Destruction versus unmaking
In Incursion, Darren has to fight a threat of enormous scale, one which threatens to unmake the universe, so it has never been. My development editor A.P. Canavan looked at this and asked me what the functional difference was between something being destroyed versus never existing.
I gave him one answer then, but I think I have a better explanation now.
Perhaps like me you have children. If not, imagine you have a child. It’s a sad fact that no matter what you do, even if your child survives you, they will eventually die, their bodies going the way all of our bodies do and, at maximum entropy, not even their atoms will remain. Time will destroy them as surely as it destroys everything else.
As a parent, I don’t like to think about this. The idea that my children will be hurt at all saddens me greatly. When such thoughts occur I try to let them pass from my mind. I work to give my children the tools they need to have fulfilling lives, no matter how brief a human life is in the face of eternity, because human life matters, and those of my children are particularly special to me. Their lives are marks in time, adding to the story of the human race at least in some small way, as we all do.
Destruction is death, but at least there was life to begin with. Unmaking is total erasure.
You never had a child. Every trace of them has been deleted, along with the rest of the past. There is no mark of them in time because the medium itself is gone. They don’t matter, for nothing matters. They don’t mean anything, for it is meaning itself that has been destroyed. It is nihilism realised in its ultimate form.
As you get older, more and more people you love will die; they are effectively destroyed. Now imagine meeting a time traveller, one who threatens to go back in time and make it so these loved ones were never even conceived.
Your loved one will not exist in the future, in one direction in time, but this time traveller threatens to remove them from the other direction too.
That is the difference.