The rift, the crystal tower, and the seat of sacrifice (Spoilers up to 6.0)

[TheMightyMollusk]

The way it seems to me, time travel within the same Shard doesn't work, because you can't change the past. This includes going back to the pre-Sundering era, because it's still technically the past of the same Shard. But jumping to another Shard changes the variables enough to break the time stream, or at least create an alternate one.

To use a (probably bad) metaphor; traveling back in your own past, like Alexander, is just riding the train back along the tracks. It can only go one way. Jumping across the Rift and traveling through time is diverting the train onto a new set of tracks.

[Iscah]

The way it seems to me, time travel within the same Shard doesn't work, because you can't change the past. This includes going back to the pre-Sundering era, because it's still technically the past of the same Shard. But jumping to another Shard changes the variables enough to break the time stream, or at least create an alternate one.

To use a (probably bad) metaphor; traveling back in your own past, like Alexander, is just riding the train back along the tracks. It can only go one way. Jumping across the Rift and traveling through time is diverting the train onto a new set of tracks.

That's not how it works, though. All the shards together are in a single stream of time, and their fates are entwined. You have the 8UE timeline where the First was rejoined and its aether wrecked the Source, and our timeline where they remain separate. There's a copy of all the shards (or what is left of them) in each stream.

[Cleretic]

The way it seems to me, time travel within the same Shard doesn't work, because you can't change the past. This includes going back to the pre-Sundering era, because it's still technically the past of the same Shard. But jumping to another Shard changes the variables enough to break the time stream, or at least create an alternate one.

To use a (probably bad) metaphor; traveling back in your own past, like Alexander, is just riding the train back along the tracks. It can only go one way. Jumping across the Rift and traveling through time is diverting the train onto a new set of tracks.

While I don't necessarily agree with this, I do think it's interesting to consider, because we don't know that's not how it works. We don't know the actual rules of time travel in this universe, we just have multiple instances of time travel that we know worked and happened, and just have to work from that. The only one that knew how time travel works was Alexander, and it ain't talking.

Maybe you're right, and it's not what you do after time travelling that determines if the timeline forks or loops, but how diagonal the time travel route was. We don't know, and nobody in-universe (at least, who's still an operating part of the timestream) knows, because nobody was actually present for all four major time travel schemes; the WoL and Y'shtola were near all of them, but Y'shtola participated in none and the WoL was only knowingly involved in one (their level of involvement in Alexander's greater time loop is very debatable).