6/10 late morning
The Caverns of Time were looking better already; the skeleton crew was almost entirely equipped with amulets and we were able to start operations for my retinue in a limited capacity. I had Soridormi give me, Irma, and anyone else who wanted to download the memory a tutorial on how exactly the bronze dragonflight worked. Time travel is messy as hell, I wanted to know what I was getting into.
"We are the guardians of the true timeline, the one which leads to ultimate victory. It is standard policy to always claim that the current timeline that one is working within is the true timeline, but we actually have several valid timelines at any given moment, and dozens more being cultivated for harvest. This, of course, is the only true timeline as you are exclusive to this one, but if you were a local contractor we would tell you the same thing to reduce the chances of existential dread."
"Hold up. Harvest?" That was alarming.
"Yes," she placidly explained. "Most timelines will deteriorate, especially if unchecked temporal magic is allowed to run rampant. When one collapses, it disintegrates into motes of possibility known as the Sands of Time which can be used for various purposes, most notably repairing damaged timelines. Nozdormu is also able to create this substance in small quantities, which was how the bronze dragonflight was able to function before we developed harvesting protocols."
"What we do not share freely with our allies is that the majority of timelines are catastrophic failures. They tend to collapse without active effort to preserve them, though they usually split several times before then. We keep a stable of around a half dozen nearly identical timelines that we carefully cultivate to provide fallback positions. This is the most temporally advanced one currently, but we have a few ready to go, mostly in the last fifty or so years with various small variations. For example, we recently abandoned a timeline in which Varian was assassinated instead of split and Onyxia was killed by a team of daring adventurers. Our calculations indicate that Varian's involvement would be vital to the ongoing health of the timeline, so we collapsed that timeline and shifted our focus to this one."
"Ok, so retcons are canon, got it, but time travel obviously exists. You police it. I have people in my retinue capable of manipulating time right now."
"Of course," she assured me, "and every time it is used, this timeline is frayed ever so slightly and must be repaired through application of the sands of time. Changes beyond a certain magnitude can cause a timeline to collapse, but only if they are particularly extreme. Bronze dragons can get away with a bit more thanks to the blessing of Aman'Thul, but even we prefer to stick to minor things like a vaguely worded warning or using patsies unfamiliar with fine details of the original timeline. It helps if the person doing the work does not understand the magnitude of what they are doing, if it can't be handled by a bronze dragon for whatever reason."
"So you can make big changes, but it's expensive?"
"Immensely. The larger the ripples created by a change, and the further back from that timeline's "present", the more sand we must expend to keep the timeline stable. That fiasco with the War of the Ancients and your new friend Broxigar was incredibly difficult to turn into a stable loop, for example, but our normal agents couldn't get involved, as the Bronze Flight itself was intimately involved in proceeding events. That's one of many reasons we tend to stay out of most non-temporal issues, the other being that we are consistent across all timelines. If we die, that is frequently our true and unavoidable death."
"So let me get this straight. If you seem likely to lose, you just abandon ship, harvest the world for parts, and swap to a different timeline? Abandon everyone in that world to their fate?"
"Not casually. But in a word, yes. Our enemies, most notably the old gods, are loosely aware of all timelines. However, if we achieve complete victory over them even once, we can proceed to siphon off energy from all other timelines, coloring all of reality through the lens of our victory. Even before you captured me I understood that this world, in which you may use your unique abilities to destroy or subdue the Old Gods, would be worth preserving. If all else had failed, we would have willingly submitted to you in order to achieve final victory as a last resort."
I took a while to process this. It was moderately heavy stuff, but what it mostly meant for me was that I had an escape hatch. If Nefarian or C'Thun managed to get an upper hand on me, I could literally just juke into another timeline. I even briefly considered deliberately collapsing my current timeline with Nefarian still in it before remembering that he might survive my world annihilating genocide. The Infinite Dragonflight, old god corrupted bronze dragons, might evacuate him if I tried something like that. Of course, it was only after dismissing the idea did I process and give proper weight to the fact that I'd just seriously considered destroying trillions of people, at least, across a whole universe because I could switch to a different timeline where people just like them existed.
New depths of depravity in my soul noted and hopefully stopped short, I admitted to myself that I'd definitely keep it in mind as a last resort. I'd consider it as a fail state, though; it was an emergency exit if I absolutely fucked up. In the meantime, I wanted to know if there were any uses for the Bronze flight that were a little less extreme. "So, you said changing the past could damage the timeline. What about bringing people from other worlds here, or traveling to the future?"
"There is no future. You can pull someone from a potential future, especially in places like the Bronze Dragonshrine or the Caverns of time, but all timelines are traveling forward at their own rates. The closer you are to the current endpoint of a timeline, the safer it is to introduce new elements from elsewhere or remove someone. For example, if we were to send Alexstrasza to one of the timelines we have set aside at that timeline's front edge, it would appear from her point of view that she had traveled backwards in time to before the third war."
"Both this timeline and that one could continue with minimal damage, temporally speaking; we would have no Alexstrasza, and they would have two, but that would be the state of things in the current day of both timelines. She could also come back without difficulty after a few months, but if we attempted to remove her at the moment she arrived a full month after she left, it would damage the timeline by altering a full month worth of events she would have impacted."
"So you could, as a random nonspecific example, send a group of mortals to ensure the survival of Thrall in the "current day" of one of your backup timelines, or borrow a copy of the Dragon Soul from another world?"
"Yes, precisely. Assuming that timeline would normally have Thrall die, or a third party was attempting to assassinate him, we could indeed arrange to have him saved by mysterious strangers so as to ensure a world in which the Third War resulted in a generally benevolent variant of the Horde setting up in Kalimdor. We arrange for such interventions routinely to bring timelines in line with our projected victory state." That certainly put a different spin on the Caverns of Time dungeons, but I couldn't blame them for wanting to guard fallback positions.
"Incidentally," Soridormi noted, "is that what the timeline Nozdormu set aside a few years before the War of the Ancients is for? You seem to know things even we are unaware of; will there really be a need for that horrid thing in a few years?" The Dragon Soul was an exceedingly powerful artifact which, for a long time, contained a fragment of the souls of Alexstrasza, Nozdormu, Malygos, and Ysera. It's primary use had been allowing Deathwing to juice himself up, commit blue dragon genocide, and make a failed attempt at conquering the entire planet.
"Oh yeah. The whole strategy to beat Deathwing revolves around it in the timeline I'm aware of. I can probably manage it in a different way, though. Wait, did you just say Nozdormu set a timeline aside for that? Like, in advance?"
"Indeed. He does not always explain everything to us, but if we need the Dragon soul, that would likely mean that there will be a need to defeat Deathwing in this timeline in about three years, based on my calculations. Correct?"
"Yeah. He causes some trouble." I answered, distracted. The War of the Ancients was one of the most historically significant events in all of Warcraft history. That was the first time that Sargeras invaded Azeroth, and was the end of the great arcane empire of the Night Elves. Also the end of the period of time when Azeroth only had one mega-continent. Slamming the door in a titan's face turns out to result in a planet cracking explosion; who knew?
"So I could send someone to Zin-Azshari with minimal cost and have a few years to mess around before the big demon invasion?" Zin-Azshari kinda made Dalaran look like a community college in terms of relative magical power, and Queen Azshara was on the extremely short list of people that still might be able to teach Doan a thing or two about arcane magic. She was also an immensely beautiful woman whose vanity could rival even Lividia's.
Soridormi considered her answer. "Yes, but the timeline would likely end up as a battlefield if you tried to capture someone like Azshara without securing it first. Both we and the Infinite flight tend to monitor the comings and goings from valuable timelines like that one. I'm not certain what reprisal we might face for trying to…" she forced out the word with clear distaste, "harvest… a timeline like that, but we would be clearly breaking quarantine protocols. We could hide using your defenses, but any extremely overt deviations around VIPs like Azshara would still be flagged, whether or not they were connected to you."
"But just existing wouldn't? Could I send someone on holiday in some city destined to explode in a few years without raising red flags?"
"If they faked a local identity and didn't carry any identifiable artifacts from the future, likely yes."
I set that aside for now. I could definitely use something like that to my advantage; having Talaada found a chapter of the brotherhood of love and beauty in night elf Atlantis seemed like a good idea, especially now that I had Cairne as a backup recruitment proxy. There was one more avenue I needed to at least ask about, though I suspected it would be complicated. There had to be a reason they didn't do it more often.
"Ok, but what about altering our current timeline? I get that it would be expensive, but if I could go back in time and capture Sintharia before she laid his egg, that would be a uniquely satisfying way to beat Nefarian." What can I say, an immature part of my soul cried out to gain absolute victory over Nefarian by fucking his mom. "What if I erased her memory of me so she'd act mostly the same way, would that reduce the stress on the timeline?"
"It would, and we do have enough sand in the Hourglass here to facilitate one or two interventions of that magnitude, but I've already considered that, and there is a complication. The enemy is blocking us."
"Blocking us? How?"
"A time walker has only a limited area of operation using the tools we have available here; they can't stray too far from their point of entry, nor can they stay long. To get to anywhere in the general vicinity of Nefarian or either of his parents, we need to go through another timeline. A false one, a projection made by the old gods, whose inhabitants thankfully cannot leave the fever dream that is their existence. There seem to be four keystone individuals who would need to be removed to displace the false timeline." I vaguely remembered something about Horrific Visions of the future being a mechanic in one of the later expansions; this was probably that.
"So we bust through and then we can go back in time, right? What's the problem?"
"It is a projection of what Azeroth shall be if Nefarian defeats you, my lord, and is aware of its nature as a safeguard."
I took a moment to consider the implications of the winner-takes-all rule. If Nefarian beat me, he would get every single person in my retinue transferred to his, loyalty included. "Well. Fuck."