Could G'raha's Original Timeline still exist?

[TheMightyMollusk]

assuming Corporeal Aether isn't Jumbled after a dive into BlackRose soup.
I admittedly never looked into if the body needs Corporeal Aether to Function, or if the soul Aether will do just fine if there are none.
One thing for sure. Zenos might just be the start of the chaos and turmoil.

But we never knew if there was else inside of him, but his Desire for us/WoL/D.

The Sage job quests involve a rare condition that prevents the body from absorbing aether from food, resulting in a person slowly wasting away. So the body does need aether to live.

All of the signs we've been shown indicate that Black Rose stills the aether around it, in a similar process to the Flood of Light (Emet-Selch even directly compares them at one point). It doesn't jumble the body's aether, it just stifles it, resulting in death. The body is still intact, it's just empty.

[Ralphe2449]

G'raha didn't "jump timelines" but travelled back in time along a single timeline. It was his actions upon reaching that earlier point in the timeline that created a split, resulting in the path we are currently on. (Though due to the oddities of time logic, that means they have always existed in parallel, even "before" he travelled back.)

As far as we know, the Crystal Tower time machine has not been shown to be able to jump from one timeline to another.

It's not impossible for someone with a more advanced space-time machine to find their way across multiple threads of timelines, but I don't really want the story to go there.

I also would prefer that they keep multiple timelines to a minimum, only created in exceptional circumstances, not created spontaneously every time someone rolls a dice. "Only when a time traveller breaks something" seems like a straightforward rule for the sanity of the narrative.

The problem with that is simple, how many times has the timeline been split up until that moment?
You cant assume you live in the original timeline, it could have been split a hundred fold by the time the exarch moved back in time creating yet even more branches. The joke was more the fact that Graha's noble efforts to "avert that future" never really achieved anything because that future still exists on a separate timeline, so he really just avoided it by jumping back in time and creating a new timeline which looks a bit less noble.


If a person from the future can go back at any moment in history or if some separate event can create an entirely new timeline then you are starting to have infinite branching timelines where literally anything can happen, you can have branches that are completely different from the other timelines which definitely makes writing a bit easier since now anything is possible but it also makes things feel like they have a bit less weight.

I would have preferred if the rules were simple myself, time travel is a loop and that's it, but the moment they made timelines a thing, you no longer can be certain for anything which is my main point.

[Iscah]

The problem with that is simple, how many times has the timeline been split up until that moment?
You cant assume you live in the original timeline, it could have been split a hundred fold by the time the exarch moved back in time creating yet even more branches.

That's why I say "only when a time traveller breaks something", and I mean that as a shorthand for my take on the time travel logic that I think I may have launched into too many times here already.

In short, because time loops can form, that demonstrates that the timeline does not automatically split as soon as time travel is involved. There has to be a further factor.

As I said before, I think that factor has to be whether the time traveller "breaks something", by which I mean they change something to an extent that it cannot be reconciled with history as the time traveller knows it. In the specific case of G'raha averting the calamity, that event undeniably happened in his past, so changing the situation to the point that the calamity cannot occur will disrupt the would-be time loop and create a split.

By comparison, when we travel to "three years ago" in Alexander, or our second shorter trip to save ourself from Alexander's laser blast, we don't disrupt anything. We see things play out in a way that is compatible with our previous understanding of the situation - despite adding some perspective-shifting new details about what actually happened - and so that did not split the timeline. It simply became, and indeed alway was, part of how things played out in the single timeline of events there.

Basically, what it comes down to is that changing the past is hard. The more understanding that the time traveller has of a situation, the more chance they have of disrupting it - which is why G'raha succeeded by targeting the specific root cause of the event - but if there are gaps in their knowledge then those events are more malleable and it's almost impossible to create the sort of contradiction that would break the timeline. We travelled to Elpis without any prior knowledge of events there, so anything we did there just became part of the one version of events that had always happened.

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So by setting the rule that there is only a split if a traveller breaks the timeline, then there are a few limiting factors. There is the bar set for the difficulty of time travel in the first place; even if achieved, there is no guarantee of a split; and depending on the time traveller's goals, they may not want to cause a split anyway (as this will likely cut them off from ever returning home).

There conceivably could be other splits we don't know about, caused by other people in other parts of the timeline, but that's the thing. We don't know about them, therefore they are irrelevant to the story we exist in which starts with a single timeline in the ancient world and splits into the two modern timelines we are aware of. Nothing else matters for the narrative, and as long as we're not in the sort of infinite multiverse where every victory creates a twin timeline where we lost, then I don't need to know about the others.

Also, it's ultimately a story. The writers can prevent any further time travel issues by simply having nobody else ever invent time travel. Cid in this timeline doesn't seem eager to do so.