I hope this isn’t another balefire German Shepherd question, but it has been eating at my brain since I started my second reread.

When Rand is stuck in the desolate world after going through the portal stone, it is suggested that the portal stones can take you to alternate versions of our “prime” timeline. The less likely the alternate version is, the more faded and washed out it appears to travelers.

Later in the series, when we learn more about Tel’arin’rhiod, it is stated that the world of dreams is a sort of “stacked average” of possible timelines. The more constant some thing is across many timelines, the more solid it is in the world of dreams.

It is also stated later in the series, when discussing the nature of the dark one, that he is a solid constant across all of the other worlds. That if he were to be sealed in one timeline, he would be sealed in all of them, and if he were to break free in one, he would break free and all of them. This made a fair amount of sense to me, as he is depicted as existing outside of traditional space and time.

But it makes me question the nature of how the alternate worlds function relative to each other. Is the timeline we follow in the book the prime/main timeline for this entire multi-verse of alternate worlds, or is it just prime from our own perspective?

Would a traveler from an alternate world coming to our world also find it washed out and faded, because from their perspective their world is the prime timeline, and our world is an alternate version of theirs? Or would they find our world to be bright and oversaturated, because ours is the true prime timeline, and therefore the most “real”?

A slightly simpler way to explain would be is it like in the Loki show, where there is a central “sacred timeline”, and every alternate world is an offshoot from that? Or is it more like Into the Spider-Verse, where every world exists on its own with many alternate versions of the same people and events, but no “center” from which they all originated?