#this was too long to be a comment
because i have isu lore amnesia: how do sages work biologically speaking, again? like eivor’s (and sigurd’s and basim’s etc.) parents are obviously not sages or have any isu dna beyond what is normal for regular humans in this universe. how did the isu manage to actually infuse isu dna into their sages’… zygotes? like. how did that work on a technical level lmao
There are two types of sages. The first being the Aesir sages that we see in Valhalla where their “essence” is inserted into the life tree in order to be born again years later. Their reincarnations were planned so that they would all be reborn around the same time and in roughly the same part of the globe. We see that Heimdall’s reincarnation process was disrupted which is why he was reborn earlier than the others and Loki was reborn nowhere near Scandinavia, as planned. Yggdrasil is described as a super computer that can store consciousness but we never find out exactly how it is able to implant the psyche of an ISU into a human.
The other type of sages are the sages of Aita who are born with his memories and the overpowering will to revive/rebirth his wife, Juno. Aita volunteered to test the fifth method of salvation which involved attempting to alter the ISU’s bodies internally with a steel that would withstand the hostile environment of the Toba catastrophe but this failed and Aita’s mind degenerated drastically. He was able to ask Juno to euthanise him before he went completely catatonic. Juno was able to distribute Aita’s genetic code into the human gene pool which would allow Aita to reincarnate again and again and again randomly across centuries.
We know that it was the ISU who created humans but it is never really delved into deep enough to fully tell us howthey created humans. We just know that, via project anthropos, Phanes used blueprints left by Consus to manipulate the DNA of a pre-existing species (possibly Neanderthals that the ISU created for military purposes) to force a rapid evolution that gave them homo-sapiens.
We don’t know if Yggdrasil played any part in the creation of humans. Maybe it did? We see foetuses in it when Ragnarok hits. Maybe those foetuses were born directly from Yggdrasil, as we know it didn’t get destroyed, and are the beginning of Eivor/ Sigurd etc bloodlines and they just carried the consciousness until it was the right time for them to “wake” as it seems that specific events “woke” them. (For example, Eivor getting bitten by the wolf awoke Odin) We know that not everyone died in the catastrophe so that isn’t an impossibility but we don’t really know. But this does beg the question as to how Loki’s reincarnation (if his bloodline started from one of the foetuses in the life tree) isn’t Scandinavian.. my answer to that would be that maybe his human bloodline differed because he was half Jotunn?Anyway, these are just my potential thoughts on it. Maybe we will find out more in the DLC or in a future AC game?
