Where's the aether? (Spoilers)

[Lady_Silvermoon]

Minor point here-

My understanding is that there was only a need for one more calamity to cause a full rejoin, which we stopped in Shadowbringers; my understanding is once #8 happened, everything would cascade to full rejoin. I could be wrong though!

Annnd 2, very importantly, the Bahamut calamity revealed to the Ascians that calamities didn't require a full map-wipe (and therefore thousands of years). Rather, they could do Calamity causing massive damage but not reset humanity; they were planning to do calamity #8 (Flood of Light in Shadowbringers) about 5ish years from #7 (The Meteor project; some 5ish? 10ish? years pre ARR).

So, even if they DID need to do 6 more calamities, it could be easily done in like.. 30-50 years tops.

While there is a line from Hydaelyn saying she will lose her grip if one more calamity happens in around 3.5, I believe? Shadowbringers has G'raha waking up hundreds of years after the calamity and Zodiark is not free and the world is not rejoined. So either she was mistaken about how many rejoinings it'd take to free him or the writers simply retconned that. And given even 200 years after the 8th calamity the world wasn't rejoined, we know most WoL (unless you play a young Viera) wouldn't make it even that long. So yeah, he was totally attempting to sell us on that Ascian life.

Also, the reason why the 7th umbral calamity didn't reset humanity is because of the twins grandfather. He wasn't around for the 8th and that did reset humanity. So the Ascians can't really just keep slamming shards into the Source or there will be no people left alive to cause the next calamity. They really do have to wait for people to rebuild.

Based on the story so far, I am with the Ascians. I think we should rejoin all of the shards. Endsinger is done and souls will be reborn/rejoined.

Who cares if you kill people? They come back from the ethereal stream.

I don't think killing is bad in this game anymore. There is really no justification for the continuation of hardship and suffering.

Rejoining the shards will not turn us into Ancients and/or end suffering. We'll just have the trauma of another half dozen brutal deaths etched into our souls. I'm sure that'll make us kinder to one another as species.

While it does look like some sort of rejoining is the direction the story is going. Just murdering everyone is a terrible plan. If not for moral reasons (which yes, for moral reasons) then because trauma impacts the soul for thousands of years and so far the only uses we've found for having a dense souls is holding a lot of aspected aether and curing someone else's soul corruption.