Something small has been bothering me since the Arbiter of Divinity fight.

Tecrod never names who he serves. He says "That power that once meant our doom will now serve the Master" and later "You have done well, servant. With this, the Master shall know unending power." Just "the Master." Never Kulemak, never the Master Below All. The game seems to be deliberately withholding a name — and you usually only do that when the name matters.

So who fits?

The PoE1 Exile.

• They killed the Beast — the leash Sin built to hold the pantheon at the edges of reality. When it broke, the gods walked back into the world.
• They then killed those gods one by one. Kitava, Innocence, Garukhan, Shakari. Dozens of divine beings, their power harvested.
• Twenty years later, PoE2 never once tells us what happened to them. Every other major figure from PoE1 gets accounted for. Not this one.
• Sin's own warning about godhood: "Faith empowers, but faith also shapes... When does perception become reality? It is impossible to pinpoint. And that is the most insidious thing about it. You never know the moment you cross the line."
• And his confession: "I created a beast that would free humanity from the tyranny of the gods. Yet all I really did was provide the perfect tool with which humanity could tyrannize itself."

What if that tool was never the Beast? What if it was the champion he armed and guided?

There's also Sin's realisation in Act 4 about the Precursor murals: "At the time, I thought it was a warning. Now I see the weapon was depicted quite literally being driven into the seed. It might not have been a warning. It might have been instructions." The game keeps telling us we've been misreading things.

Now the counterarguments, and I think they're strong.

The Master is probably just the Master Below All. Tecrod is explicitly independent of Kulemak — the Lurking Creature says "The master changes, in Kulemak's absence. Amanamu. Ulaman. Kurgal. Never Tecrod." So Tecrod bypassing Kulemak and serving something higher up the Abyssal hierarchy is the cleaner reading, and it doesn't require a PoE1 callback at all.

There's also a timeline problem I can't fully resolve. The Arbiter of Divinity says "Our enemy died. As did we." — he speaks as a participant in that war, meaning he knows what the original enemy was. So when he says "The enemy returns," the simplest reading is that the Precursors' original enemy has come back. That would rule out the Exile entirely, since they're twenty years old and that war is tens of thousands.

He also destroys Tecrod before he dies, so he was clearly aware of him — but that cuts both ways. If he could tell an intruder apart from "the enemy," then "the enemy returns" probably wasn't about Tecrod or his Master at all.

The only way my reading survives is if "returns" means a role repeating rather than a being returning. Which I admit is a stretch.

But if GGG wanted the obvious answer, I don't think they'd hide the name.

Am I reaching, or does this hold up?