I actually like Mikko's idea.

As for my own... well this post will contain spoils for a 24 year old game.

*shapes tinfoil hat into a cowboy hat*

In Final Fantasy IX, Zidane is a manufactured person. He's a Genome that was given a soul and a mission. He forgot the mission. His mission was to destroy all of the inhabitants of Gaia, so that the inhabitants of Terra could populate the fused planet after Terra consumed Gaia's crystal heart. Terra was a wandering planet of highly advanced beings whose planet was dying, due to their incidental killing of its crystal core.

Mothercrystals in prior Final Fantasies have always been important. Either bestowing power directly to heroes or maintaining the forces of nature. Sometimes both. In IX, they started the tradition of The Crystal calling souls back to itself when beings died, like a fusion of the old crystals and FFVII's planetary rebirth cycle. They flesh this out and explicitly show it in FFXI.

Anyway, in IX, The Terrans having essentially killed their world... They needed a way to live. And they found out that they could move their planet to other planets and have it merge its empty core with a new crystal core, and this would stave off their extinction. Of course, this meant that they had to replace a cycle of life. A young crystal would not work, and the natural flow and evolution of crystals and worlds was too slow for them. So they traveled from world to world, sometimes shepherding primitive peoples till their world was ripe, more or less, and then they replaced them with themselves.

It's been an awful long time since I've played through IX, so I don't remember if that had happened once or twice or multiple times before. I just remember that in IX it was currently what was happening to Gaia, and it was the reason for things like The Mist and Kuja and Zidane.

With that backdrop in place, it wouldn't surprise me one way or the other, whether Solution-9 was alien or it was ancient. The Ascian's civilization has actually been responsible for prior FFIX references and is utterly alien to our real world, so it could easily be that. It could also be an amalgam. You know, "Why not both?"

Just as Venat as Hydaelyn took in the alien race of Dragons as both refugees and allies, so too, perhaps, did her controlled opposition.

We've already been shown in the Hildibrand questlines of EW that there are multiple alien races already caught up in present day affairs. The symbiote race responsible(but possibly not responsible) for the Hildibrand clan's prodigious power. The blue alien race for Pupu. These came to Etheirys of their own will, in need.

But what if, what if perhaps Etheirys took in another world, not a shard, to save itself? What if under the auspices of the Ascians, another world, or at least its denizens, were taken in?

What would such a fusion mean for Rejoinings? What would it mean towards the larger threat that was always out there til just recently? And what would it mean with regards to the WoL and who the WoL is?

Perhaps there are still puzzle pieces in our own origin that have yet to be laid bare. As it stands, a lot of folks like to believe that the world of FFXIV is a solved equation. We've certainly been shown that to be the case. Yet, with XIV dev's love for subverting expectations, what if there's a few more motes of light that have yet to twinkle?

What if the WoL is a strange Zidane analogue crafted by both Ascians and Aliens? An Angel of Death sent to reap Nihilism.


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Yeah, never gonna happen, but YEEHAW!