Rules of the Multiverse

While there are certainly a lot of timelines in the multiverse, one would expect there to be far more than 100,000 within the general area of the Prime Timeline. This has led to the widely accepted Shift Theory, which dictates that whenever one travels between timelines, they skip over a specific number of timelines for every accessible timeline that they pass. The number of timelines skipped is the same every time, and is hypothesized to be infinite, effectively meaning that there are an infinite number of Wings of Fire multiverses overlayed upon one another, all incapable of interacting with one another.

The only way that one could theoretically get to another shift is through time travel, as all recorded instances of someone travelling back in time have resulted in them never returning. It is theorized that traveling back in time creates a new timeline in a different shift, effectively removing you from your current shift and preventing you from ever returning. Some specific timelines may have their own unique rules about time travel, but on the whole this possibility has resulted in almost nobody wanting to attempt to go back in time.

The primary reason for me as an author adding this theory to the lore of the multiverse was so that my multiverse fanfiction would not contradict with others'. I later realized that others' fics still use very different structures for their multiverses, meaning they still likely wouldn't be able to exist in the same canon as mine, but shift theory still allows people to write their own stories using my multiverse framework while also having them be able to exist alongside it without interfering.

The multiverse is filled with a variety of odd consistencies, some of the most common of which being the seven Pyrrhian dragon tribes and the general topography of the continent of Pyrrhia itself. These consistencies become on average less pronounced as one travels further from the Prime Timeline, and they have become an important aspect of exploring new timelines near the multiverse's center. Researchers spent years combing through data about different timelines and the similarities between them to determine which aspects are the most consistent, but their work was potentially wasted when a series of books titled "Wings of Fire" was discovered in one of the notorious chaos timelines. While many were not immediately inclined to believe in the validity of the series towards predicting consistencies due to its origins, it still became required reading for just about anyone hoping to explore the multiverse. There are also some who worship the books as a form of holy gospel, believing them to be the source of the multiverse as a whole, though these beliefs have yet to be confirmed.

As this multiverse was originally designed to represent the wide range of Wings of Fire fanfiction in existence, the idea of consistencies was meant to explain why some things are the same across many timelines, while others aren't. Details from later books in the canon series tend to be far less consistent than ones from earlier in it.

Magic is incredibly inconsistent across the multiverse. While there are timelines where one’s futuristic technology might not work properly, if at all, magic in far more cases does not work as intended when taken to another timeline. Typically, animus magic and to a lesser extent other magical powers like mind-reading and foresight will cease to function upon entering a new timeline, with enchanted objects either not functioning as intended or becoming mundane. Sometimes magic is more consistent between nearby timelines, and those timelines with looser rules can often support magic from many different timelines, but on the whole magic is generally very unreliable across the multiverse and has thus fallen out of favor. On occasion, magic can even backfire in dangerous ways when brought to an incompatible timeline, and individuals who have been affected by some sort of magical phenomenon are advised to go through a magic scrubber before traveling between any more timelines.

The primary reason for making magic so inconsistent was to nerf animus magic, which is so incredibly powerful that it could potentially trivialize many story lines. This way the multiverse as a whole runs on more sci-fi oriented technology, while individual timelines can have much more diverse magical settings and systems withing them, and the magic won’t unbalance the power dynamics and events of the overarching story of the multiverse. The inconsistency of magic also fits well with the fact that many different fanfics have their own explanations for where animus magic comes from, and magic of one source would probably not work very well in a world whose magic comes from another source entirely.

Chaos timelines are - simply put - meme timelines, joke timelines, word for poop that I will not say for fear of children reading this post timelines, etc. In these timelines logic is merely a suggestion, if it exists at all, and just about anything can happen. They are incredibly dangerous most of the time, and nobody really wants to visit them. They are also where the Wings of Fire series of books was discovered, throwing into question many preconceived notions about the multiverse and generally confusing the heck out of everyone. Sometimes individuals from chaos timelines will venture out into the multiverse, whether in search of a better, more normal life, or just for the fun of it; although these individuals are often stigmatized by others for how out of the ordinary they tend to behave.

Chaos timelines exist, and there isn’t anything anybody can do about it.