#could not pepe silvia without y'all

[essektheylyss]

Alright, deeply circumstantial conspiracy theory time.

Remember how we never fucking figured out Vence Nuthaleus's deal? Ludinus's annex, who supposedly was working outside of Ludinus's knowledge or orders?

The Nein found two Abyssal Anchors in Xhorhas while chasing the Angel of Irons cultists, ostensibly to cause chaos and distraction during the war. These anchors were created by Vence based on tech used by demon generals during the Calamity to invade the Material Realm with more ease, and Vence created crude approximations of them, that Obann then deployed in Asarius and Braan.

(If only Caleb hadn't incinerated that goblin in Braan. We could've cracked this case wide open years ago.)

under a cut, as this is long—and does contain spoilers for c2:

The last anchor the Nein come across directly is in the Chantry of the Dawn; Jester scries on Vence delivering it to Cardinal Respa, along with two scrolls that are supposedly from the vaults of Vasselheim that provide guidance for establishing a ritual in the Chantry, upon a fane that was one of six holding Tharizdun at bay. Respa notices the scrying, and ends it, and the Nein immediately head to the Cathedral, though Vence has already left, and the anchor is set up as a distraction, while the main ritual happens elsewhere.

This is primarily notable because the timeline is fairly compressed. Jester scries on Vence while they're already in Rexxentrum; they go to the Chantry and fight assorted cultists under Respa's watch, the demons coming out of the portal, Obann's crew of cultists, and then Obann the Punished. They exit the basement fairly quickly and talk to several officials who have arrived at the Chantry, and then are immediately marched to Dwendal's throne room for an audience.

This is the conversation in which Ludinus admits that Vence had "recently" asked for an Amulet of Nondetection, and he granted the request. Given that Vence hadn't been attuned to it prior to going to the Chantry, he evidently takes the time to attune to it within the two hours (accounting for travel times around Rexxentrum) between those periods.

Here's where we start to get circumstantial: if Vence had obtained the amulet before, why hadn't he attuned to it immediately? It's possible he hadn't even gotten the amulet until then, at which point there was already a Kryn attack underway, as well as a significant disturbance at the Chantry of the Dawn. This seems an odd time to request such an item, as well as a rather foolish move on Ludinus's part to grant the request with little information.

With that in mind, let's go back for a moment to the Abyssal Anchors.

They're said to be crudely-reconstructed versions of Calamity-era technology. They create a planar rift between realms. They were not designed to assist in the ritual to summon Tharizdun, and instead seem only to have been a distraction—though a rather odd one, as they created minor nuisances that were, in both cases, dealt with by the Nein, and never on the direct orders of the Dynasty's leadership. The war itself seems as though it would've been distraction enough.

We also hear that there have been similar anchors discovered across the Empire, collected, and destroyed—words that come only from Ludinus's mouth.

The Nein had considered that perhaps Ludinus knew what Vence had been up to, but they had no tangible evidence of that, and he of course denied it. I recall considering the possibility at the time that he had even been involved, and mostly discarding it because he seemed to have no motivation to do so.

But now we know that something notable happened about six years ago, in the timeframe of the Material Plane: according to the Calloways, Ruidus became visible in the sky in the Feywild, and presumably with it, the Shadowfell.

We know that at the time, Ludinus was using the findings from his stolen beacons to create the dunamantic liquid that was used to make an assassination attempt on Keyleth. We also know that at some point, an annex of Ludinus obtained scrolls from the vaults of Vasselheim that gave instruction on creating a ritual to "release the fane" beneath the Chantry. (Fanes are, generally, places of power—which is similar to the list of locations across the Feywild that Ludinus looked into in order to absorb power from, per the notes that Team Wildemount discovered in Gildhollow Tower.) Incidentally, we also know that Ludinus oversaw, in 835 PD, the excavation of crash site A2 in Eiselcross, which held both the corrupted forest akin to the Savalirwood, and a threshold crest just beyond that. All of this happened roughly around or just before Ruidus was tethered to the Feywild.

Though we may never know for sure that these things are related, my theory is that these crude iterations of the Abyssal Anchors were the test run for whatever arcane device that Ludinus used to tether the moon in the echo planes, finally allowing him the ability to put his long-considered plan into motion.