If you read the description of the Dying God constellation. Than you know the creation of the mortal planes was done after they betrayed Ch’thon and drained his blood and cast him into a void. 
And by history of this world, they may refer to 300 years ago, when the Loghorrean was summoned.
true. chthon got shattered and banished by his subordinate celestials before they start making many realms filled with living beings. we don’t know the stories about the age where chthon still whole and rule over the celestials though. maybe its just filled with endless meditations, sports, & mind games in empty space.
if the aetherials doesn’t know about the 1st time log was summoned by carinean civ, then that means the chthonians and bloodsworn have their own luminari/bysmiel like intelligence taskforce. many erulan officials joined the bloodsworn cults, so their intrigue network must have been very formidable. we don’t even know the name of their taskforce. all we know is just the bloodsworn, and that’s it.
btw, about the theory that ulzuin is okaloth, notice that okaloth hides inside a mini volcano chamber named ‘pit of atonement’. so its very likely korvaak punished ulzuin for his mad ragequit tantrum in destroying the korvaan city and being not present to help him when bysmiel’s gang force dress korvaak in loincloth and shackles. ulzuin’s name is changed to okaloth to humiliate and brainwash him, and the volcano pour magma daily on his body for his atonement.
no wonder daila doesn’t use the lava in korvan city to cook her meal.
Yes, I just got a refresher course from Anasteria. Strange that Karroz’s note claims the Aetherials were clueless about them, when they would have known all along about Ch’thon and the horrors from the void, because calling on them was a direct cause of the end of the war.
I guess it’s as you say, the Aetherials had visited countless worlds, and they had no idea there were dangerous Chthonic cultists on this particular world.
thank you flix and anasteria. what anasteria says reveal that it is the 1st chthonians who punished and banished the aetherials after they defeat empy & korvaak’s forces. i though they were punished by their own master celestials. missed that crucial infos.
this means the aetherials are very likely to have a deep grudge against all celestials. because they know in the 1st place how truly devastating and awful the celestials are when they became sinful, whether they are empy’s korvaak’s, chthon’s, or any other celestials.
this also means it is very likely that the chthonians have significant influence hidden in the aetherhold… since it is the chthonians who banished the aetherials there…
also, anasteria said that the aetherials were the most loyal servants of the celestials. this implies that other than humans & beasts & constructs, there are probably many other species (sapient & non-sapient) that loyally serve the celestials.
lastly - anasteria said that their celestial masters were either cut down or scattered to the far reaches of creation. when she said scattered, she doesn’t explain whether the scattered celestials are still whole & sane, or shattered to pieces or lose their sanity. being scattered to the far reaches of creation could also mean banished to far away galaxies, where the celestials most likely have some experimental realms still in young colonial/pre-formation phase and providing very little sustenance for celestials taking refuge there.
this means that empyrion and other surviving celestials might be recovering for a very long time in these far away galaxy. korvaak’s runed flesh lore note said that he will recover his power even if it take thousands of years… which means those refugee celestials can recover on their own but it takes more than thousands of years… not enough time to rescue cairn from chthon & yugol…
but still, the fact that oathkeeper can access some of empyrion’s power, and how constellations of many celestials can provide some blessings to their believers, mean that empyrion and other celestials could be somewhat aware of what’s happening in cairn and can send very little power there… orin vostra, the aetherial mentioned in this AoM lore note says some insightful things:
https://grimdawn.gamepedia.com/Missive_to_the_Master_of_Flesh
"The Circle has been made aware of stirrings within the Aether that may prove concerning. Great eyes now turn their attention towards this world. If They are made aware of what has transpired here, then all we have created, all we gained, may be in jeopardy. Our grand vision must not be interrupted by cosmic ruminations."
great eyes… cosmic ruminations… does that mean empy and other refugee celestials are worrying about cairn? but their visions are blocked due to the aetherial invaders’ interference? (& perhaps chthonians & dreeg?) we must also remember that according to hagarrond, the imprisoned aetherial in the fleshwork, there are many loyalist aetherial factions still lingering in limbo inside aetherhold. it could be possible that those loyalist aetherials are still loyal to empy’s forces (empy’s forces doesn’t banished them to aetherhold, just warring with each other & destroying their works), and might reconnect with empy’s group of refugee celestials in far away galaxies. and then, some of them will descend to cairn in gd2… perhaps fracturing the aetherial forces to many more factions… and making cairn so crowded that yugol will die of overeating before cairn goes puff.
well, it seems the fate of empyrion is clearer now. unless gd2 comes and shatter (very popular word in grim dawn) our expectations.
edit: i really want to see some celestials apologizing to mortals of cairn for their part in making war of the gods happened. mog kinda apologizes somewhat, but he’s still aloof & secretive. i’m hoping for some celestials that are sane & seeking redemption to appear in gd2.
edit2: creed’s 10th journal in AoM kinda foreshadows more divinity influence will appear in gd2:
https://grimdawn.gamepedia.com/Journal_of_Inquisitor_Creed_-_10th_Entry
"As much as I am grateful to have such a powerful ally in this war, I cannot help but feel a little on edge when he (Ulgrim) is present. Between Ulgrim and the recent rumors of Mogdrogen, I am concerned that other divinities may also begin involving themselves in worldly affairs; as it is said they did more commonly in ancient times."
Mmm, not quite.
well this makes things more confusing. who would banish the aetherials to the aether just because they serve their masters without question. their enemy is the most obvious culprit. or maybe one of their masters got tricked by the enemy and made derpy judgement. or maybe everyone forgot who did that in the 1st place.
and it seems the box has turned its gaze here in mild amusement. don’t worry, i’m just spamming wild theories like panetti build because i love grim dawn’s lore & mythology.
I think your mistake is thinking the Chthonians won the war of the gods. They were unleashed and used at some point, but I don’t think they were the ultimate victors (if so they would have been a bigger force in the world).
It seems whoever won the conflict (I’m still not sure what the sides were) banished the Aetherials, who were servants of the losing side.
korvaak’s saying that he and empyrion loses the war and his intense hatred against chthonians is what got me thinking the chthonians won the war.
https://grimdawn.gamepedia.com/Ruminations_of_the_Primordial_One
"The war is over, we…have lost. My kin, in their desperation, tapped into the forbidden void in order to turn the tide in their favor. They may be the victors, but the maddening whispers have them now. As for us, we are beaten. Nothing remains now but to hide and tend to our wounds."
after chthonians won the war, perhaps they fight amongst themselves because of chthon and void’s mad whisper (rylok species chthonians battle each other for dominance). which make their presence in cairn’s physical reality reduced significantly.
if some group other than chthonians, empy & korv won the war, then shouldn’t korvaak say something different about who the victors are? korvaak’s rumination seems pretty much define the ending of war of the gods.
edit: if chthonians are the winner and banisher of the aetherials, its pretty weird that the aetherials expect the chthonians to lend some mercy to them, with excuse like aeths just carry out their master’s order loyally. the aeths must have known that chthonians can’t be reasoned with for their mad nature. or maybe the aeths just lament their fate in all of this mess like a grieving widow. like a widow serving her husband’s need in times of war, then suffers so much after the war is lost, her husband’s dead, and the enemy destroys her home.
Regarding the Aetherials, if you talk to the one that possessed you:
yeah, that’s allostria the mindthief’s quote. the aetherials that tries to possess the taken in the vanilla intro.
thes particular parts of the sentences interests me:
maybe its allostria’s host influencing her behaviour, or maybe its allostria herself that says that straightly. but i can’t help but think that these words are not something a ‘Loyal’ servant should ever utter, even if their master is gone.
which means, even in war of the gods, some aeths have rebelled & form factions of their own against their masters.
and perhaps that makes their masters decide that all aeths are broken and should be banished to the aetherhold forever.
hmm, maybe not all aeths are banished by the same party at the same time? maybe some aeths are banished by the celestials, and some aeths by chthonians?
I don’t think anyone really won the war. It was a disaster for all sides.
Regarding how the Aetherials talk to each other, I think that’s meant to convey that they are beings that don’t have much emotion and don’t understand emotion well. They have drive and goals, but no emotive passions. Then some of them started living in human bodies.
in certain perspective, that’s right. korvaak says the maddening whisper have the void tappers now. so perhaps the surviving celestials and aetherials considered chthonians as a mad rabble, only wanting torture and violence on everything, not capable of ruling anything. mayhaps even if chthon’s resurrected whole, his mid was already shattered beyond saving.
it feels like cairn is just a battleground for scavengers seeking less rotten pasture that is getting fewer and fewer. beggars, killers, innocents, beasts, demons, spirits, constructs, celestials, all were just living like scavengers in cairn now. dreeg only saw rot as the truth of the universe anyway.
the only choice forward for every sapients in cairn is to either fall into the madness and torture of chthonians, become doomed vessel/zombies for the aetherials, devoured by the emptyness of yugol, or grasping for survival by pledging loyalty to survivalist factions of cairn that may force its members to abandon their humanity just for lulz.
all the aether human enemies we encounter are always arrogant, violent and hateful. the only pure aetherials in spirit-like form we’ve encountered doesn’t speak at all. perhaps they can only communicate with humans if they possess humans. the aetherial missive to krieg in act 1 considered human communication method as crude. i think the aeth’s talk can be compared to ai’s binary communication which is often very efficient but can be considered arrogant/dismissive by humans for their lack of emotions.
anasteria, korinia, and hagarrond are the only friendly aether humans that almost completely lack the arrogant & hateful tone of other aether humans. perhaps they realize that the aetherials doesn’t recognize their arrogance in their communication with human, because they don’t understand emotions due to their original robot-like mannerism. so the trio tries to be more humble and understanding to cooperate with the human survivors. maybe they also know deep inside, that indifference to their innate arrogance will lead to their downfall. just like their celestial masters.
My impression has been that “pure” Aetherials tend to be cold and dispassionate, focused only on efficiency. It’s only after extended time in their hosts that they tend to take on all kinds unsavory personality traits (or in some cases, like Anasteria, noble traits). How exactly their personality manifests depends a lot on their human host, in other words.
true. their cold dead personality seems pretty vulnerable to the malicious thoughts of their hosts though. i’m wondering if there is an infighting within the aetherial invaders themselves, particularly between the pure aeth & loyal aeth hybrid against groups of rebellious aeth hybrid. the letter to krieg seems signify this tense relations. krieg hybrid want to play with his victims and make little kingdom in burrwitch, resulting in slowed speed of corpse collections. but he immediately become compliant and cooperative to his superiors in AoM (maybe because of theodin’s influence).
speaking of krieg, it feels like he comes back from dead pretty fast in AoM not long after taken defeated him in act1. though we don’t know how many weeks/months had passed after act1 to events in AoM. if krieg can resurrect with pretty much minimal penalty (he even grow stronger in AoM), does that mean the aetherial invaders’ reinforcements are unending and only delayed by slight days/weeks before they can manifest again in cairn?
AI: “01000111 01110010 01100101 01100101 01110100 01101001 01101110 01100111 01110011 00100000 01000110 01110010 01101001 01100101 01101110 01100100”
Me: “You arrogant bastard!”
Hmm, we probably don’t see spirit aetherials talking because they don’t know our language. Ones in bodies know our language because they are in bodies that know the language. Ones that have been in humans might be able to use our language though. Also, their lives are probably so different from humans that it lacks of lot of shared context needed for communication. They likely find many of our everyday concepts completely foreign and vice versa. All that is in addition to their subdued emotions (obviously they have some since they do have drives, goals, and are upset over how they’ve been treated).
maybe the celestials created aetherials to be so different from humans. that way, there is little possibility of them living together cooperatively with complete understanding of each other, resulting in nephalem like hybrids appearing all over the place, risking the celestials’ authority over them.
i see most ai in science fiction to be arrogant (whether theyt realize it or not) even though they often claim their communication manners to be objectively more efficient & superior to humans. perhaps that’s why some people see ai’s to be prone to arrogance because of their inherent superiority in communication.
aeldari race in warhammer40k is another example of superior beings that will always look down on every other race other than them.
1 logical reason is because of their superior form of communication through telepathy, senses, & emotions. not to mention their biological superiority.
hence why, imo… aetherials have inherent arrogance inside of them. their achievement as loyal servants of the celestials are prove of that, including their hands in making many uncountable realms. anasteria, korinia, and hagarrond has tempered their arrogance, which makes them more pleasant to be interacted with.
An interesting thing about Anasteria. If you decide to kill her and get access to the Fort’s prison, you will find many aetherials there and Anasteria herself as the boss. I wonder, where did all these aetherial come from and why they don’t try to kill the rogue kinsman. If they are Anasteria’s secret army why won’t she use them in the Battle for Malmouth?
the aetherial invaders think of anasteria as a traitorous anomaly. and they want to heavily punish her for it.
when you kill anasteria, she’s forced back into the aetherhold, back into the clutches of her former aetherial masters. like krieg who also got back in AoM after we kill him in burrwitch.
so its obvious the aetherial invaders punished her after we killed her, and then reeducate her to be more subservient to them. and they sent her back with a contingent of aetherial force into the deeper part of her warden chamber in the fort ikon prison to destroy the black legion there.
anasteria still had some shred of her consciousness though. and she remembers your action. she’s judging you:
anasteria never want to show up her aetherial nature to the black legion and the resistance. just like korinia.
because obviously, they’ll be immediately hunted by the paranoid mob, causing fracture in the resistance.
so anasteria prefer to remain as advisor to creed. korinia is the malmouth resistance commander in her case.
i want to share some more thoughts about ulzuin’s fate. when i looked closely at dreeg’s memory in korvan elegy part 2, i noticed some interesting choice of words about his plan for ulzuin:
https://grimdawn.gamepedia.com/The_Korvan_Elegy_-_Part_2
“The Everliving Flame needs to be extinguished from the path. His immortal heart shattered by betrayal; and the one that wraps her web around his very soul will be the very same that binds our prize.”
the word ‘shatter’ appears again here. this shattering of ulzuin’s heart is explained in korvan elegy part 3:
https://grimdawn.gamepedia.com/The_Korvan_Elegy_-_Part_3
“It was on the fateful day when the earth ruptured and the sky turned to flame that Ulzuin realized his folly. Bysmiel had promised him a glorious surprise, an indulgence unlike any he had yet experienced in his many lifetimes, which left Ulzuin recklessly far from Korvan City and the Temple of the Eldritch Sun. Sensing the upheaval, Ulzuin rushed back to his post, but he was far too late. The city was consumed by fire and the great temple had been claimed by another.”
“Ulzuin howled at the sky, calling out to his father, Empyrion, for aid. But the skies were silent. In blinding agony and rage, Ulzuin flattened his temple and inflicted a wound upon the world that burns to this day, just as the wound Bysmiel left upon his heart remains still. But where the vengeful god is now, perhaps only the Witch Gods know.”
agony, rage, and madness. these are the thing that happens when a celestial/ascendant experienced a shattering. similar to what happens to chthon, when empyrion shatters him, chthon’s mind & body become fragmented and consumed by agony, rage, and madness. and these afflictions are almost certainly permanent and irreversible. just like how a shattered mirror cannot be whole anymore, no matter how much magical glue/duct tape is used to repair it.
at the point of his shattering, ulzuin turned from a god of ceremony and healing flame into a god of vengeful fiery destruction. when he destroys his own temple, and create permanent constantly erupting volcano in korvan city, the 3 witches have already won and imprisoned korvaak.
notice how dreeg said: “the one that wraps her web around his very soul will be the very same that binds our prize.”. this implies that bysmiel imprisoned ulzuin too after imprisoning korvaak. linking to my previous theory that ulzuin is okaloth who is buried beneath a korvan village rubble in the outskirts of korvan lands and rescued by kymon.
by imprisoning ulzuin there, perhaps the 3 also intended to absorb ulzuin’s power. see how solael cult provides several fire+lightning items, amongst other fire+vitality/fire+chaos items. solael wishes to master the eldritch flame. solael knows there are still a lot of ulzuin worshippers out there, so he let ulzuin get some powers from his worshippers around cairn, then solael suck it out of ulzuin to further strengthen his mastery over the eldritch flame. and perhaps knowingly/unknowingly, like how aetherials that merged with humans becomes harder to distinguish separately from its host, solael merged with some part of ulzuin’s memory with him, leading to him having even more tense relationship with bysmiel. perhaps becoming one of the factors that leads to the bitter war between the 3.
anyway, so, ulzuin got shattered by bysmiel’s betrayal. but he’s not fully shattered like chthon. because the various lore sources around cairn implies he’s still around and capable of directly blessing his worshippers who are mostly demolitionist pyromancers. and so ulzuin continues to become bysmiel’s puppet celestial in chain, while also becoming solael’s cattle for his daily intake of grossly incandescent flame. until kymon destroys the ward around his prison and rescue ulzuin/okaloth:
https://grimdawn.gamepedia.com/Kymon%27s_Journal_-_Page_2
“I now wish I had not burned the town where I awoke this ancient being.”
kymon allied with korvaak & ulzuin/okaloth at that moment. several years after that, grim dawn happened:
https://grimdawn.gamepedia.com/Journal_of_Inquisitor_Creed_-_10th_Entry
“Kymon was once a brethren inquisitor, but he went rogue in the years before the grim dawn.”
then the event of fg happened. and ulzuin/okaloth rejoined korvaak’s forces and stay in the pit of atonement.
though i don’t quite understand how ulzuin/okaloth’s spirit can revive and talked to in kymon’s chamber in sorrow’s bastion after he’s killed in that pit. maybe he’s tied to the mind & bodies of several kymon’s chosen that stays there? just like how he’s tied to kymon? as a backup plan?
https://grimdawn.gamepedia.com/Kymon%27s_Journal_-_Page_1
“Even as I write this, I can sense its energy rippling through the room. I can feel it like worms twitching below my skin. It burrows and pulls, urging me to get closer. I dread to think of what would become of any of my Chosen should they get too close to this entity. What would remain, I cannot say, but I suspect the Messenger would shuck the mind and claim the body for its own.”
i wonder how the 3 will deal with ulzuin/okaloth after the fg event and korvaak’s banishment. maybe they’ll purge kymon’s chosen and imprison ulzuin/okaloth again. that’s very likely. bysmiel must have missed tormenting him, and solael wants his daily fiery cocktail again.
