stated that Ardbert's actions caused of the Flood of Light. Which is it? Are these things linked? If so, how?

My suspicion is that the Ascians had ALREADY set Eden to ramp up the Light-aligned aether, but when Ardbert slew them, there was no one left to control Eden. With no one left to control it, Eden kept at it, eventually resulting in the Flood. So, the Flood wasn't exactly CAUSED by Ardbert's actions - it was caused by the Ascians, who'd planned to supercharge the world with Light, but NOT to Flood it.

Basically, it wasn't so much that Ardbert caused the Flood of Light, but that he eliminated the folks capable of stopping it (who, incidentally, were the same folks who started it in the first place).

[Zackneifein]

Some of what you said could be possible (the use of Eden for example, that could have accelerated the Light abundance).

But it's clearly stated that Ardbert killing Loghrif is what triggered the Flood of Light by breaking the equilibrium between Light and Darkness drastically.
If everything would have happened like Emet and Loghrif wanted, it wouldn't have happened Eden or not.

So, for now, I will stay on that Ardbert and his companions are those who triggered the Flood, it's there choice to not do what was planned by killing Elidibus servant and to track and kill Loghrif, and not the choice of anyone else.

And if at the end we learn that Ardbert & co aren't responsible for the Flood, it wouldn't like it, their story would lost meanings.

[Edax]

I don't quite understand how killing an Ascian could cause a Flood of Light.

[Zackneifein]

The First is naturally strong in Light aether.
Before Loghrif and Emet came to the First, there was no prominent Warrior of Light, and if there was, none of them have won over the Darkness enough make the First in the situation of a Rejoining or a Flood.

It was Loghrif and Emet plan to create the strongest Warriors of Light of the First, making them have success against their minions, and by doing that making the Light stronger in the balance with the Darkness.

The end should have been to kill their last and most powerful servant, creating the ideal situation for a Rejoining.
But by killing Loghrif instead, an Ascian that is more or less Darkness incarnate, they basically won too much, breaking the balance entirely, in a world where the Light is already too strong, provoking the Flood.

[Edax]

The First is naturally strong in Light aether.
Before Loghrif and Emet came to the First, there was no prominent Warrior of Light, and if there was, none of them have won over the Darkness enough make the First in the situation of a Rejoining or a Flood.

It was Loghrif and Emet plan to create the strongest Warriors of Light of the First, making them have success against their minions, and by doing that making the Light stronger in the balance with the Darkness.

The end should have been to kill their last and most powerful servant, creating the ideal situation for a Rejoining.
But by killing Loghrif instead, an Ascian that is more or less Darkness incarnate, they basically won too much, breaking the balance entirely, in a world where the Light is already too strong, provoking the Flood.

I still don't quite understand, Ascians aren't native to the First so why would their life or death have any connection to the alignment of the First? If the source Warrior of Light was defeated and became a sin eater, would the First get "darker" as a result?

[Anonymoose]

From the way the NPCs walk about it, the primordial forces pool around their agents like gravity wells. Just as what we call Light is drawn to the agents of Hydaelyn, Darkness is drawn to the Ascians. Killing an agent of Hydaelyn or Zodiark causes a sudden shift in the balance - and any shift sudden and/or violent enough will trigger a Flood.

The First was already Light-heavy, but had fallen into a delicate homeostasis. The Shadowkeeper was supposed to help break that homeostasis and tilt a bit farther towards Light (the path of least resistance, I suppose), which would pull all of the elements to an unnaturally umbral charge and cause it to begin to diffuse into the Source. Striking down the Warriors of Light while triggering a disaster on the Source would have led to a Rejoining. Instead, the Warriors of Light defeated and spared the Shadowkeeper and killed her masters, causing a violent lurch even farther towards the Light.

[Iscah]

I still don't quite understand, Ascians aren't native to the First so why would their life or death have any connection to the alignment of the First? If the source Warrior of Light was defeated and became a sin eater, would the First get "darker" as a result?

Our earlier theories (pre-Shadowbringers) were based on Ardbert's understanding that killing the Ascians directly caused the Flood - and because of that we assumed that Ascians must be 'cosmically aligned' to Darkness and keeping the balance. That information is outdated now.

I haven't actually got to the final role quest yet so I'm going on why I've heard from others, but my understanding is that killing Ascians (who we now know to be "just people", if extremely powerful ones) isn't inherently a problem - but killing the person carefully manipulating the balance of Light and Dark without being aware of what they were doing, and especially just after you've altered the balance in a direction they didn't anticipate, is going to cause that plan to fail and the careful balance to tip, and suddenly the world is in a Flood state it was never supposed to actually reach.

[Anonymoose]

It might also help to remember that the story Mitron and Loghrif told the Shadowkeeper directly contradicts the story Elidibus told Ardbert in some ways. (Not the least of which being that the Shadowkeeper was told that, because they had failed to save their world from the Flood of Darkness, the First was doomed to suffer a Flood of Light no matter what because the universe likes balance. Rejoining the First instead of letting it fall to the Flood was supposed to be redemption.)