Thank you!

The conception of Time and time travel in this sort of evolved out of when I was writing Homestuck fanfic, and felt that there were a lot of issues with the way time travel was presented in that canon - basically, the canon there is that there are multiple timelines, but only one is the "real" one, and the others are all "doomed" in some way, and there is a lot of inconsistency about what precisely that means. I think it was because the author didn't put a ton of thought into it when he first introduced the time travel, and wound up having to write around the questions of "is everything predestined?" versus "if there are other timelines/alternate universes, then what's actually special/important about this one?" The idea is, hopefully with this story, if this is established like this at the outset, these issues won't be a problem.

It would probably be easy to write about a religion that believes in absolute predestination (we have some real ones to use for reference, even!), but it was ultimately not what I wanted to go with for this story.