6.1 plothole?

[Hasrat]

A few lines came up in doing these quests (context, I'm wrapping up 6.5 at this time), and it doesn't seem this is going to get addressed. So.. maybe some of you lore nerds has some better rationalizing or maybe it's a translation thing or who knows..

What we know:

Using the Crystal Tower and a pact with Cloud of Darkness, Allag opened a voidgate during their war on Meracydia.
Vrtra tells us his sister, Azdaja, flew through this voidgate during the war (after which it closed, but that's not important [and maybe just coincidence])
Y'shtola informs us that "For a being to navigate the chaos of the rift, with or without form, there must needs be a guiding agent on the other side."
G'raha points out that, in the case of Allag, technologists served to draw voidsent through the gate to the Source.

These points raise an important question: How did Azdaja end up on the Thirteenth? There was no such "guiding agent" to lead her through the rift.

Vrtra (as Varshahn) does point out that travel through a fissure does not require these conditions. Which... I guess is how they explain the whole "we turned Alzadaal's fissure into a gate, allowing us to pass through like a fissure.

Or is this a misinterpretation, and it's more that a "gate" requires a force on both ends to open two-way travel, while natural fissures are just one-way leaks? (and Alzadaal's fissure only required force on Source end for being already present and open on Void end?)

Or is this just the game can't keep "voidgate" and "fissure" straight all the time?

Or is this just a case of "well, she's a dragon, and they're powerful, lots of aether, technically unsundered, hell, she was angry too so maybe dynamis was involved" which seems like an awful lot of leaps to rationalize..

[Palladiamors]

I think you put more thought into it than the writing team did.

[Hasrat]

Vrtra (as Varshahn) does point out that travel through a fissure does not require these conditions. Which... I guess is how they explain the whole "we turned Alzadaal's fissure into a gate, allowing us to pass through like a fissure.

Or is this a misinterpretation, and it's more that a "gate" requires a force on both ends to open two-way travel, while natural fissures are just one-way leaks? (and Alzadaal's fissure only required force on Source end for being already present and open on Void end?)

Actually.. for clarity, what is (or was) in Alzadaal's Legacy? G'raha, on arrival, surmises it must be a gate, given the security. But Vrtra found it as a natural fissure. The alchemists of the time, using a synthetic Atomos, "managed not only to expand the fissure, but also manipulate it as one might a gate..."

a) When we arrive, there is no such Atomos, so why does G'raha conclude it must be a gate? Is he just wrong? Mistranslation?
b) Probably the source of all of this confusion, they converted it to a Serviceable gate, but without the necessary "guiding force"?

This all seems to lead to Y'shtola being wrong/unclear about travel through a voidgate. The "fissure=1-way, gate=2-way" explanation seems to be what clears all of this up well enough, but the game seems pretty hazy on usage..

[Iscah]

I haven't gone through all the details, but if it is a situation where a normal being would need guidance to navigate the rift, I think it would be fair to reason that this might be the case for sundered beings but a dragon is aetherially dense enough to force its own way through and/or has additional senses to detect a way through and navigate on its own.

[Hasrat]

And then I guess there's the matter of the moon later on.. Using the Tower of Babil, we punch open our own gate on the moon to the Void-moon.. and once again we're traveling through a gate (this time not manipulated by a synthetic Atomos) and arrive safely with no such guidance. Best you can do here is Vrtra having the same capabilities I guess..

[RavLandslide]

I think it's just dragons being dragons. Midgardsorm was also able to find Hydaelyn to settle on while flying through space, I can't image that was pure luck.

[Anonymoose]

According to the ancient texts, gates to the void open naturally and accidentally on the Source all the time due to the fact that the Source/Thirteenth membrane wobbles and is already void on the void side. What's difficult is making a large enough and stable enough hole for a powerful essence (or, especially, a physical body) to slip through where and when you want it to.

Even then, though, when has it ever involved the crossing a difficult-to-navigate expanse of rift? That specific claim is what felt weird, to me. (Maybe I'm losing my mind.)

It feels like the writers went in a circle - they invented new dimensional hop rules to make an exceptional trip to the First that should only have worked with the void - not a healthy dimension - and then ... applied those exceptional new standards to the void-Souce membrane despite them not having been present in, say, the Crystal Tower story arc. (The Shadowbringers dimensional hop did require exiting the Source into the rift and then back into the First, but - as I understand it - for wholly different reasons, namely enabling time travel while perhaps also avoiding the direct breach of a membrane between two rejoinable dimensions, assuming you could even get through it directly at all.)

[Iscah]

Following on from my previous post, annother element is that we have seen dragons navigating the rift before – specifically Hraesvelgr when he rescued us from Omega's collapsing pocket dimension.

[Cleretic]

I'm not sure why this is confusing, because I think it's very understandable:

Azdaja travelled through the voidgate large enough to fit her, and then got lost. We've now been into the Thirteenth a couple times (well, the OP hasn't), and can tell pretty easily why someone needs a 'guiding agent': the place is just a morass of darkness with only a few discernible landmarks in a a nebula of shadow. Ours is eventually (past the OP) Zero, but Azdaja had nobody--or at least nobody trustworthy. Azdaja's got a slight advantage in having self-propelled flight, she can traverse in a way we can't, but she's still gonna have a problem of 'where is anything'.

The question of asking 'how did Azdaja traverse the void' is rather easily answered with 'very poorly'.

[Hasrat]

The question of asking 'how did Azdaja traverse the void' is rather easily answered with 'very poorly'.

The question is not "how did Azdaja traverse the void."

The question is "how did Azdaja traverse the rift between the Source and the Thirteenth (colloquially known as The Void)."

The "and then got lost" part is unclear, as Y'shtola's explanation indicates Azdaja should've gotten lost between worlds. The "guiding agent" comment indicates that traversing a voidgate without that guiding force can leave you adrift outside of the reflections.

You are confusing needing an actual literal guide to get around once you're on the Thirteenth with the need for some means to guide any being large or small to actually make it there in the first place.

Voidsent do not need a guide in the Source, but they do need to be guided through the rift to arrive on the Source from the Thirteenth (through a voidgate). Presumably, this works the same in the other direction. To which, Azdaja had no such means of being guided to the Thirteenth.