Replaying 6.4 and opened the voidgate to the Thirteenth's moon. In light of the plot being hinted at in 7.4 now with Halmarut's comments about "withering", some of the prior commentary on the nature of the Source and its reflections seems pertinent.
Embiggen or use the alt text.
As I've been watching someone play through Endwalker again recently, this is a fascinating bit of dialogue to point out, and I think in retrospect it is absolutely the story we're going into.
The timeline as I understand it right now below, mostly to put it together for my own understanding - and maybe others? If you're still puzzling through it like me, anyway.
Meteion's Final Days make it to ancient Etheirys.
The Convocation figures out the worst instances are happening where aether is most stagnant - as we know now, dynamis was overflowing in the places where aether left it room.
They know that the power of Darkness is the power of movement, of activity, so they create a plan to bring Darkness to these areas to push out the dynamis.
This was not possible without sacrificing fully half of the people living on the planet. Which they did, and Zodiark was born from it.
They did in fact block the Final Days! Hooray! Though wow, at what cost.
They didn't realize at the time that a primal requires regular infusions of aether to maintain, because hey, first ever primal, no one knew jack shit about what would happen after.
Zodiark's effect started to fade, and only then they realized that they'd have to sacrifice more people to get the required aether.
So, they sacrificed more people, while trying to come up with a way to not only stop having to do so, but to bring everyone else back, which was always going to be an impossible ask even for the Convocation.
Venat doesn't believe the Convocation can do what they're saying they'll do, and doesn't want to see even more people sacrificed. So she gathers her own "shadow" Convocation, and they come up with a plan to reintroduce Light - stasis - to contain Zodiark.
We still do not have a lot of information, I don't think, about what brought them to the conclusions they made, or what their methods were. But I suspect we'll get more in future story, as we try to do something similar to what Venat and company did.
Venat implements her plan to contain Zodiark, which sunders the world and nearly all of its people into fourteen different shards - which effectively kills everyone on the old Etheirys, but preserves their souls into fourteen different pieces, and allows fourteen different worlds to grow in its place.
The unsundered Ancients - now known as Ascians at some point - are furious, because they still believe they could have figured out a way to save everyone. Even though they hadn't done so yet.
The fourteen shards naturally want to rejoin together, but to do so would be to allow Zodiark to become active again, and would allow him to continue to consume catastrophic amounts of aether and, by extension, precious life.
Venat now only exists in the lifestream as Hydaelyn; a powerful primal, though weak in comparison to Zodiark. But she's strong enough to be able to hold these 14 worlds in stasis, maintaining a balance that lasted for millennia.
The Ascians start coming up with ways to force the shards to rejoin, one at a time. It takes a lot of manipulation and applied elemental energy to rip one away from Hydaelyn's stasis.
Of course, because aether is what makes up all life, getting that much aether requires killing a LOT of people. Whole worlds, in fact. Because if it took half of the world of intact souls to power Zodiark, imagine how many pieces of those souls will be necessary to free him?
But those soul pieces are also rejoining with their mates on the "Source," the world shard that for some reason is known to be the "real" world, the one that will survive.
Would the people on the Source survive as they are now, or at least with their memories and current lives intact, if the Ascians had succeeded? Unknown.
Hydaelyn splits her power as much as she dares, giving pieces of it to "Warriors of Light" to try to combat the Ascians.
Our WoL finally manages to bring down all the unsundered Ascians.
Unfortunately for us and Hydaelyn, though, no one bet on a combination of a) one of Emet Selch's experiments in the form of Solus's great grandson, who gives no shits about anything but his own entertainment, and b) the sundered Ascian who just so happens to be the one who accidentally created the Final Days out of his own mental health crisis and has never gotten any better.
Whoops, Zodiark is free. And then dead. And now the activity, the Darkness, that kept Meteion at bay is gone.
Welcome back, Final Days!
Hydaelyn is not strong enough to figure out a new way to keep everyone alive. The best she can do is give us the power needed to travel through space and hope we can stop Meteion through the power of friendship and therapy.
Hydaelyn is no more.
We do, in fact, stop Meteion through the power of friendship and therapy. Hooray! No more Final Days!
However, now there is no stasis holding the remaining shards in place. So they all want to rejoin with the Source, like marbles spiraling down one of those big funnels.
This is probably what allowed the Ninth to partially collide with the Source and create the little pocket of Alexandria in Tural.
But - and this is more into theory now - the fact that the Ninth is tethered to the Source is probably hastening its collision course, and it's closer to disappearing completely than the others.
Which will probably trigger another Calamity on the Source as well?
So now we have to figure out how to come up with enough Light/stasis to stabilize all these worlds in the coming expansions.
That was ... longer than I intended, but if I'm even close to right, it makes everything make a lot more sense to me than it did before.
There are even more questions, of course, but I have wasted enough words on this post as it is.
