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How do you see this power working, taking into account its background description?

Twisting the flow of causality and remoulding temporal streams, the C'tan Shard erases its foe's existence from space and time.

Is the target erased to have never existed and thus others would not even remember? In which case what happens to the deeds it did if the target was a character and presumably did notable deeds? Would they never have happened (which may then cause further butterfly effects) or would the deeds have been performed by someone else? Would the target's existence be burned away retroactively like balefire from the Wheel of Time series up to a certain point, but the character did exist so others would remember?

The option that doesn't cause weird causality issues is the simplest but perhaps least thematically impressive and ignores the first half of that background sentence: the target ceases to exist at the time it was hit but it did exist and its past deeds remain. That renders the power little more than a generic energy blast though.

Time travel is stupid.

Maybe you can try to find an explanation with overlapping alternate realities or something?

Yeah, 100% of the time, killing someone removes them from the timestream. Although technically only if you completely obliterate them from reality, because otherwise they still exist in the future, just as a dead body.....

You got this all wrong. It is not the C'tans fault that the oponent showed up not filling out his 2000 points.

Watch Star Trek: Voyager, "Year of Hell" to see what happens when you erase things out of the timeline. Pretty funny thought when you pull that off against Guilliman or Bjorn, or even Eldrad and rewrite thousands of years of 40K history

2nd and 11th Primarchs?

...what 2nd and 11th Primarchs?! What on earth are you muttering about.

 Super Ready wrote:
2nd and 11th Primarchs?

...what 2nd and 11th Primarchs?! What on earth are you muttering about.

Funny but the existence of a 3rd and 12th would themselves have implied the existence of a 2nd and 11th.

In interpreting the power, I guess there is no option but to also take into consideration game effects. So if for example a SM Captain has a climactic duel with a Necron Phaeron and wins, but then is hit by Time's Arrow, the Phaeron remains defeated. So the power cannot be a straight erasure of the past if the results remain.

Maybe the re-written timeline has the Phaeron being defeated another way or a more complicated re-writing has the Phaeron never showing up to the battle, though then more re-writing would need to be done to account for anything the Phaeron did in the battle in the original timeline.

The description of the power from the 5th edition Codex reads far more like the target is shunted outside of the normal timestream ('Mutating the flow of causation and remoulding the temporal stream, the C'tan shard casts its foe back into the darkness from before time was time'; so they exist until they're hit, and then they don't, but they were still there in the past - making it effectively just a fancy magic missile.

Assuming the power completely removes the target and its actions from the future, present and past is equally fitting and horrifying.

It shows how C'tan are truly gods of the material plane and a power you should not use lightly, even against your enemy.

You remove your enemy from existence... but who could guarantee that the replacement wouldn't be an even bigger threat? Maybe a new Solar Macharia took their place and the planet you are fighting on has already been exterminated?

Simple answer? C’Tan are an entirely fundamental part of our reality. Hence they cannot be utterly destroyed.

Time Travel may seem daft to us, but their level of understanding is waaaaaaaaay beyond ours.

Also also?