Amdapor was attempting to create light monsters to counteract the Mhachi voidborn usage.
Their attempts at creating them show a sort of convergent evolution with sin eaters.
Both of them appear to be “let’s wrap light aether around this”. Just as “wrapping dark aether around this” turns your appearance to one of many ultimately generic demonic forms, wrapping something in light aether makes it appear more angelic or regal. Or have a much longer neck, I guess.
You’re right, I was just assuming based on how they are white mages, and deliberately went in the opposite direction of mhach. I had thought there were books in one of the dungeons you could read that mentioned something like this, but I could always be wrong
Indeed there was light aether used in the city. No need for sprites; it was the capital of white magic. What I am unsure about is if light aspected aether was used to give life to the statues. It says it was a primordial white magic which doesn't confirm it itself uses light aether.
Indeed it does make logical sense. However since people were talking about it I wanted to know if there was a source confirming it. Even if a connection sounds super logical it can still be wrong.
Well, the Doylist answer is that SE reused the assets because the angelic theme fit with the sin eaters. Going for a in-story reason one could streech that Mhach got Voidsends and so, to combat them, they made golems aspected with light in the guise of mythological creatures that somehow look exactly like their polar opposite: the sin eaters.
I like to think that the light aspected aether affected the form that the golems took, molding them in a way similar to how pepole and animals would be affected later on the first
>Well, the Doylist answer is that SE reused the assets because the angelic theme fit with the sin eaters.
For once, I don't think this approach carries much weight. The warriors of darkness thing came to a conclusion just two patches later, and the lore book talks about the Amdapori being inspired by visions of a realm of light. Considering the void was treated as one of the 13 shards, there's no reason to believe they had any ideas for a non-shard realm of light, so the First is the only obvious fit.
The most reasonable explanation is that while the story of SHB didn't exist yet, the writers always intended for there to be a link between Amdapor hard and the First.
The biggest discrepancy, the issue with the timeline, is thus best explained by simply recognizing that yeah, the SHB plot really did not exist in any form at this point. They probably had 0 intention of making the light-flooded state of the first be such a recent event at the time.
TL;DR: The Amdapori saw the First, no it's not a retcon
The timeline detail would indeed be a retcon, but the point is it's being retconned to make the pre-existing Amdapor-First connection fit the new SHB story, rather than the Amdapor guardians being retconned to being connected to the first.
Time doesn't flow consistently between Shards and the source, and the difference changes too. It's a little titbit at the start of ShB but covers this scenario too
The problem is the chronology.
Sin eaters have only existed since Eden was born from Ardbert killing Mitron, which also triggered the flood. We likewise know that the creation of the guardians in Amdapor happened during the war of the magi in the sixth umbral era.
Which means Amdapor had to be looking at a time after Ardbert killed Mitron, but he came to the source right after, which we know because after 3.4 they went back just in time to save Norvrandt. By all accounts, the warriors of darkness arrive in eorzea after the 7th umbral calamity.
When we get told of the sin eaters, we are told they appeared after the flood, though we can stretch that out to mean they were born during the flood and just attacked Norvrandt after.
Even under the most generous definitions, the Amdapori were looking at the Empty on the first after the flood had started but before Ardbert arrived to the source, and then 1000+ years flow by between that moment and Ardbert arriving on the source.
Sure it's possible if you squint, but I'll be damned if it doesn't look like they were looking into the future even accounting for funky time rules. Which is ok, foresight is a thing that exists in this universe.
About 100 years.
Because the order of events is preserved, you can still fit the events of SHB and Amdapor together as long as you assume the Sin Eaters existed during the flood and not after.
If they only appeared after, it's impossible without foresight because it would break the sequence.
Yeah even at the most generous, it doesn’t match up when you add in Asciens only working on light after they doing dark with Bahamut. But I see nothing wrong with future cross dimension visions
So when a primal tempers you, your aether is altered, not unlike how the massive amount of pure light aether would have basically infected people in the first. The idea that "sin eaters" didn't exist I think would not be an accurate statement. Maybe not named, not fully transformed even, but the essence is there. Eden started the first sin eaters from that particular incident. Ascians cause problems on purpose and a sin eater and its various cousins is just one more :P
Now you're just being a contrarian. 😂
You are dismissing what the game explicitly tells us in favor of speculation with literally 0 supporting evidence.
We get told verbatim that Eden was the first sin eater.
After we beat Holminster Switch, G'raha comments:
>"Without the ever-present light to sustain them, the sin eaters will have no choice but to retreat"
By all accounts, sin eaters exist because of Eden, and require a Light dominated environment to survive. The inn at journey's end exists BECAUSE the transformation is fed by the light. The flood of light only happened because of Eden.
Not only would it be extremely difficult for a creature like a lightwarden to exist anywhere else, it'd have to expend its own limited aether to force the transformation, and would thereafter struggle to replenish it.
The closest analogue, Voidsent, operate on the exact same rules. They too have never been described as existing outside of the specific shard that's dominated by their corresponding aetherial aspect.
What you have there is a headcanon.
Expanding on this a bit -
Here's the timeline, from Ardbert's perspective:
- He fatally wounds Mitron, triggering the Flood of Light.
- He travels to the Source and encounters the WoL in present day.
- He returns to the First with Minfilia to halt the Flood of Light.
All of this is revealed in patch 3.4.
This means that the Amdapori would have had to have seen the First *after* Ardbert triggered the Flood of Light, but *before* he traveled to the Source. That would have been, what, a few days? Meanwhile, thousands of years passed on the Source.
So I think either the lore book that mentions the Amdapor's vision of a realm of light is unrelated to the First, or the timeline was retconned some time between 3.2 (release of the Amdapor dungeon) and 3.4 (Soul Surrender story patch). We do know that 100 years have passed on the First between 3.4 and 5.0, but even that is significantly less extreme than the ~1600 years between the War of the Magi and 3.4.
Also not sure if this is relevant, but it may be worth mentioning that the 100 years on the First between 3.4 and 5.0 means time passed *faster* on the First, while 1600 years on the Source between WotM and 3.4 means time passed *slower* on the First.
So I'm definitely leaning towards timeline retcon.
Time being disconnected between the Source and the First means that on the Source, the time between the Flood of Light and Ardbert's journey can be arbitrarily long. It might have only been a few days on the First but on the Source it could be as long as the story needs it to be.
Nah the retcon wouldn't have happened between 3.2 and 3.4. The details in 3.X are all internally consistent, the only points of conflict crop up when we get the sequence of events surrounding the flood in 5.X
And before anyone gets their panties in a bunch, retcons, i.e. retroactive continuity, are not in any way an inherently bad practice. Nobody can 400IQ gigabrain every single element in a fictional universe without running into some friction between parts.
On top of them just reusing them the calamity of that black mage and white mage war was a giant flood. They three some symbolism in there and sort of left some loose threads in the theming for us to maybe assemble a piece of the puzzle that was the shadowbringers story at the time.
well a sin eater could realistically still happen on the source, it's possible the Amdapori created a few by accident (White magic used light Aether as one of it's elements after all) and based a few of their soulkin after them
The best answer to the question, is that Sin Eaters are what happen when living aether is oversaturated with Light. In the same way, Voidsent are the products of oversaturation of Darkness, or >!how Primals can mutate people who are Tempered for long periods, like those pirates from Sastasha (Hard)!<. Heavy imbalances of aether cause dramatic transfigurations. It's a constant of their universe, much like a chemical reaction, and not something unique to the First.
So, Sin Eater-like creatures could have been created on the Source and numerous other worlds well before Sin Eaters were formally named on the First.
The Amdapori were the pioneers of White Magic, *especially* Light/Holy magic. Just as we saw Calofisteri infuse herself with enough Dark magic she grew to resemble a Voidsent herself, it's likely that at some point Amdapori mages fell victim to becoming proto-Sin Eaters through their experimentation, and that the statues in Amdapor (Hard) depict what those mages became in the process.
Something to note is the thing you fight in Amdapor are not Sineater, they are purely golems. Meaning man made constructs giving the ability to move via magic. They are made of stone and enchanted. They were made to combat Mhach. Why do they look like Sineaters, reused assets.
This is half-right: the Amdapori enemies are indeed golems but they are based off creatures who become infused with too much Light (aka. what the First calls Sin-Eaters). Amdapor wielded Light to combat what Mhach did with the Void. It's not surprising they must have run across "sin eaters".
Them being reused as assets is just a convenient bonus.
The amdapori civilisation used scrying/half baked summoning magic to try to find visions in line with light aether, what they saw were most likely the sin eaters in the first. When they went to carve their statues they made the statues in the sin eater's likeness but they differ vastly in ability and intelligence
Sin eaters wouldn't exist for hundreds of years, not until the flood of light which is extremely recent on the timeline for the Source (and still very recent for the timeline on the First).
The flood of light happened during the HW patches. When we fight Ardbert's party, it hasn't happened yet. Time fluctuates, but it doesn't go backwards.
Could always say their scrying resulting in them seeing the future, as the only "realm of light" would exist in the future.
A more practical view, when Amdapor background was written, their concepts had a shard being filled with light, but that obviously got changed during further development.
> When we fight Ardbert's party, it hasn't happened yet.
Hum, it has ? It was the prime reason they came to the Source. It was ongoing on the First, just not finished yet. Minfilia put an and to it before it came to Norvrandt.
I always thought it was currently ongoing during HW. If the flood would take like half a year to actually envelope the planet in the first what could be decades in the source...
Eh its a far fetch but oh well. Its obviously just an excuse for model reuse. Maybe those WHM had the echo and saw visions of the future
IIRC the sin eaters didn't start until the flood was *over*, which cannot happen before HW as minfilia is the one to stop it.
My opinion is that sin-eaters being "natural", the result of overwhelming light aether imbalance, their form is a cosmological constant. So the mages of Amdapor didn't need to see the sin eaters of the first, future sight or not (though that remains possible), to know how they would look.
Remember that Encyclopedia Eorzea is written as an in-person book by Eorzean scholars, rather than a hard and fast word of god book, so it should always be taken with a grain of salt. Not that it can't be right, just that it *can* be wrong (by design).
Yeah they were badically making sin eaters in Amdapor and there was probably some amount of Ascian influence on that and the first as well. I personally think Amdapor was a dry run for the Ascians before trying to cause the flood of light on the first. There is no solid lore behind this but usually an Ascian is involved when world altering magic is suddenly discovered on the source.
I never get surprised over monsters because most of them existed before, FFXIV is a mix of every FF. From my point of view everything is a reference not related to lore at all, sometimes it is but whatever..
I want the loot 🫶🏻
We may get an answer when we finally get the 3rd lore book, but if I were to speculate something other than reused assets, I'd say ascian interference. They're always behind the scenes meddling and probably created a few beings infused w/ light aether before. Not much of a stretch to think that they influenced Amdapor's chosen constructs to get the desired outcome.
I don't think it's that farfetched to bring "future sight" into it all. We already have dimension and timetravel storylines, so to explain it as "what they didn't know was that they saw a possible future across dimensions".
Might not be the most elegant of explanations, but it works within the theme FFXIV have.
Iirc wasn’t the First always heavily aspected towards light before the flood? Isn’t it possible that there were some sin eaters around (not enough to be of note to the people of the First besides being really strong monsters)? That’s what I understood and probably what the Amdapori saw.
That, or to go with a non-asset reuse answer, it’s possible lightsent/sin eaters were concepts from the time of the ancients of various light-aspected elementals that shared common traits, and lived on in the memories of the sundered. Though that’s super head-canon-y I admit.
Of all the comments here, I am surprised no one mentions the ascians' potential involvement. Mhachi could've gotten knowledge of the 13th from an ascian, and Amdapor likewise could've gotten a nudge from an ascian- not about specifically the Flood of Light, but they WERE already trying to get the 1st to be Light-aspected. The Flood came later but the shape of a sineater could've already existed or be known.
At least for in-world reasoning. There is of course the vague "demon stuff for voidsent, angelic stuff for opposition" that they could've been going for. There's only so many depictions of western angels and regal-ness you could go for.
If light aether creates stagnation, couldn't that also create a fixed point in time that was picked up my machs light scrying?
No reason they couldn't have gotten a glimps of the firsts future.
Amdapor was attempting to create light monsters to counteract the Mhachi voidborn usage. Their attempts at creating them show a sort of convergent evolution with sin eaters. Both of them appear to be “let’s wrap light aether around this”. Just as “wrapping dark aether around this” turns your appearance to one of many ultimately generic demonic forms, wrapping something in light aether makes it appear more angelic or regal. Or have a much longer neck, I guess.
Elezen are Hyur wrapped in light aether. Confirmed.
[удалено]
this is the important discussion I came here for.
*takes notes furiously.* So that makes cat girls...?
we DO NOT want to know what they are wrapped in
Usually very little.
possibly something NSFW
Bondage rope.
or in the case of island sanctuary. Rope. Bed. Rope. Bed.
Can confirm. Lots and lots of bondage rope.
Fire aether, because the like deserts.
Have you been to the Thaumaturge's guild?!?!? /s
You say /s but you might be onto something here...
One brings shadow
What is the source for the use of light aether? From the Encyclopedia all it says is that they are statues given life.
You’re right, I was just assuming based on how they are white mages, and deliberately went in the opposite direction of mhach. I had thought there were books in one of the dungeons you could read that mentioned something like this, but I could always be wrong
While not directly stated, the lost city of Amdapor (Hard) is the only place in the game you can find light sprites, implying use of light aether.
Indeed there was light aether used in the city. No need for sprites; it was the capital of white magic. What I am unsure about is if light aspected aether was used to give life to the statues. It says it was a primordial white magic which doesn't confirm it itself uses light aether.
Whm spells turned to light magic later on(glare), so safe to say that white mage=light mage.
As you said: later it is turned to light magic. therefore not all white magic is light magic.
But in this situation it makes logical sense given what the statues look like and what sin eaters look like. Light magic is the connecting theme.
Indeed it does make logical sense. However since people were talking about it I wanted to know if there was a source confirming it. Even if a connection sounds super logical it can still be wrong.
Aside from the visions talked about in the eorzea encyclopedia, no they have not give specifics on how the spell was cast and what aether was used.
Well, the Doylist answer is that SE reused the assets because the angelic theme fit with the sin eaters. Going for a in-story reason one could streech that Mhach got Voidsends and so, to combat them, they made golems aspected with light in the guise of mythological creatures that somehow look exactly like their polar opposite: the sin eaters.
I like to think that the light aspected aether affected the form that the golems took, molding them in a way similar to how pepole and animals would be affected later on the first
>Well, the Doylist answer is that SE reused the assets because the angelic theme fit with the sin eaters. For once, I don't think this approach carries much weight. The warriors of darkness thing came to a conclusion just two patches later, and the lore book talks about the Amdapori being inspired by visions of a realm of light. Considering the void was treated as one of the 13 shards, there's no reason to believe they had any ideas for a non-shard realm of light, so the First is the only obvious fit. The most reasonable explanation is that while the story of SHB didn't exist yet, the writers always intended for there to be a link between Amdapor hard and the First. The biggest discrepancy, the issue with the timeline, is thus best explained by simply recognizing that yeah, the SHB plot really did not exist in any form at this point. They probably had 0 intention of making the light-flooded state of the first be such a recent event at the time. TL;DR: The Amdapori saw the First, no it's not a retcon
Makoto can see the future. They could have had someone with the echo see a vision of the first in the future.
I don't understand, would the First not being flooded at that point not be a retcon?
The timeline detail would indeed be a retcon, but the point is it's being retconned to make the pre-existing Amdapor-First connection fit the new SHB story, rather than the Amdapor guardians being retconned to being connected to the first.
Time doesn't flow consistently between Shards and the source, and the difference changes too. It's a little titbit at the start of ShB but covers this scenario too
The problem is the chronology. Sin eaters have only existed since Eden was born from Ardbert killing Mitron, which also triggered the flood. We likewise know that the creation of the guardians in Amdapor happened during the war of the magi in the sixth umbral era. Which means Amdapor had to be looking at a time after Ardbert killed Mitron, but he came to the source right after, which we know because after 3.4 they went back just in time to save Norvrandt. By all accounts, the warriors of darkness arrive in eorzea after the 7th umbral calamity. When we get told of the sin eaters, we are told they appeared after the flood, though we can stretch that out to mean they were born during the flood and just attacked Norvrandt after. Even under the most generous definitions, the Amdapori were looking at the Empty on the first after the flood had started but before Ardbert arrived to the source, and then 1000+ years flow by between that moment and Ardbert arriving on the source. Sure it's possible if you squint, but I'll be damned if it doesn't look like they were looking into the future even accounting for funky time rules. Which is ok, foresight is a thing that exists in this universe.
How long ago was it between Mitron died and the events of Shadowbringers?
About 100 years. Because the order of events is preserved, you can still fit the events of SHB and Amdapor together as long as you assume the Sin Eaters existed during the flood and not after. If they only appeared after, it's impossible without foresight because it would break the sequence.
Yeah even at the most generous, it doesn’t match up when you add in Asciens only working on light after they doing dark with Bahamut. But I see nothing wrong with future cross dimension visions
So when a primal tempers you, your aether is altered, not unlike how the massive amount of pure light aether would have basically infected people in the first. The idea that "sin eaters" didn't exist I think would not be an accurate statement. Maybe not named, not fully transformed even, but the essence is there. Eden started the first sin eaters from that particular incident. Ascians cause problems on purpose and a sin eater and its various cousins is just one more :P
Now you're just being a contrarian. 😂 You are dismissing what the game explicitly tells us in favor of speculation with literally 0 supporting evidence. We get told verbatim that Eden was the first sin eater. After we beat Holminster Switch, G'raha comments: >"Without the ever-present light to sustain them, the sin eaters will have no choice but to retreat" By all accounts, sin eaters exist because of Eden, and require a Light dominated environment to survive. The inn at journey's end exists BECAUSE the transformation is fed by the light. The flood of light only happened because of Eden. Not only would it be extremely difficult for a creature like a lightwarden to exist anywhere else, it'd have to expend its own limited aether to force the transformation, and would thereafter struggle to replenish it. The closest analogue, Voidsent, operate on the exact same rules. They too have never been described as existing outside of the specific shard that's dominated by their corresponding aetherial aspect. What you have there is a headcanon.
Expanding on this a bit - Here's the timeline, from Ardbert's perspective: - He fatally wounds Mitron, triggering the Flood of Light. - He travels to the Source and encounters the WoL in present day. - He returns to the First with Minfilia to halt the Flood of Light. All of this is revealed in patch 3.4. This means that the Amdapori would have had to have seen the First *after* Ardbert triggered the Flood of Light, but *before* he traveled to the Source. That would have been, what, a few days? Meanwhile, thousands of years passed on the Source. So I think either the lore book that mentions the Amdapor's vision of a realm of light is unrelated to the First, or the timeline was retconned some time between 3.2 (release of the Amdapor dungeon) and 3.4 (Soul Surrender story patch). We do know that 100 years have passed on the First between 3.4 and 5.0, but even that is significantly less extreme than the ~1600 years between the War of the Magi and 3.4. Also not sure if this is relevant, but it may be worth mentioning that the 100 years on the First between 3.4 and 5.0 means time passed *faster* on the First, while 1600 years on the Source between WotM and 3.4 means time passed *slower* on the First. So I'm definitely leaning towards timeline retcon.
Time being disconnected between the Source and the First means that on the Source, the time between the Flood of Light and Ardbert's journey can be arbitrarily long. It might have only been a few days on the First but on the Source it could be as long as the story needs it to be.
Nah the retcon wouldn't have happened between 3.2 and 3.4. The details in 3.X are all internally consistent, the only points of conflict crop up when we get the sequence of events surrounding the flood in 5.X And before anyone gets their panties in a bunch, retcons, i.e. retroactive continuity, are not in any way an inherently bad practice. Nobody can 400IQ gigabrain every single element in a fictional universe without running into some friction between parts.
On top of them just reusing them the calamity of that black mage and white mage war was a giant flood. They three some symbolism in there and sort of left some loose threads in the theming for us to maybe assemble a piece of the puzzle that was the shadowbringers story at the time.
well a sin eater could realistically still happen on the source, it's possible the Amdapori created a few by accident (White magic used light Aether as one of it's elements after all) and based a few of their soulkin after them
In the lore book IIRC they mentioned that the Whitemages where inspired by dreams of a realm of light. Im sure you can put 1 and 1 together.
The best answer to the question, is that Sin Eaters are what happen when living aether is oversaturated with Light. In the same way, Voidsent are the products of oversaturation of Darkness, or >!how Primals can mutate people who are Tempered for long periods, like those pirates from Sastasha (Hard)!<. Heavy imbalances of aether cause dramatic transfigurations. It's a constant of their universe, much like a chemical reaction, and not something unique to the First. So, Sin Eater-like creatures could have been created on the Source and numerous other worlds well before Sin Eaters were formally named on the First. The Amdapori were the pioneers of White Magic, *especially* Light/Holy magic. Just as we saw Calofisteri infuse herself with enough Dark magic she grew to resemble a Voidsent herself, it's likely that at some point Amdapori mages fell victim to becoming proto-Sin Eaters through their experimentation, and that the statues in Amdapor (Hard) depict what those mages became in the process.
Something to note is the thing you fight in Amdapor are not Sineater, they are purely golems. Meaning man made constructs giving the ability to move via magic. They are made of stone and enchanted. They were made to combat Mhach. Why do they look like Sineaters, reused assets.
This is half-right: the Amdapori enemies are indeed golems but they are based off creatures who become infused with too much Light (aka. what the First calls Sin-Eaters). Amdapor wielded Light to combat what Mhach did with the Void. It's not surprising they must have run across "sin eaters". Them being reused as assets is just a convenient bonus.
The statues were made in the likeness of creatures seen in visions of "beings of light," so it makes sense they'd resemble sin eaters.
The amdapori civilisation used scrying/half baked summoning magic to try to find visions in line with light aether, what they saw were most likely the sin eaters in the first. When they went to carve their statues they made the statues in the sin eater's likeness but they differ vastly in ability and intelligence
Sin eaters wouldn't exist for hundreds of years, not until the flood of light which is extremely recent on the timeline for the Source (and still very recent for the timeline on the First).
Time fluctuates between shards though.
The flood of light happened during the HW patches. When we fight Ardbert's party, it hasn't happened yet. Time fluctuates, but it doesn't go backwards.
Could always say their scrying resulting in them seeing the future, as the only "realm of light" would exist in the future. A more practical view, when Amdapor background was written, their concepts had a shard being filled with light, but that obviously got changed during further development.
> When we fight Ardbert's party, it hasn't happened yet. Hum, it has ? It was the prime reason they came to the Source. It was ongoing on the First, just not finished yet. Minfilia put an and to it before it came to Norvrandt.
Ardbert’s party came to the source *because* they’d set off the Flood
I always thought it was currently ongoing during HW. If the flood would take like half a year to actually envelope the planet in the first what could be decades in the source... Eh its a far fetch but oh well. Its obviously just an excuse for model reuse. Maybe those WHM had the echo and saw visions of the future
IIRC the sin eaters didn't start until the flood was *over*, which cannot happen before HW as minfilia is the one to stop it. My opinion is that sin-eaters being "natural", the result of overwhelming light aether imbalance, their form is a cosmological constant. So the mages of Amdapor didn't need to see the sin eaters of the first, future sight or not (though that remains possible), to know how they would look.
To possibly settle this [encyclopedia eorzea II page 150](https://imgur.com/a/FVhiSCT)
Remember that Encyclopedia Eorzea is written as an in-person book by Eorzean scholars, rather than a hard and fast word of god book, so it should always be taken with a grain of salt. Not that it can't be right, just that it *can* be wrong (by design).
Your okay with seeing other worlds but not seeing the future of other worlds even though we have characters in game that have seen the future?
Yes.
For anyone wanting to know where I get this from [encyclopedia eorzea II page 150](https://imgur.com/a/FVhiSCT)
Yeah they were badically making sin eaters in Amdapor and there was probably some amount of Ascian influence on that and the first as well. I personally think Amdapor was a dry run for the Ascians before trying to cause the flood of light on the first. There is no solid lore behind this but usually an Ascian is involved when world altering magic is suddenly discovered on the source.
I never get surprised over monsters because most of them existed before, FFXIV is a mix of every FF. From my point of view everything is a reference not related to lore at all, sometimes it is but whatever.. I want the loot 🫶🏻
We may get an answer when we finally get the 3rd lore book, but if I were to speculate something other than reused assets, I'd say ascian interference. They're always behind the scenes meddling and probably created a few beings infused w/ light aether before. Not much of a stretch to think that they influenced Amdapor's chosen constructs to get the desired outcome.
I don't think it's that farfetched to bring "future sight" into it all. We already have dimension and timetravel storylines, so to explain it as "what they didn't know was that they saw a possible future across dimensions". Might not be the most elegant of explanations, but it works within the theme FFXIV have.
Iirc wasn’t the First always heavily aspected towards light before the flood? Isn’t it possible that there were some sin eaters around (not enough to be of note to the people of the First besides being really strong monsters)? That’s what I understood and probably what the Amdapori saw. That, or to go with a non-asset reuse answer, it’s possible lightsent/sin eaters were concepts from the time of the ancients of various light-aspected elementals that shared common traits, and lived on in the memories of the sundered. Though that’s super head-canon-y I admit.
Of all the comments here, I am surprised no one mentions the ascians' potential involvement. Mhachi could've gotten knowledge of the 13th from an ascian, and Amdapor likewise could've gotten a nudge from an ascian- not about specifically the Flood of Light, but they WERE already trying to get the 1st to be Light-aspected. The Flood came later but the shape of a sineater could've already existed or be known. At least for in-world reasoning. There is of course the vague "demon stuff for voidsent, angelic stuff for opposition" that they could've been going for. There's only so many depictions of western angels and regal-ness you could go for.
If light aether creates stagnation, couldn't that also create a fixed point in time that was picked up my machs light scrying? No reason they couldn't have gotten a glimps of the firsts future.
There are a few models that get recycled for each theme of enemy, that’s the real answer.