Tales From the Shadows Updated (SPOILERS ABOUND)

[Grimr]

/sigh With the eight umbral era not disappearing and the crystal tower remaining on the first seems to confirm my suspicions that the eight umbral calamity has not been averted. Two timelines can not exist together. Its a world of paradoxes. One timeline will take over the other.

If they had averted the eight umbra calamity, the tower would have gone back to erozea along with the scions. It is probably a different calamity altogether but it would facilitate the need to go back and avert it.

[Iscah]

/sigh With the eight umbral era not disappearing and the crystal remaining on the first seems to confirm my suspicions that the eight umbral calamity has not been averted. Two timelines can not exist together. Its a world of paradoxes. One timeline will take over the other.

If they had averted the eight umbra calamity, the tower would have gone back to erozea along with the scions. It is probably a different calamity altogether but it would facilitate the need to go back and avert it.

They're averting the Calamity by preventing it from happening in this version of the timeline, even though it will still happen in the other timeline. In fact, that split actually prevents a paradox, because we're not raising that issue of "travelling back to prevent a historical event, thus erasing the event from history and removing your motivation to time-travel in the first place". Here, because the two timelines co-exist, G'raha can be aware of what happened in one version of history while still being able to prevent it in the other.

There's no reason at all for the tower to vanish back to Eorzea - the whole point of the split timeline is that there will be no unravelling and no resetting. Once the two versions of time have diverged, they exist as they are. The tower is in Lakeland and it's staying there unless someone fires up the TARDIS engine again (which won't be happening because we broke it).

The whole point of this story seems to be to confirm the opposite of your suspicions: that the split does not need to be resolved and the two versions of the timeline will continue to co-exist, despite each being inaccessible and undetectable to the other.

It's worth pointing out that this story is set 200 years into the future of the other timeline. Unless their story is going to overwrite ours again, which would defeat the purpose of the whole exercise, then it has not happened to them yet even though their world exists far beyond the limits of our modern-day time bubble.

I'm fairly sure that this story is simply to clarify that the other timeline has not been destroyed and is not in a hopeless situation. While you can never say never in this story, I don't feel like we'll be hearing from them again.



Edit to add: If you're of the impression that the Eighth Calamity can't have been averted until we see the tower and the Scions returned to their original places, that was essentially a working theory at the time, based on an incorrect assumption of the consequences. The Exarch expected that a successful aversion of the Calamity would cause time to unwind and the tower to revert to its rightful place in future Mor Dhona - but then here we are in that unwanted paradox state, asking whether that would also undo the very work that lead to the Calamity being averted in the first place. Of course that didn't actually happen and the timeline split instead of being overwritten, so the final outcome is different.

[kujoestars]

snip

Gonna have to break this post apart because of character limit, but here goes:

That’s not how time travel works both by the consensus in the physics community (theoretically speaking, of course) and the game’s own darn rules established in the Alexander story (i.e. time travel can only occur as a result of a causal loop). But basically, you can’t actually change the future by changing the past. The only way you can travel through time is if you were meant to in the first place.

Maybe being a former Homestuck fan makes comprehending the concept of alt timelines resulting from time travel easier. But to some them up, in Homestuck there is an Alpha Timeline (i.e. the “real” timeline where everything happens as it “should”) and countless Doomed Timelines (i.e. things were not “supposed“ to happen this way due to a “bad” choice made by a Time Player, who all have the ability to time travel).

Homestuck had used a similar plotpoint somewhere in Act 3 where John was tricked into confronting his game world’s (fyi, Homestuck is about kids who play a game that destroy the world and forces them to create a new one in another plane known as Paradox Space before releasing it) Denizen, which are the giant NPC monsters inhabiting each player’s world. The result was that he was killed, which prompted Dave, his best friend and Knight of Time, to travel back to the point in time where he did not stop John from meeting Typheus.