#this is probably extreme unclear. i would've made a new post where i rephrase and organize things but eh

[daz4i]

yknow. 3.2 does imply that had mydei wanted to, he could still just. die. so does that mean hitting his weak spot makes sure he won't be able to come back? and, does it mean if he gets corrupted by the black tide his very soul will also lose its sanity - but not enough to forget to climb out of the river of souls - which is why he needs phainon to kill it for good?

also, does his soul return to his body? what if his body gets blown into smithereens or completely crushed and there's nothing to return to (i mean. one could argue such a case hits his weak spot probably lol)?

how long does this process take? because, 3.2 also made it seem like it takes awhile, but since he managed to fend off nikador for like, days, and he surely must've died a few times during that battle, it implies he fought them nonstop, aka he came back to life instantly. does that mean time doesn't matter in the river of souls? that it can feel like days or years but no time has passed in the real world at all?

what does that project onto the implications that time in amphoreus is generally weird and the flame reaver (most likely) experienced the past and the future at the same time (for lack of better quick way to descibe it)? it seems the nether realm is at least separated from the loop process, given that polyxia remembers her past while calypso (and probably gnaeus) didn't? does that apply to the river as well? if so, has mydei unknowingly met people from previous loops? are the people of styxia even from the loop we're currently going through, or could they be there since the last one?

and that also raises a question I've been wondering about. are there even more than 2 existing loops? let's refer to them as the calypso loop for the previous one and the anaxa loop for our current one. if time is indeed frozen in the nether realm, then did polyxia kill the previous incarnation of thanatos back in the calypso loop? or did that version of thanatos just disappear on their own? she's the only one in the nether world when cas gets there, after all. but we see that castorice didn't need to kill her sister in order to inherit the coreflame. and their conversation - polyxia asking that castorice won't forget her in the next loop - implies that at least those 2 will exist in each one regardless, so at least thanatos's cycle repeats those same 2 loops each time which. given the frozen time implications. is a bit odd, isn't it?

as mentioned polyxia does remember her past life so this implies that at least those two loops are connected, but her fearing that cas will forget her implies that they don't go both ways, if that makes sense? as in, from what we currently know at least, there's a calypso loop -> anaxa loop data retention, but not an anaxa loop -> calypso loop one (or maybe polyxia just said it due to being emotional in that scene. that also makes sense lmao. but bear with me here)

sooooo essentially i think it's less a separate calypso loop and anaxa loop, but combined into the same run. if flame reaver is indeed phainon (and not khaos, which, given that he showed anaxa his memories, means he's probably still kephale in some way) that means he did come from a different run. which means that other characters in the anaxa loop existed in previous runs, but possibly not in the same the way the twins did (as in, they simply didn't have the roles they do now, for some reason. dw i'll get to that). so. i don't think amphoreus resets whenever all coreflames are returned and the demigods befome the new titans. i think it resets after it happens more than once - after the anaxa loop, where phainon, the flame reaver, comes from.

i don't think our anaxa loop chrysos heirs end up becoming the titans - i don't think they existed in the calypso loop at all (aside from castorice of course). the fact the titans still keep the same names through every loop (as we see calypso and polyxia refer to cerces and thanatos by name and separate from themselves) despite it supposedly resetting implies that they are a fixed being, almost like a class in an rpg rather than an actual character, except only one person can equip it at a time which is why you have to kill the previous one in order to become it yourself.

if amphoreus is some kind of experiment, to see if you can recreate a world from memories, then. maybe the creators of this experiment (the organization black swan mentioned...?) simply couldn't extract the right memories from flame reaver!phainon. our current phainon seems to doubt his memories, after all. maybe the black tide is actually a corruption of memories that came from him, as he said (tho not in those words 😩), memories can't create a perfect replication of a whole world. maybe the black tide overtook everywhere else in amphoreus because a previous phainon only got to see okhema. maybe aedes elysiae was a new addition made by the creators of the experiment for the current run, and it got overtaken by the black tide bc it didn't have memories from phainon to back its data up (maybe the flame reaver broke from it bc it was simply a weak spot in the system that he could break through).

is kephale means "head". and kephale essentially holds the memory of the entire world, then. yeah that name makes sense. "khaos" being the name of the previous incarnation of them is very interesting tho, since it means void or chasm, nothingness etc. which can connect to march's current state somehow, too, as black swan described it as nothingness. I've seen ppl say she's cyrene, or that she'll inherit oronyx's coreflame instead of tb, but what if she's related to khaos somehow? (i don't think she IS khaos since iirc the others referred to him with he/him lol but maybe, if i'm wrong abt the 2 loops thing and there ARE more, maybe she was kephale before him...? maybe the messenger had to block her memories because they literally contain an entire world and who knows how that'd affect someone outside the experiment) or what if the hijacking of her mind is like the black tide? if we go by the idea that the black tide is created by gaps in memory, and we know that it can spread and overtake other things, maybe that's simply what is currently happening to her? the mark of kephale is what's used to purify it, too... hmm.

man. this is one of my least coherent "theorizing" posts. idk how much i believe in any of this^ tbh (i do lean towards the 2 timelines thing tho. even if i can't fully explain why it'd be that way. yet) everything might get refuted by the next patch for all i know lol. this is more me asking questions this patch made me think about and it getting out of hand as i kept typing lmao. anaxa would be proud