Funeral Games And Pyres

Raor, the female Varagan, confirms Everard's suspicions about what the Exaltationists would have done next if they had defeated the Time Patrol:

"The glorious head lifted. Pride rang. 'We would have made [the universe] what we chose, and unmade it and remade it, and stormed the stars as we warred for possession, with an entire reality the funeral pyre of each who fell and entire histories the funeral games, until the last god reigned alone.'

"'Desire blew out of [Everard] on a winter wind."

-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), PART TWO, 209 B. C., p. 118.

Possibilities

(i) A war of realities and histories might be the ultimate fate of the Time Patrol timeline. Every time a time traveller sets out to return from his past to his present, it is possible that he will arrive in an alternative present and also that he will be unable to restore the preferred course of events.

(ii) Maybe something like this has already happened, like with the Nine, but the Patrol has been able to restore the Danellian timeline? When Everard asks how may temporal catastrophes there have been, Guion replies:

"'That is a problem inherently insolvable. Think about it.'

"Everard did."

-The Shield Of Time, PART FIVE, 1990 A. D., p. 262.

But what does he think? Why is it impossible for Patrol agents even to know how many divergent timelines they have deleted?