blue-mood-blue:

There’s only one Light of Creation, even if it’s collected multiple times. It’s called “the” Light of Creation, and the IPRE doesn’t end up with a cargo hold filled with incredibly powerful orbs of light. It’s always the same single piece of creation that slipped out of the creator’s hands fell out of place.

So what removes the Light from the IPRE or the Hunger when they get to a new world? Why is it always falling at the beginning of the year?

The story is linear. The IPRE’s perspective is linear. From the outside, it seems like one year in each world, happening one after the other and resetting the physical forms of the crew each time. But since each of these years happens in a separate dimension, consider: they’re happening simultaneously, in the same year.

The “reset” at the beginning of each year is not really a reset – the IPRE is returning to the beginning of the same year, at a different physical location. The Light always falls at the beginning of the year because it’s only just been misplaced; it’s gone when they reach a new location because it has to fall again, because the year is at the beginning again. The “one after the other” perspective of the crew isn’t wrong, it’s just a different way of ordering the experiences that is easier for the mind to understand. Seeing all of that happening at once would be devastating – it was devastating for Maureen, who saw all of those worlds at once and the one consistency between them.

There is still a century of experiences, but in a layered whole that’s only broken when the IPRE moves past that one year. They only had to restore the Light and defeat the Hunger on a single world to save them all, because all of these dimensions are connected: if there’s only one Light and only one Hunger, only one victory is needed.