What would happen if the Source were destroyed in the same way as a shard?

[Vyrerus]

Since pieces of Zodiark are still in every shard, then Hydaelyn would no longer exist, while Zodiark would remain in part.

If the sudden, violent destruction of the Source didn't trigger a massive multi-Rejoining, that is. For a Rejoining to occur in a stable way, where the Source is largely unaffected, they align the aether polarities, and blow up the shard while wounding the Source. This causes the aetherial link between the two to have a vacuum, from what I understand, and the Source absorbs the shard's life back into itself on the aetherial level.

They never tried to just damage the Source without priming the shards, but it stands to reason that if the Source took a big enough dunk, that it'd still try to draw the shards in to fix itself. Doing it all at once is probably too great a risk, so it would likely end catastrophically, with every shard being absorbed into an unstable aetherial mass that inevitably implodes.

[Alenore]

It's not that the shard destruction is what causes Rejoinings.

From what we know, Ascians first imbalance the aether in a reflection, which cause the "dimensional wall" between Source and Shard to fissure, with some aether from the shard trickling back to the Source. Then, they trigger a calamity on the Source which, in order to stabilize itself, just suck all the available aether from the nearest source : the already weakened Shard, absorbing it altogether and de facto destroying it.
Except if the Source is actually just another shard the Ascians picked at random, I suppose the whole Sundering thing make it that it's the "base" and it only flow that way.

So I guess you can destroy it as much as you want, it'll just be a barren rock in the end, unlike a shard where its dimension just collapses and goes back home.

If you actually manage to destroy the planet and all its aether completely, I suppose the shards would just be there since the planet already took quite big hits through all the calamity without really affecting the other non-imabalanced reflections.

Perhaps it's Hydaelyn triggering the Rejoinings in a last resort to stabilize the Source? In which case, she may choose to just break down a random shard to try to fix it until there's none left.



As for other planets, we have 3 occurrences of aliens using Aether : Ultima (High Seraph, not the fancy metalwork Nero made), Midgardsormr, and Omega. That last one literally is a machine able to manipulate aether, so its creators must have at least known about the stuff.