To Appease a God: Play within the Rules, Balance the scales or Leave them uneven (theory)
With the conclusion of Book 3, the general course of the Hero has been clearly defined for Book 4: Find a means of stopping Aequilibria from destroying the world as we know it and killing everyone who lives on it by putting it back to sleep.
Destroying Aequilibria is obviously out of the question as all beings born on Lore are dependent upon the flow of mana and thus cannot exist without it. We also lack the means of amassing enough power into a weapon like the Exalted Artillery to force the entity into slumbering. A fact I imagine The Elements had deliberately intended to be the case after the Exalted Alliance amply proved that entities capable of generating mana as they could would always be a threat to their vision.
As such, it only makes sense to ensure any new creations are not capable of that kind of power ever again. So, destruction is off the table, and we lack the power necessary to force the Core to go back to sleep early.
The binding of the core our trio of mages are currently utilizing to keep Aequilibria at bay seem like a nice solution but not one that will surely last even if we were to apply it on a grander scale as our god would only continue to rattle at its chains until they no longer held.
So, what are our options? I believe we have already been given the answer on how to achieve this task by the Aequilbria itself.
I suspect that a good portion of our journey throughout Book 4 will not be by finding the power needed to force Aequilibria into submission, at least not completely, but rather to achieve the 'balance' it so desperately craves in a manner that fits its parameters of its own concept of Order to a point a refresh is no longer deemed necessary for Lore and it goes back to sleep of its own volition.
At the end of Book 1 we didn't really restore order to the world. We stopped the World from being brought to Doom yes, but we did not uphold the balance, only stopped the matter from getting worse. The fact that in Book 2 we saw the elements in a state of disarray should be evident that the imbalances only continued and got worse due to numerous forces as we were later imprisoned in ice.
And so, under this lens, the Hero's mission is clear: Reinstate the Creator cycle, bring back the Avatars from their stasis, close the holes in the fabric of reality, and clean up the various errors detected Aequilibria. We will become a balancer of Lore and bring about elemental unity. A balance we make of our own, one that will not be perfect but just good enough to satisfy the system.
This is where the Shadowscythe will come to be a thorn in our side in this new saga. The Shadowscythe have one consistent goal: To rid the world of the pollution of the elements, to bring all into The Darkness as they see it and they will do this at whatever means necessary.
Furthermore, they know exactly the best way to make this outcome happen: Corrupt the Balance into their favor.
We have been shown a number of times that the Shadowscythe will go after the Creator and Destroyer to fulfill their long-term goals because to control both is to have to control of the system designated by Aequilibria.
The Shadowscythe/Doom is not foreign to the world. It may have snuck its way into this universe at the dawn of its birth, but it is now deemed an acceptable force in existence by Aequilibria. As a result, there is not necessarily a rule dictating that Lore cannot have them present.
Therefore, there is nothing to say the only thing allowed in creation is darkness as perceived by the Shadowscythe, especially should Aequilibria fall asleep completely unaware of what goes on upon its shell until it is time to wake again. Which if the Shadowscythe get their hands on Fluffy and Draco again, may never happen again once Lore has been refreshed.
As mentioned, the world is imbalanced. The Twins are not yet ready to take on their roles in earnest at the moment, and the Avatars cannot preside over them or their planes to cease the chaos occurring in the Elemental Plains and keep that same chaos from bleeding into Lore. Now is the perfect time to strike at the enemies of Doom while everyone is still recovering from the loss of leaders or damage incurred from the Rifts or new fissures created by Aequilibria struggling against its bindings.
Which means, all the Shadowscythe has to do is ensure that order continues to be disrupted in whatever way they can until Aequilibria breaks free and destroys Lore for them, hell they might even work towards assisting it in breaking free as well. Which likely means they might be responsible for a good portion of whatever conflicts we see in Book 4 either directly or indirectly or causing certain ongoing conflicts to continue long before they became a factor in those conflicts.
It's a race against time in the long run for us and one I'm sure our old adversaries will plague nearly every step we take to avert this existential threat.
In the end, where our goal will be to balance the scales to achieve a form of equilibrium in our own way, the Shadowscythe's goal will be to keep those scales as unbalanced as possible to ensure the annihilation of everything on the planet so that they might determine its course in the aftermath.
Ah but that concludes my thoughts.
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