Quote Originally Posted by Cleretic View Post
This can't be taken as a given. In fact, all evidence suggests otherwise: the WoL and the Crystal Exarch are confirmably more aetherically dense than those in the First (the Scions might, that one gets complicated and can't easily be argued either way), and yet neither of them are gods among men on the First. Ran'jit gives us a run for our money more than once, and the Exarch is no more powerful as a Trust partner than Lyna is.

The lack of voidsent on the Thirteenth might be a matter of the rifts that voidsent use to travel only existing between the Source and Thirteenth; or at least definitely not between the First and Thirteenth. Or it could just be that the First doesn't have the generations and multiple civilizations of institutional knowledge set in motion by immortal ghost wizards that the Source does in Allag and Mhach, so the people of the First just aren't at a level of knowledge where they'd do that as readily. (Especially because they've already got Sin Eaters all over the place, why do they need the Sin Eaters' goth cousins?)
I think it's a matter of capacity more than capability.

Ran'jit beat us in CAPABILITY. They could do more with significantly less, and, I would guess, probably would have lasted WAY less than we would have. The WoL could, in theory, outlast Ran'jit, but the issue is that Ran'jit, from decades and decades of training and refinement, had figured out how to do way more than we ever could in a single moment at this point in our lives. And the Exarch explicitly used up a massive amount of his power in maintaining the spells of the crystal tower itself I think.