Headscratchers / Year Walk

• Why exactly did Daniel have to die, if he listened to the message, didn't Year Walk and didn't kill Stina? I know the reason given was because he had simply thought about Year Walking, and that's all it took for the Watchers to demand their "sacrifice", but you'd think there'd be more mysterious Year-Walk-related deaths if that were the case. Did going back to prevent the Year Walk not count, since he still technically did it in another timeline? Can we even trust any of Theo's theories on the matter to begin with? Is it all just your standard fae/divine/otherworldly-being bullshit that has no logic to it?
  • The way I see it playing out is that the box causes a divergence in the timeline that ends one of three ways; the first is he ignores it, does the Year Walk, kills Stina, and gets executed a year later. The second is if he opens the box but ignores Theodore's message, goes on the Year Walk, etc. The third and best outcome is that he opens the box and heeds the warning, thereby turning the knife on himself and letting Stina live while satiating the Watchers. However, keep in mind that you can only find and open the box after the game starts proper, and by that point you're already Walking (the companion app says that the only way to back out on a Year Walk is to eat something, speak to someone, look at a fire, or simply stay indoors before midnight on the day before your walk.) So, by the point where you could potentially deal with the knife problem, you've already pissed off the Watchers enough for them to demand sacrifice. Thus, someone has to die, and Daniel can only pick who it is; himself or Stina.
  • By the time he finds the box, he has already started the Year Walk. It doesn't matter, whether you finish it or not. Simply starting it means you are breaking the rules of the universe. By the time Daniel finds the box, he has started the Year Walk and thus broken the rules. So to return order, someone has to die. The box would only have saved him, if he would have found it and it's message BEFORE he started. Which he didn't, most likely because yes, the Guardians require a sacrifice and someone trying to cheat them like this is not acceptable. They allow "cheating" as in "Ok, then YOU die instead", but not the version where nobody pays for having broken reality. It is most likely their version of averting Wishing for More Wishes: seeing the future and then avoiding paying for it is a big No-No.