You asked to discuss facts, I threw down the facts. I could go into extra math to explain how much of a sacrifice it could be (in brief: I hope you have a least favorite continent on Etheirys), but I see it's not really welcome.

I would caution not conflating 'ancients' and 'Ascians', though. My opinion on the Ancients is actually mostly 'eh', but we weren't really talking about them here. We were talking about the Ascians--explicitly post-Sundering, present-day Ascians, who've gone through a very tragic but very long arc that's ended in them being villains with a lot of impact on the game world; they haven't done a whole lot of good for people living in the Seventh Astral Era, and it's a disservice to the Ancients to claim that aspersions cast on the Ascians are really directed at them.


To get back on the subject, a related subject to the OP's original post: so, is the Cloud of Darkness dead? We know that you can't kill Voidsent on the Source and they'll just snap back to the Thirteenth, but she's the only one of note we actually did fight there. The Thrones talk about us and her as if we killed her, and she's referred to in the past tense, but if we actually look back at the Crystal Tower raids, she didn't die after the fight, and we leave the Thirteenth pursued by her particle beams.

So... did we kill her and they just forgot that last scene? Did she take a while to bleed out? Did someone else kill her afterwards (maybe Obvious Golbez)? Is she still around, but no longer relevant? It's just very odd, because everything's playing out like she died... except for the part where she didn't.