Prologue
"But Hold Me Fast and Fear Me Not and I'll do to You No Harm." - The Ballad of Tam Lin
Time travel is complicated. And messier than even a room full of Geniuses could ever hope to understand. It isn't linear. Or Cyclical. Or even a 'big ball of wibbily-wobbily, time-y, whimey stuff' as someone so eloquently once put it. It is a tapestry of thread woven in a pattern only the Universe understands. The warp threads run through the length of all time, both forward and back. The weft is all creation, moved to and fro, over and under, across and up, across and up, along the warp, locked into place by the beater of the present.
A room full of Geniuses are not a weaver at a loom. They may think they know which thread to pull in order to change the tapestry to their design. But none of them have touched a shuttle a day in their lives, let alone stamped a trettle. It's guess work at best when you can't comprehend the pattern. And yes, they guessed fairly well. But when you pull a thread from a tapestry, even if you replace from whence it came, the tension of the tapestry is forever changed. And this change has a way of playing out in a manner only a skilled weaver may have the ability to spot.
After all, it's so easy to pass the shuttle over, instead of under, a single thread.