Quote Originally Posted by Cleretic View Post
My bet: Zoraal Ja doesn't last a week, and the invasion never happens. And in doing so, the entirety of the Source is doomed.

I don't think that, without the immediate threat of the invasion, Tural breaks into the dome as quickly and forcefully as they do, so we're probably there for longer than thirty years. This doesn't shorten the thirty year timeline: it lengthens it. But that doesn't actually factor that much to my reckoning; it's Oblivion that gets the Origenics infiltration plan together, and all we really provided was the impetus to put it into action. However, I can reason that everything afterwards still happens: once Zoraal Ja's out, Sphene takes the key and retreats to Living Memory. And we follow, right?

...well, no, we don't; the gate to the golden city is off in the Skydeep Cenote, which we can't access because it'll take more than thirty years for us to get out. ...and we just truncated Sphene's timeline of erasing her memories and going ahead with dimensional fusion by about thirty years. Meaning, nobody stops the Queen Eternal.
If we defeat zarool ja inside the barrier Sphene can’t “retreat” to living memory because under the dome living memory is connected to the everkeep because at the time they are inside the same shard, tural does nothing to break the dome, the dome is forced back into the shard by zarool ja completing vanguard

It’s only when vanguard forces the dome into the source that living memory becomes disconnected existing alone within the shard Alexandria originally came from so Sphene can use the key to force the gate closed