Do you think after Endwalker there will be time travel?

[Iscah]

It's not necessarily a separate timeline, the apocalypse world could be a separate world within our timeline. There is a rather large precedent for multiple copies of the same world existing across the same timeline in-universe.

No, it's definitely an alternate timeline. G'raha was there for it - he knows which world it happened in, and it was the Source.

And I don't think there's a "rather large precedent" for multiple copies of the same world in a way that everything in the last 12,000 years since the Sundering would be, if not perfectly identical, then sufficiently similar to mistake another shard for an alternate timeline of this one.

We only have a sample of two observed worlds, but they are utterly different beyond the basic geography. I'm not sure how this is supposed to set a precedent for the opposite.

What I remember was the machine trying to crunch the spell (spoiler under cut)

G'raha needed to bring the souls of the Scions over from the First.

That was already well resolved at that point.

From memory they were trying to develop the anti-tempering spell.

[Jandor]

No, it's definitely an alternate timeline. G'raha was there for it - he knows which world it happened in, and it was the Source.

The world would be split from the Source as/after he left. I'm not saying it started as a different dimension.

[WhiteArchmage]

The world would be split from the Source as/after he left. I'm not saying it started as a different dimension.

Nope. Stated as such in the Side Story I had mentioned.

Conscious that others were watching, I shook my head. Causality be damned. I refused to believe our friend would allow our travails to be for naught. The Eighth Umbral Calamity had been averted, if not for us then in a divergent timeline.

That was from hundreds of years in the future, in the Source. Since G'raha was succesful in averting the Eight Umbral Calamity (Black Rose), and there was no Back To The Future change in their timeline (therefore, a Temporal Paradox). It is textbook alternate timeline, not a separate Reflection. As far as we know, only Hydaelin would have the means to create ANOTHER Reflection.

It'd only be a separate dimension on the loosest of terms that would still require it to be an alternate timeline.

[Jandor]

A split would mean that the current world and the bad future exist concurrently. There is zero evidence of Graha creating another shard, and a different timeline makes a lot more sense due to the time travel involved in changing things. If he had created ANOTHER shard through what he did someone would have mentioned that by now.

Why? Who would know? Who would say if they did know?

Conscious that others were watching, I shook my head. Causality be damned. I refused to believe our friend would allow our travails to be for naught. The Eighth Umbral Calamity had been averted, if not for us then in a divergent timeline.

That was from hundreds of years in the future, in the Source. Since G'raha was succesful in averting the Eight Umbral Calamity (Black Rose), and there was no Back To The Future change in their timeline (therefore, a Temporal Paradox). It is textbook alternate timeline, not a separate Reflection. As far as we know, only Hydaelin would have the means to create ANOTHER Reflection.

It'd only be a separate dimension on the loosest of terms that would still require it to be an alternate timeline.

He's stating what he chooses to believe has happened. Just as G'raha doesn't really know the fate of that world, they're not really sure of the fate of G'raha.

A separate reflection solves the paradox because G'raha becomes an outside actor, he is no longer interfering in his own past because the events that lead to him changing the past happened on a different world to the two he changes.

I mean, I suppose you could say the Source and the shards are all already alternate timelines in a way. They were all split 12,000 years ago from the same point and they all developed along different lines, sometimes with the timelines of each world being at different points relative to each other, but they're all still linked in the grand overarching scheme of things too.

[Bright-Flower]

Why? Who would know? As far as I am aware no-one we've spoken to about it is even sure that the 8th calamity world still exists.



He's stating what he chooses to believe has happened. Just as G'raha doesn't really know the fate of that world, they're not really sure of the fate of G'raha.

A separate reflection solves the paradox because G'raha becomes an outside actor, he is no longer interfering in his own past because his own past happened on a different world to the two he is messing with.

The ascians, whose whole thing is travleing between shards and arranging calamities, would prooooobably have noticed if there was a new 14th shard suddenly split off. Espeiccally because Gra'ha didn't travel back in time to just now, he was on the First for a long time after he went back in time and changed things.

It's a pretty simple 'went back in time, future was changed' story. Nothing about that would suggest a new physical world within the same timeline now exists because of it. Heck we don't even know for sure if the bad future timeline even still exists or not.

[Jandor]

It's a pretty simple 'went back in time, future was changed' story. Nothing about that would suggest a new physical world within the same timeline now exists because of it. Heck we don't even know for sure if the bad future timeline even still exists or not.

It does. Short story about it here:

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes.../#sidestory_08

It still exists, we don't really know how. Most people go with a whole new separate timeline, that is how most time-travel stories would do it after all, but seeing as that doesn't really fit with the prior example of time-travel that we have in this story (which also happens to be what the Ironworks based their own time-travel on) I don't think it's that. Not in the sense that most people seem to mean anyway with a whole new source and shards and Emet and Elidibus still skulking about, etc. etc.

[Iscah]

The world would be split from the Source as/after he left. I'm not saying it started as a different dimension.

Shards don't just form spontaneously. There is no precedent for it. There was only one Sundering, through circumstances that have not been repeated, and everyone who has any knowledge of the shards talks about them as a consistent number.

On top of that, it would achieve nothing for this new shard to have developed "after he left". The damage was already done at that point - the calamity and the destruction of society as we know it - and yet we have now prevented that from happening. History does not match the future-Source.

Whether it seems to perfectly work with Alexander's version of time travel or not, everything points to it as creating a split timeline by travelling to the past and altering it.

And while my initial response to it was feeling like it didn't match Alexander's "stable time loop" approach to time travel, I think it can be made to work. Even back then, time isn't guaranteed to remain stable, but the loop is at least partly created and kept on track by Alexander's deliberate interference with events.

As it is described in the story:

The summoning of the colossus, and the events that followed, had potentially disastrous consequence for our reality. Its fabric strained to accommodate an infinite number of potential futures separated by nary a thread.

Time isn't a loop there because it's guaranteed to loop, but because Alexander made sure that it did.

I think in the case of G'raha's travel, reality would be likewise strained by multiple potential futures, the difference being that he was deliberately trying to take the world into one of them, and succeeded by altering events that he knew to have happened in the timeline he came from. That, I think, should cause the timelines to restabilise - and if not, then the destruction of the time machine (by us in this timeline; by the rejoining in the other). But unlike Alexander's neat loop and single outcome, the fact that part of G'raha's life was spent in that other timeline keeps that other reality "wedged open" so both continue to exist independently. Where he expected that the timeline would be destroyed and that he would cease to be as a consequence, instead his existence requires the other timeline to remain open.

That's my best attempt at resolving it within the information we have, and I think it makes sense without introducing new concepts outside of what we have already seen.