#cr3e102

Ludinus : "I don't need to be part of it."

Imogen : "But you want to be, don't you ?... You can commune all you want. You'll never feel what I felt, will you ?"

Let’s assume for a moment that the vision given to BHs by Evontra’vir is 100% confirmation that if Big Pred is released, he will chase the gods to whatever realm they flee too and not linger in Exandria. So what happens next? A glorious rebirth of the Age of Arcanum and the rule of the magocracy, unhindered by the gods? Great! And what did a certain mage at the height of her power prove was possible during the previous Age of Arcanum? That a mortal could ascend to godhood!

So you know that with the outer planes emptied of divine figures, one or several of these hubristic bitches are going to attempt the Ritual of Seeding again, to take up the now-empty divine portfolios. And it is only a matter of time before there is a new but growing pantheon, with no divine gate to restrain them, and no reason to believe they wouldn’t try to protect their position just as the old gods did. In order to discourage other mortals from even attempting this, Predathos would need to remain a known threat in some form, a monster lurking outside the gates waiting for some overly ambitious wizard to poke their head too far out and get got.

So what is Lud’s master plan? He’s not answering the question of “how do you know Predathos won’t eat us all” because he doesn’t know and it doesn’t matter, because Big Pred isn’t going to make it that far after he’s released. We know Lud’s unnaturally long lifespan comes from his practice of sucking up the life essence of other beings. BHs currently possesses the older, abandoned prototype of the machine he used to do this. We know he is still doing this, because of Astrid’s comment about the itch on the back of his neck and how secretive he is about it.

So he’s going to find his vessel—Liliana, Imogen, Fearne, whoever else he can convince, and force Predathos’s essence into a nice, neat little humanoid-sized package. He’s going to wait for them to emerge on the other side of the proto-divine gate surrounding Ruidus. And then he’s going to activate Soul Funnel 2.0, and he is going to BECOME Predathos. He is going to eat the thing that eats gods. Then the rest of the world can become the godless utopia he thinks he is bringing, and he can be the eternal entity that protects and enforces the new status quo.