Okay wow!
Page 486 of the Halo Encyclopedia
“Careful observation indicates that they (Xalanyn) somehow have the ability to manipulate various forces and energy types in unique ways, including - perhaps most troublingly- a peculiar attunement to elements of Living Time itself, though to what extent is unknown.”
I mean, surely that’s case closed right? What does living time mean in Halo?
Command & Conquer：Red Alert
The first thing I thought of was this game.
Time travel always creates new troubles.
“We trade one villain for another.”
It means 343’s saving grace. A way to create different time lines to distance themselves from the original.
You don’t think this is going to turn into saving Skynet? 
Lmao maybe saving Cortana! 
Case closed ? We are far for time travel ! All we have is speculation.
Manipulate Living Time itself could meen a lot of things : predict the future, jump to the futur, froze thing in the time, accelerate things in the time (like when the Urdidact accelerate the time around the Primordial to kill him) or create a place where time move slower or faster (relativity)
Travel to the past and change the reality is something completely different and infinitely more complicated, nothing in Halo show us it’s possible.
Maybe the Endless survive to the Halo by jumping in the future and avoid the destructive wave, but I don’t think they have the capacity to travel to the past.
It should be noted that Living Time isn’t necessarily time itself. Its more like treating the universe and everything in it as a living thing. Its a forerunner concept that extends from the Precursor’s Neuro-Physics, so its possibly relating to that, and the precursors themselves aren’t really shown to have ‘time powers’.
Agreed. This would be my personal hope for the interpretation.
The introduction of Dr Who / Terminator levels of time travel comes with an impressive amount of ‘baggage’, especially for a 20 year old IP that wasn’t created with the intention of including it.
I know there’s the First Strike anomaly, and the various offhand references to the old slipspace shenanigan, but I think there’s a reason the series hasn’t brought it up since then.
We know the Forerunners had the tech to accelerate spatial pockets into the future (with the Primordial) and also slow down pockets in time (Onyx).
Perhaps them being surprised by the Endless having such capabilities is because the Forerunners believed themselves to be the apex of galactic life and didn’t think anyone else had that sort of tech.
Reaching a bit here, but what if the Endless were given that name, because they were able to do this biologically through natural evolution?
Haha sure, let drag out her corpse some more! The character already shredded cheese. Why not poke some more holes after her goodbye in infinite.
I don’t think it’s a reach. It’s the conclusion I drew. That the endless adapted some sort of biological means of temporally slipping around danger.
I also don’t think it has to be super complicated or come with a whole lot of baggage.
Imagine, if you will, a moment in time. A ‘moment’ to us is something like nanoseconds long (I guess if you measure by neural pathway travel time or something), and in that moment we are constantly pruning the decision trees of our lives. What if, for the endless, a moment is like an hour? Or a day? Or a year?
The implication is this: what if the Endless have a larger window of decision from which to take in information and decide their path forward? This would effectively look as if their future self was informing past decisions, but only within that window of 1 hour (or whatever). When multiplied across a population one could imagine they’d be able to use this effect to discover the source of their destruction and seek out shelter before it happens.
Then again, maybe they’re just… immune. The rings don’t straight up kill people right? They fry neural networks. What if the Endless don’t neural like we do? Then they are simply outside of the flood problem and solution, thus a threat to Forerunner supremacy.
Idk, but it’s fun to speculate.
I don’t think they would bring up Living Time unless it was full on time travel. Stuff like a few seconds for some and days passing elsewhere isn’t notable enough. It feels like they’re setting up a big reveal of some kind and that would fall flat if it wasn’t significant.
For example. There’s a picture of Offensive Bias in the book. He’s only got one eye. So that was not him in that trailer but must be Mendicant Bias. What if they end up travelling back in time to when he controlled the ring?
An interesting take.
Expanding on it, if they were able communicate instantaneously like a kind of hive mind, that would give them an advantage across a galaxy that’s 100,000 light years across. Obviously the Halo fires faster than the speed of light, but even if a colony on the far side had just a few days heads up that the Halo had been fired, that would be an advantage.
Personally I feel like they just have some kind of natural immunity to the way the Halo destroys life, and that the talk of ‘control of time’ is simply metaphorical. There are plenty of examples of the Forerunners talking this way about time, so it’s most likely just the case in Infinite.
The baggage I was mostly referring to is the messiness that it introduces to the story, such as paradoxes, plot contrivances, retconning, and the often lazy writing to get around them.
There are lots of interpretations in fiction about the ‘laws’ of time travel, of which I could talk about for hours, but generally unless an IP specifically sets out to deal with TT, the introduction of it generally causes more problems than it solves.
Does the Domain exist in Slipspace and so outside of time?
Unless the encyclopedia redefines what Living Time is, Living Time has no direct connection to Time Travel.
If anything its tied to Star Roads and stuff.
When it comes with all the time metaphors and imagery?
That’s a can of worms best tossed into high charity containment and forgotten. It opens endless plot holes and un does story beats to make them feel pointless.
IMO, being attuned to Living Time is basically what the Forerunner were capable of. Not capable of time travel, but being “in touch” with how time will flow and will eventually be and what will be intertwined with what. I think the choice of the word “attuned” is important there - it does not mean they can directly time travel, but rather they’re in touch with Living Time in a way that other species are not. To our knowledge, other species are not currently aware of Living Time in concept or observationally, and have not been since the Forerunners. So, if the Xalanyn are, it would basically put them on the Forerunner level of being able to understand how time would flow. This is basically everything the Librarian had used to set up her eventualities.
Thing is I know time travel moments have happend in the books but i don’t like the idea of the whole time travel or multiverse theory in halo.
It just doesn’t feel like it belongs there.
It depends.
For example one thing that’s brought up is when the Weapon discusses the Reclamation spires that
“Imagine what would happen if we left it for a few million years.”
They could use limited time travel or a time lock to do things like that and instantly repair the Array.
Alternatively, this whole drama with the Weapon maybe going like Cortana. You’d only need to age the character seven years to be in rampancy territory. A few really bad portals (in Halo 4 those teleport portals are strongly implied to quicken her rampancy) or a species with control over time could badly mess with that.
But I feel like there’s just far too much of it in the game. We’re on Zeta Halo. It stands to reason we may see a lot
more of this rings history than we thought.
For example, we know what Offensive Bias looks like. He has one eye. So what exactly is Chief talking to in that trailer? When could he be talking to Mendicant?
Star Trek does Time Travel quite a bit. Usually there’s a dramatic change and then the heroes have to reverse it. Picard is doing something similar atm as well. So there is a model for how that story could work. Alternatively it’s like Endgame where they are going back and fetching things they need from various interesting points in time.