In the campaign its eluded to the endless having control over time or at least greater than that of the Forerunners. It’s also said that their species were previously uncatalogued.
THEORY:
The endless were a very powerful but isolationist species. Their power extended into time. Since they didn’t want any outside interference they used Time Manipulation to completely hide their solar system. Likely related to the cylixes. It also gave them immunity to Halo. (this also falls into teleportation, a small device could be used to change how time works for a being, giving them them the ability to float or teleport, like the harbinger).
Once the Endless discovered what had happened after Halo’s activation, they investigated and found the rings, Zeta specifically. Then the Forerunners, what was left, saw the capabilities lf the Endless and were terrified or what would happen if the endless were infected by the flood, an immunity to Halo would remove any chance of defeating the flood. So the Forerunners made a mock trial, sealed the endless away and put Despondent Pyre and the other AI to stop anyone freeing them. With no explanation on why they did this.
Either that or its time travel and 343 are planning to retcon 4 and 5 as some ““leaks”” suggested and make it so that it never happened. But thats boring and dull and God I hope not.
I dont think its literall time controll, we couldnt really fight them and thay would have never been imprisoned if they had that huge abilitys. They either experience time diffrent or do shenanigans on a simple term.
The explanation was: To study (and learn their secrets) them and since they couldnt be killed through the array, they must be contain or else they could be able to controll time (like the voices said: Time is not a construct that we can controll. And we cant allow it to be theirs) suggesting they have theoreticall the means but not a direct controll at that point.
A lot of people think that time travel to the past is a thing in Halo, but nothing prove it. Manipulating the relativity of time isn’t a travel to the past. For example, if 1 hour somewhere = 1 year in the universe, we can talk about a travel to the future, but not to the past.
Another example, in the forerunner trilogy, the Urdidact accelerate the time around the Primordial to kill him.
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.
Time travel most likely exists in the Halo universe due to Halo 2 and possibly Spartan Strike. Prometheans were not originally involved in the events of Halo 2 and yet conflicted reports on Spartan Strike say they were. It seems unlikely that the Prometheans would have gone un-noticed in Halo 2 due to their general behaviour. And the Prometheans didn’t seem active until around Halo 4 due to the Didact.
Also the fact is ‘Time crystals’ were found on Reach and were reported to push John 117 and Halsey back in time is proof enough because while on Reach and it seems both the Covenant and the Banished have had fragments of the time crystals.
Or I think Spartan Strike isn’t a serious game, it’s more likely the developers include Prometheans because it’s “cool” rather than 343 creating a clue for a futur time travel intrigue
Yeh that wasn’t clear to me and it’s been a while since I played it. Either way time travel is more than likely due to the time crystals but doubt it’s restricted to forward only.
Look up Menachite Forerunner crystal: (Halopedia)
“Perhaps most extraordinarily, however, Dr. Halsey discovered that the crystal had bent both space and time, causing a three-week average time difference. John-117 and the other survivors from Installation 04 had effectively been transported backward in time during their journey to Reach because their relative [space-time event path] intersected the crystal at an earlier point in time as measured by the UNSC’s [Military Calendar)”
Slow teleports occur all the time in sci-fi.
Half Life 2 had a teleport which took a week or two for you to get from A to B.
Because the Silent Auditorium was collapsing again, the teleport process was likely slowed as John and Cortina were put into a data-storage cluster until the data could be reassembled and processed once again.
It is more of a case of time manipulation rather than time travel.