Shadowbringers, Endwalker, and the Branching Timeline Model
Or, how the Warrior of Light might have saved the Ancients from the Final Days (but will never know)
I made a short post awhile back posing a philosophical interpretation of Endwalker's time travel plot, on which @starcunning replied with an interesting question:
How do we square this with the Eighth Umbral Calamity timeline where WOL dies before ever going to Elpis? The loop is never closed in that future, but the worldstate is still sundered.
And as this ties into something I've thought about a lot, I started to write a response but realized it should probably be its own post, so here we are!
Let's talk about the branching timeline model and what it means for Shadowbringers and Endwalker.
On my first playthrough of Endwalker, it did kind of immediately bug me that the time travel mechanic appeared (at least at first glance) to work differently than what we saw in Shadowbringers. I've thought about it a lot since then, and in particular Elidibus's words to the WoL before he sends them back, and I think that it's not necessarily inconsistent after all. Is what I'm about to lay out the intended reading? I have no idea. Like the previous post, it's just a reading that I think is both viable and interesting to play with.
So first of all, that the time traveling Crystal Tower scheme in Shadowbringers worked at all seems to pretty definitively indicate that temporal paradoxes do not occur in this universe; instead, what we seem to have is a branching timeline. At the point when G'raha Tia is sent back in time across the rift, the timeline diverges. The branch we travel is the one where G'raha is successful, and the Eighth Umbral Calamity never occurs. But since the Eighth Umbral Calamity never occurs in this branch, G'raha is never sent back in time--in fact, he can't be, because we wake up the young G'raha sleeping in the Crystal Tower generations before he would be sent back. In our timeline this loop is already not closed, and never can be.
Urianger even seems concerned about this in his conversation with the Exarch in the Echo flashback, saying, "Yet howsoever history be rewritten, thy present self was shaped by events which followed the Calamity. Should said catastrophe be averted, the very skein of thine existence will unravel. Surely thou hast foreseen this..." And G'raha assures him he's aware of the consequences... but still seems to believe the plan will work, so it's hard to say exactly what he means here, as nothing he says about "an offering and not an edict" or the Warrior of Light as their "unbroken thread" actually explains why the plan would still work even without closing the loop.
But in any case, that doesn't actually happen! The Exarch continues to exist after the First is saved and the Calamity averted--and he seems just as surprised at this as anyone else.
Y'shtola: And with that triumph, the future from which you came will no longer come to pass... Yet, here you still stand. Crystal Exarch: ...So I do. I wonder if that other age continues onward somehow, cut adrift from time's flow? Or have I simply etched myself a place upon this new block of history? Crystal Exarch: Either way, this is an unexpected development.
So, it's evident here that a contradictory past and future are able to coexist in this universe. How, we don't know for sure. G'raha himself is the first to propose something like a branching timeline model and I think that's the simplest way to conceptualize it so I'm going to go with that. Based on that model, we assume that the timeline in which the Eighth Umbral Calamity occurs persists, though we do not experience that branch.
In Endwalker, Elidibus sends the Warrior of Light back in time to Elpis to discover the truth of the Final Days. Before they depart, he gives them this warning:
Yet even should you manage to interact with others, you will be unable to effect meaningful change. For the reality you wish to save─the reality to which you must return─exists as a result of the Final Days. You cannot reshape the past to undo the tragedies of the present. Cannot unmake the sorrow and suffering fated to come.
I've spent a long time thinking about the meaning of Elidibus's words here--in particular "You cannot reshape the past to undo the tragedies of the present." Does he mean "You cannot" as in "it is impossible; you will be unable to even if you try"? Because based on what happened in Shadowbringers, that seems to be false. Or does he mean "You must not, because if you alter the past, your own present will not come to pass"?
I was initially leaning toward the latter, and so I was shocked when the Warrior of Light made the choice to tell Venat and the others the whole story. It certainly seemed like it flew in the face of Elidibus's warning--though that is, let's be real, very Azem of us.
It is useful here, I think, to compare the Warrior of Light's journey through time to G'raha Tia's. G'raha traveled back in time with full intent to change the future by changing the past; he wanted to undo the future from which he had come. He also never intended to return, and so if we apply the branching timeline model, G'raha remained in the new branch he created.
The Warrior of Light, on the other hand, does not intend to change the past, at least not at first. They are simply seeking knowledge with which they can return to their time and stop the Final Days from destroying their world.
Why, then, does the WoL decide to tell all to the Ancients? I think that depends on your WoL, and it also depends on how they interpret Elidibus's words--whether as a caution, or a mere statement of fact.
I think one possible interpretation--and it's the one I think I prefer for my character, but certainly not the only one--is that the WoL tells their story with full knowledge that this may change the past such that their future, their timeline, their world never comes to be, because given even the chance to save the countless lives lost in the Final Days of the ancients, they cannot in good conscious refuse to at least try--Elidibus's warning be damned.
But of course, it doesn't work, right? Among the Ancients, only Venat retains her memories of what happened with Meteion, and the Warrior of Light returns to their future, and the Final Days of Amaurot occur, and Venat either cannot or does not prevent it with the knowledge she has.
And yet, if we apply the branching timeline model... this is the only thing that could have happened, from the Warrior of Light's point of view. As Elidibus says, "For the reality you wish to save─the reality to which you must return─exists as a result of the Final Days." Where G'raha Tia remained in the new branch he created and was thus able to see the changes he had wrought, the Warrior of Light returns to their own time, and thus their own branch. Thus, if we interpret Elidibus's words in light of Shadowbringers, what he means is that you cannot change the past in the timeline to which you must return.
The possibility remains, however, that the Warrior of Light's actions caused a new fork in the timeline. It is possible that Venat did act with the knowledge she possessed, and was able to effect some change. Perhaps she was able to stop the Final Days before Zodiark was summoned. It is very possible that the Warrior of Light created a new timeline where the world was never sundered.
Because they return to their own branch of the future, however, they could never know that, and thus we can never know that.
So now, I return to starcunning's question. If we apply the branching timeline model, then the idea I proposed in my previous post can still be true--but only in one branch. By traveling to Elpis, meeting Venat, and leaving her with foreknowledge of the future, the WoL's actions create (at least) two possible Venats: one who changes that future, and one who does not (whether through inaction or trying and failing).
The branch where the Sundering occurs will later split into two more branches: one where the WoL dies before traveling back to Elpis, and one where they live to do so. Since both of those branches exist simultaneously, at least one WoL will always travel back to Elpis, where there is only one timeline because it hasn't yet forked. So Elpis will always receive a visit from the WoL who lived, even though there is also a branch where the WoL died.
I will also say, however, that my previous post was more of a philosophical musing on the game's themes around primals and gods than a hard interpretation I am arguing for over all possible others. I myself don't necessarily think that Venat wouldn't have created Hydaelyn without a visit from the WoL. I don't think it's possible for us to know that for sure, because we don't see a world in which that didn't occur and we also spend limited time with Venat, leaving much of her character open to interpretation and speculation. It is possible to imagine a third branch of the Elpis timeline in which the WoL never visited. Perhaps the Final Days play out the same way they do in canon, or perhaps something else happens entirely. If you really want to go there, perhaps if the WoL doesn't visit, they never catch Meteion, and she never delivers her message to Hermes at all, and perhaps that alters the timeline in some other way we haven't even imagined. Who knows! Sounds like a fun thing to write a fic about.
As for the branching timeline model, there's a lot to explore about time travel in this universe, and various ways to interpret what we see, and I haven't even brought up Alexander! I think the branching model works best for reconciling the various examples of time travel we see in the game, and I think that model opens up a lot of interesting possibilities to explore. This is just one of them!
