Tales From the Shadows Updated (SPOILERS ABOUND)

[Iscah]

You seem very confident. The lack of definitive answer to how exactly the doomed world fits into the overall cosmology, if it does at all, was the most annoying aspect of the story to me.

Is there some information I'm missing? Nothing I read really gave me any reason to believe everything that exists in the wider scheme of things carried over. Especially not Emet, Elidibus and reincarnations of Azem.

It just... had to. It's logical. It's a timeline equal to ours and it can't not have all of reality intact.

Perhaps the idea that time runs at different speeds in our Source and First confuses people and makes them think of the shards as "different timelines" but that's not the same thing at all - they're still part of a single linked reality and affect each other. By contrast, the bad future timeline is completely separated and affected by a set of shards that are not ours.

There is a Source and a First in our timeline. There is a Source and a First in the other timeline - or at least there was until it rejoined to the Source. The Future Ironworks team could deduce which shard had been affected, which implies the others are there to be observed.

Again, the other timeline is equally "reality" - it would be the only version of events to exist if there was no split. There is simply no way for the shards to not exist alongside it, unless they just spontaneously vanish.

The Source is not a reality to itself - the Source and shards together make up reality.