ah yes…
i could argue that “the spell of the ancient age” was referring to sestren and the towers but from the tone it does sound like it knows that it is disobeying the ancients…
wait, what was the question? 
i do plan to mention the DV and the battle between sestren and heresy in the story i’m planning, so it’s good that i’m getting this straight now.
Then you need to ask why the Heresy dragon originated in Sestren. How did it get there if it was created by someone other than the ancients or Sestren, and why 10 000 years after the downfall of the ancients? I’m not sure myself but the theory that Sestren was programmed to create it (for whatever reason) sounds like a reasonable place to start. It’s far more likely that it was one of the ancients’ own creations gone rogue (whether of its own free will or because of some outside force). The ancient rebels couldn’t build drones, but rather stole them, so what makes us think they could create the Heresy dragon?
It depends on your definition of create I suppose. I think the only way they could set the Heresy dragon loose on Sestren was by somehow programming Sestren to create it at a certain time or for a certain reason, or by infecting a dragon program that Sestren was always going to create at a certain time or under certain conditions.
I used to believe that the ancient ones intentionally became the victims of their own schemes because they came to the conclusion that enslaving their own race was the only way to save the world (an insane theory I know). Another theory was that the ancients became a threat to the very environment they built Sestren to protect and therefore lost control of their creations. This was the will of the ancients. Of course, I believed that long before we learnt that a group of ancients went into hibernation (and I totally ignored the Zoah bibles). God knows why the Heresy dragon chose to save humanity.
It appears Sestren was loyal to the ancient ones (so loyal that it would never harm them, only obey them) while the Heresy dragon or the Divine Visitor was ignoring its “duty” (whatever that was). Perhaps the Heresy dragon was originally a guardian dragon. Perhaps it was meant to destroy the Towers at a suitable time but not kill Sestren. I’m sure there’s much more to this story than meets the eye.
All ideas are welcome.
From what I can gather, the scientists who created the D Unit memory chip were very smart. Perhaps on the level of the ancients. Were they working for the ancients to create the ultimate monster? Or were they working against them to create the ultimate fighter meant to oppose the towers? My guess is the latter because they were “found out” and the underground ruins also mentioned the creation of Azel and Atolm, whom we know were designed to infiltrate the Towers. Maybe the D Unit chip was meant for Atolm. I’m not sure about the creation of the Heresy Program. This is just me and my opinion. I figure that Sestren was a giant living supercomputer built by the ancients to control the Towers. Somehow it can touch multiple dimensions at once. But super or not, it still IS a computer. Especially since in Orta it acts more like one than in Saga. Maybe scientists and technicians as smart as the scientists who created the D Unit somehow stole bits of information about the inner workings of Sestren and passed off that information to someone who could hack into Sestren. That person or team of people then created the Heresy Program and hacked it into Sestren. How the program managed to avoid detection after 10,000 years is beyond me.
Another more far fetched scenerio is that the Heretic Dragon really IS a messenger of the gods. Even though the ancients created the dragons, the dragon bible mentions that the dragon is a divine creature. Maybe there’s some truth to this. Maybe the lone Heresy Dragon that keeps appearing time and again is some avatar of a benevolent god. But then why would it start life inside Sestren? Maybe it wanted to start at the source but failed in its mission and got ejected from Sestren and forever barred.
The third scenario is what Lance has been saying. That the Heresy Program originated from Sestren. Is it a glitch or a bug in the system? How did it get to run counter to the programming of Sestren and the Will of the Ancients?
Well. There’s no way any of us could know for sure what’s going on behind the game. I’m more inclined to believe the first scenario, but that’s just me.
Uh, the scientists WERE the Ancients.
Yes but there must’ve been certain factions who were against what their superiors were doing. And I don’t think the ancients were ALL scientists. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to have that much control over the masses. Maybe there were some rulers and high priests that kept the status quo and the scientists that worked for them created their biological terrors.
The term “Ancients” can be a bit misleading because it includes all who were alive in the Ancient Age. The scientists of the Uru genetics lab were indeed working for the creators of the Towers though, so they would probably count as “Ancients” in the sense that the word is normally used.
The truth is actually a little more complicated, as although Azel was designed to interface with and control the Tower of Uru, she was only going to be used to infiltrate it by the ancient rebels who stole her from the Uru genetics lab. There’s also no real evidence that Atolm was created in Uru, although given that the Uru lab designed dragons it’s not all that unlikely.
I think this theory was held as “most likely” for quite some time, but there are some important elements that don’t quite seem to add up. For instance, if the Heresy Program was meant to save the world from the Towers, why would it only have been designed to go active after the human race had been oppressed for ten thousand years? Also, if the Program’s “purpose” could only be fulfilled with the aid of the Divine Visitor / Player, how would the rebels have been able to predict when the player would arrive and how the player would act? But as Geoff says, the Heresy Program’s origins are of course shrouded in mystery.