"The Usual Death"

1245beta A. D.

Maybe I should stop quoting Manse Everard every time that he says something that I disagree with because I wind up repeating the same arguments about time travel logic but let's try it one more time. While Everard and Novak are in a divergent timeline, the latter proposes to hold off their attackers while the former escapes:

"You'll be killed,' Everard protested.

"'We'll both be if you don't run while you have the chance, you fool. You know how to end this damned world. I don't.' Sweat runneled over Novak's cheeks and made his hair lank, but he grinned.

"'Then it'll never have been. You won't exist anymore.'

"'How's that different from the usual death? Run, I tell you!'" (pp. 411-412)

(Poul Anderson still notices concrete details like sweat on cheeks and lank hair even while inviting his readers to contemplate highly abstract time travel paradoxes.)

When Everard and Novak conduct this conversation, they are in the beta timeline. Therefore, that timeline does exist at the very moment when Everard says, "Then it'll never have been," and it has existed until that moment. Therefore, it cannot possibly come to be the case that that timeline has never been. There can of course come to be another timeline in which the events of the beta timeline have never occurred but that is an entirely different proposition.

In fact:

Everard escapes from the palace where Novak and he are under attack;

Everard joins Jack Hall who has a timecycle hidden in the hills;

Everard and Hall rescue Novak a few minutes after Everard had left him;

Everard travels further back in time and restores the Patrol-guarded timeline.

If Everard and Hall had failed to rescue Novak, then Novak would either have been killed by his attackers or have been captured by them and have died in the usual way later in the beta timeline but, other than this, he would neither have ceased to exist at any moment along his world-line nor, even more impossibly, have come to never having been. As Novak himself realizes, he has nothing to fear but death. And none of us need fear that because it comes to all.

In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, Morpheus accompanies his sister, Death, on her duties and they pass graffiti proclaiming that no one gets out of here alive.