So, a lot of people are upset with how the season is going. Some people think that the story is actually awful to. I've heard that Osiris is not in character here - why does the sundial even exist? Why does it even work the way it does? After all "if the Vex could time travel, we would already have lost". Yet here we are in the season of Dawn, doing what's essentially time travel. That's what it is after right? We're going back in time to change history and save Saint-14. Breaks the rules yes? Well, imo, yes and no. Yes, the Vex cannot time travel as we think and know it. After all if they could they would simply ensure certain things never happen - Traveler never finds us (which they actually cannot influence, but more on this if you want in another post), Humanity never survives the collapse, they never lose in the Vault, etc. So how can we do it if the super-intelligent got milk bots cant? Well, the Sundial isn't just Vex tech. It's Guardian tech, which means it runs on Light. Light is paracausal, which means it doesn't play by the rules. Yes we're breaking the rules of time travel in the sense that we are changing the past, but we've done this before in the Vault of Glass. According to all Vex timelines we die in the Vault. Erased from history is essentially what I believe happens to any team that goes in. Pahanin most likely was not the first to enter the vault with his team, but we never hear of them because the Vex just make it so those teams never existed. Yet we not only escaped the vault, we conquered it, and changed time. We did it again with the Vex future in the questline for No Time to Explain, wherein the Taken future of the Vex will never happen. So essentially, the Sundial accesses the timelines the Vex simulate, but focuses our Light to the point where we can do what the Vex do in a more immediate sense - we can simulate our own possibility and change our own timeline because our Light lets us circumvent the rule of reality. We're only able to do this however, because the Psion Flayers have done messed with the timey wimey stuff and made the Sundial do all sorts of crazy stuff that it wasn't intended for but could always do - access the multiple simulations of the Vex and manipulate them, then brute force them to be reality. Osiris planned on using his Light to brute force reality to accept a timeline where Saint never died to that one specific mind, but he failed because he was missing something. The Perfect Paradox. It's like knowing the number for a variable. Osiris needed to know "x" to find Saint, but he could never find that "x" because he never had it. But we do, because we made the Perfect Paradox. The Shotgun exists because we forged it from the infinite forge - yet we don't actually do that to get the shotgun. Instead, we get it off his corpse. So how did we forge it then? Well we just did with the quest - and then gave him that shotgun for us to claim centuries later. The reason we're able to find Saint is because we're connected to him through time - That shotgun could not exist without us, but we don't even know it exists and that we forged it until we get it from Saint. So to make the current timeline we live in in the Destiny Universe true we have to have made the weapon and given it to Saint, which we just did. We also need to have found the Shotgun in order to know that it exists, which we already did. So our current timeline is set. What Bungie intends to have us do is change the current timeline by changing a moment within the Vex Network that is set in stone - but that we can access because of our connection to Saint. In so doing, we're using our Light to brute force our way into the Network, forcibly change the Simulation and thus the script of the current timeline, and brute force that outcome into our own reality, making it so. Time Travel, except its only very specific and only possible because of the Light and a Paradox.