2022-06-09 12:43:02 ¶ ●

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Elias wasn’t on an obsessive pilgrimage towards knowledge, he wanted immortality and used The Eye as a path to get there

people can have multiple interests? immortality was perhaps his primary aim, but he never passed up an opportunity to expand his knowledge. he abandoned Mordecai Lucas to the Lonely despite caring about him (‘collected his bones mournfully enough’) just to see what would happen, because ‘he had to know’. he was always interested in esoteric knowledge; when their little group was each pledging themselves to an Entity, Smirke specifically asks him to stop following the Eye. he stole the library in Schwartzwald despite knowing it could harm yet another friend. he runs an educational institute, not a neuroscience or genetic engineering lab (with which, too, he could have connected the esoteric as with the Anabelle Cane experiment).

and, as you say, he used the Eye specifically. not Terminus, not the Corruption (cockroaches can survive anything logic), not the Extinction (become post-human to avoid human death), &c.. I feel like he wouldn’t have chosen the Eye, nor been so effective an acolyte, had he not had a genuine affinity to the Eye’s domain of knowledge and curiosity. he chose his God and he fed it well.