Board Thread:The Last Sovereign Discussion/@comment-39332473-20190808194309/@comment-77.111.246.98-20190916221856

From interlude:

T:The untouchable Ivala, reduced to this. I can imagine how pleased you are with your little Church, hmm?

This is evidence of church of Ivala being responsible for the current state of the goddess (at this point, I will consider this a power level, not the prisoner status, as latter would implicate the Church directly). This need not imply that they are aware of what they are doing, at least not the majority of them, however they ARE draining her. This will also explain why the rank-and-file priestesses are losing their connection to Ivala - she is simply becoming weaker. We have learned that the power of shards is limited. Most of her power is being drained to allow church crazy things like 3AW wall.

It is possibble (even probable) that Ivala was the one who initiated direct connection to her worshippers originally, however the church, given a finger, bit off the arm. For the greater good - they needed a tool to fight the IK(s).

Now it is technically possible that the leadership of the Church is completely oblivious. They think that they are using these massive spells and the power is coming from nowhere, or that Ivala is infinite and therefore they can keep pulling more and more power. In fact, I suspect that vast majority of priestesses (including most High Priestesses) think that way. After all the Church was established long ago, and likely operated with consentual links. However at a certain point something happened. The power that Church started drawing increaed. When Simon confronted Hester on the Ivalan wall he explicitly asked what price they had to pay for it, which she dodged with 'is it that hard to believe that devotion can produce these effects? Well, not telling you anything'. This leaves me with one out of two options - either Hester is more oblivious than she looks or she knows what she is doing. Even in the latter scenaro she need not be the captor, simply someone who is utilizing the link to the maximum.

So it is possible that whoever the captor is, they are not affiliated with the church. They either were ok with church draining their goddess, or simply wanted to remove Ivala from being able to influence the world, and not care about what church does to her. Out of characters we know, Anak could fall into that category. The pros of this theory would be another reason why Ivala is weak (theosen collection from prelude) and the fact that Anak likely has Zelica as captive and therefore knows something about imprisoning goddesses. Zelica being drained is implied from the fact that Wendis stopped hearing her after a while. The cons is that during the conversation between Mythin and Ivala where they talked about "monster who has Zelica" to be different from her captors. Also in his conversation with Ivala, Tanurak explicitly used Anak by name (technically title), but did not name the captor.

So I keep my speculation. Hester is the the last Arclent Tower walker and "the" captor of Ivala who found a way to exploit consentual links and drain the godess for the greater good - fight with Arclent IK.

On a tangentially related note, the Totally Normal Girl has blonde hair with blue eyes, same as Ivala. If we assume that she has a direct link to Ivala, letting her drink from the shard might help sustain the drained goddess for a while longer.