Board Thread:The Last Sovereign Discussion/@comment-1435995-20180527175726/@comment-31763506-20180527185420

You're bringing some assumptions into your game theory here. First is that you are assuming that a Simon vs. Estaven confrontation is going to end with one killing the other. Evidence suggests that Estaven was a significantly harder target than the late lamented Arsehole even before he started dicking around (probably figuratively and literally) in the Tower. A more likely possibility is that the two sides fight one another to a stalemate over an extended period of time, during which neither is able to interfere with Xerces.

As to unary shardholder in the distant past, the Lustlord of legend? I used to be involved in a forum where there were a lot of transhumanist immortalists, and one of many annoying things about them was that they didn't seem to get the point that every improbable contingency must happen eventually over an infinite space of time. As long as it is possible for practical godhood to be destroyed, it will eventually happen. Wait long enough and the Incubus King will accidentally decapitate himself while shaving. Xerces response to that would probably be the same as what the great economist John Maynard Keynes said about the economy eventually recovering from the Great Depression naturally: "In the long run, we are all dead."

Even though someone who unites all of the shards will eventually be overthrown, there's the short and medium term imbalance that's causing trouble for the potentially long time that he's around.