Quote Originally Posted by Sylve View Post
My opinion is that we were in an altered timeline from the beginning of ARR.
Basically, Original WoL goes back to Elpis, finds out about Meteion and then returns to the Original Timeline, leaving Venat to play out her role in the story as originaly described to her.
The Original timeline doesn't have a tagged Meteion, but the new altered time that we've been in since ARR is the one with the tagged bird. Original time goes through the Exodus on the Moon and finds another way to Meteion.
Meanwhile, we get the events of Endwalker. Its the only way the Elpis part of the story gels with the time travel rules they set out in G'raha's story.
I disagree that you need a different timeline to make the story work or to make it consistent with G'raha's time travel.

My basic interpretation of the time travel rules is that the universe "prefers" things to link up into a single timeline. If you travel to the past, you move back along your own timeline and most of the time anything you do while you're there gets integrated into the way things always happened. This is the outcome seen in Elpis and in Alexander.

G'raha, in the other hand, managed to break the timeline by altering things in the past enough that the future he came from was impossible. This new future splits off on its own path while the original one also stays open as it forms the path that will bring him back here in the first place.

So that essentially turned the timeline from a single straight line to a Y shape with the "trunk" being everything that happens up to Shadowbringers and the two branches are the original (dark future) timeline and the one that we exist in now.

When we travel back in time to Elpis, we are going to the "trunk" of the timeline that is the single past of the two current branches, and so our actions there create the basis of both paths.

Our other self in the dark timeline never visits Elpis. They never have a reason to do so prior to dying in the Calamity, and in any case both Emet and Elidibus probably survive our demise and Fandaniel never gets to set off the Final Days anyway.

However, if our other self did have reason to go to Elpis, they would arrive in the same world we visit, not a separate copy. So there is no need for them to do so, and no paradox caused by their failure to get there.