The Ascians going forward

[Necrotica]

There should still be a bunch of those black masked foot soldiers left. I assume they know better than to challenge us directly, but they could still spread their flawed Primal summoning knowledge far and wide.
?
And they can teleport anywhere where the blessing of light does not stop them. Will they start killing off our friends one by one in retaliation for killing their god?

Or will they be completely forgotten, dropped from the plot, and never mentioned again without any explanation as to why?

EDIT: And I also have no idea why a blessing that prevents aetheric corruption would stop Ascians from teleporting into the Waking Sands but...*shrugs*

[SannaR]

The blessing of light can also work as a shield. It's what is being used during the Lakshmi fight Lyse goes and get Fordola for. It also seems to be light aspected as even Emet curses it after we break free from his chains. The black masked Ascians aren't much of a threat and don't even need a blade of light to kill. As you kill off a bunch of them in the HW Smn quest line. Heck when we were dealing with Elidibus on the 1st the other Scions killed a bunch of the black masked off screen. I don't think they were the ones teaching how to summon primals. As that wasn't their job. They were just there to cause general unrest

[FireMage]

The blessing of light can also work as a shield. It's what is being used during the Lakshmi fight Lyse goes and get Fordola for. It also seems to be light aspected as even Emet curses it after we break free from his chains. The black masked Ascians aren't much of a threat and don't even need a blade of light to kill. As you kill off a bunch of them in the HW Smn quest line. Heck when we were dealing with Elidibus on the 1st the other Scions killed a bunch of the black masked off screen. I don't think they were the ones teaching how to summon primals. As that wasn't their job. They were just there to cause general unrest

The Echo prevents tempering, not the Blessing

[Tsiron]

That's what was thought until EW, but now it's been confirmed it's the Blessing that "prevents the corruption of one's aether" and the two were only conflated because Hydaelyn would immediately bestow it upon anyone and everyone who gained the Echo

[FireMage]

That's what was thought until EW, but now it's been confirmed it's the Blessing that "prevents the corruption of one's aether" and the two were only conflated because Hydaelyn would immediately bestow it upon anyone and everyone who gained the Echo

Fordola and Zenos don't have the Blessing. So no, it's the Echo

[Tsiron]

Idk what to tell you when it's what the game outright states.

[Lyth]

Let's face it, the Ascians never intended on going forward. They were always stuck in the past.

[FireMage]

Idk what to tell you when it's what the game outright states.

Feats take precedence over statements

[Iscah]

From our rewritten-by-Endwalker understanding of what the blessing is, it's quite possible that it is something that could be copied over in the Resonance process rather than being bestowed by Hydaelyn personally. Or maybe their fake Echo downloads a real blessing.

Whatever it is, the writers really made a stuff-up of their own lore and somehow forgot to review their own past statements about what they had set into canon and where the remaining gaps were.

The post-ARR stuff was always confusing to look at and try to figure out what they intended to be the line between Echo and blessing, and Endwalker has overturned the whole thing, so I don't feel like it's even worth trying to make sense of any more.

As for Nabriales, prettymuch everything he says and does seems to be an oddity left behind in the swerve from the apparent ARR setting of "Ascians as beings of the void" to their retconned history of "tragic ancient race". He has a few lines that seem to be from a never-followed plot line about Tupsimati being a key of sorts, and talks of Zodiark as if he were something quite different than what we got in the end, and the inability to go into places shielded by the blessing just seems to be part of that abandoned line of thinking.

At the time it put me in mind of the folklore concept of fairies not being able to enter a house without permission, plus from the way Elidibus tended to act – always half-truths but never lies – I thought they might be in that sort of "arcane beings bound by specific rules" trope and their ultimate direction of actually just being normal people (at least in personality) has always felt like a let-down in comparison.

[Hainiryun]

With regard to what the black masks are up to these days we haven't heard anything of them since 5.3 (as far as I can recall anyway) when there are a few offhand mentions of them spreading chaos around Norvrandt during the star shower, and being dealt with off screen by our allies.

As for whether they could be a threat going forward, maybe? We've already seen a group of them try and fail to get revenge on us for defeating their overlord way back in the HW SMN quests so they'd likely struggle to threaten us personally unless they came in force. But that requires someone to organize them, with some overlords still unaccounted for (someday we might see Halmarut again) they'd probably make more sense than individual black masks taking over.

Could they pose a threat to people who aren't us? Probably but only really in ways that would feel kind of unsatisfying. If a major combat capable NPC got taken out by a black mask it'd probably feel weird even if they had the element of surprise on their side etc because we've already established at this point that a competent NPC can take these people on. It'd feel equally weird if we suddenly find out that F'lahmin got ganked by a spooky wizard out of nowhere while we were off dealing with something else.
Summoning as a threat feels like it's largely worn out its narrative relevance at this point between the cure for tempering, warding scales and general diplomacy disincentivising summoning. It could still come up again but it'd have to be somewhere we haven't been before to really cause much damage.

Honestly I think they were dropped largely because they aren't really necessary at this point in the story. We've been going toe to toe with the overlords for so long that it'd feel arbitrary to suddenly have a random lower tier mooks causing trouble on a large scale. It also sort of provides a reason why we personally haven't seen them for a long time. We're a threat to the actual overlords so there's not a ton to be gained by them sending their minions into the meat grinder when they could be better employed elsewhere. Elidibus didn't send them to fight us because they weren't capable of stopping us and he wanted to deal with us himself. The 5.3 mention is that explanation for why they're not around anymore IMO. They still are, they're just not engaging with us directly because that ends badly for them and doesn't achieve much.