Quote Originally Posted by Grif View Post
"Right, right. This way, if you please." With that, she began leading Hawkflight to the Civic Centre, and to her room. She began giving the cliff's note summary of what she found so far, what with Sandy's curse/affliction apparently not of unicorn origins and indeed perhaps not of this world. The magical curse seemed to resist any attempts to tamper with it, with unintended side effects to the victims.
"Iiiiinteresting," Heartflight murmured, looking over the data. "Did you try tracing the spell back through his worldline?"

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Quote Originally Posted by Wikipedia
In physics, the world line of an object is the unique path of that object as it travels through 4-dimensional spacetime. The concept of "world line" is distinguished from the concept of "orbit" or "trajectory" (such as an orbit in space or a trajectory of a truck on a road map) by the time dimension, and typically encompasses a large area of spacetime wherein perceptually straight paths are recalculated to show their (relatively) more absolute position states — to reveal the nature of special relativity or gravitational interactions. The idea of world lines originates in physics and was pioneered by Herman Minkowski. The term is now most often used in relativity theories (i.e., special relativity and general relativity).

However, world lines are a general way of representing the course of events. The use of it is not bound to any specific theory. Thus in general usage, a world line is the sequential path of personal human events (with time and place as dimensions) that marks the history of a person[1] — perhaps starting at the time and place of one's birth until one's death. The log book of a ship is a description of the ship's world line, as long as it contains a time tag attached to every position. The world line allows one to calculate the speed of the ship, given a measure of distance (a so-called metric) appropriate for the curved surface of the Earth.
tl;dr - A worldline is the path through space and time of a space-time event. It's also the basis of "altered fate" stories.