Elias: The Shape History Could No Longer Hold

“Traveler, you ask why the past bends so easily beneath my hand.

Some believe it was my interference that ignited the conflict between the Authority of the future and Edson a millennium ago. They claim that had I not scattered clues across time, had I not guided certain eyes toward the Dreamer, the Authority would never have come. It is an appealing conclusion. Blame, after all, is far easier to carry when it rests on a single choice.

But understand this: I did not change destiny. I altered only its purpose.

The Authority was always meant to arrive. In their era, Edson was already a corpse—catalogued, exhausted, and stripped of consequence. Its past, to them, was an unguarded vault, ripe for exploitation and error. Even without my guidance, they would have come to plunder a timeline they believed had already ended. They would have found a world once alive—forests unbroken, rivers flowing like silver beneath unblemished skies—and they would have witnessed its final cataclysm all the same.

My actions did not cause that fall. They merely placed the tools where they could be found, ensuring that a necessary path could be carved through what was inevitable. I did not hasten destruction; I preserved an answer.

The past does not bend because I command it. It bends because it was already fractured, already straining beneath futures that refused to remain silent. I listen to those fractures. I choose where to apply pressure. And when the shape of history shifts, it is not because I forced it to move—but because it could no longer remain as it was.

And in yielding, the past did more than change. It opened. A passage formed where none had existed before—a narrow gateway through time and possibility. Through that opening, the Dreamer’s path was no longer constrained by what had been, but allowed to flow forward, branching, deepening, and taking root. From that moment on, the Dreamer’s saga could flourish—not as an accident of fate, but as a consequence of a door finally, and irrevocably, unlocked."