The Time Variance Authority had labeled every videotape with the words Earth-616. Were they wrong?
They were, but not entirely. They only knew that relatively famous branch and mistook it for the source of everything.
The three Prophet gods themselves only had a superficial understanding of the Time Concept, and they also had a logical error like the Y2K Bug. They had originally been born during the Seventh Firmament, at an apocalyptic node near the End of Time. Only by traveling upstream along the Timeline had they impersonated the Forerunners from the era of the Big Bang.
But that had only been the explosion that gave birth to the Seventh Firmament. They knew nothing at all about the Multiverse's previous cycles of rebirth.
When the Multiverse underwent a Universe Reboot, everything from the past was overwritten. Other than high-dimensional powers like the Celestials, no clues could be found in ordinary reality, and the Timeline was impossible to trace back.
To use an inappropriate analogy, the three gods followed the river of time to its source and found a spring, where watery time flowed forth.
They slapped their thighs. Ah, water came out of the ground. This was the beginning of all time.
That was what they believed, and what they made the people under their deception believe as well.
But anyone with a little geographical knowledge knew this: was the place where water emerged from the ground really the beginning of a river?
No. It was merely the "visible" beginning. Eyes could deceive; far more water was hidden elsewhere in invisible forms.
It might be glaciers atop snowy mountains, the underground Unlight Sea, clouds in the sky, or water vapor in the air around them.
Water formed rivers, that was true. But believing that only flowing water counted as water