Fading is a time-varying change in the path loss of a link with the time variance governed by the movement of objects in the environment, including the transmitter and receiver themselves. For example, you might be sitting in a conference room with a wireless laptop and be connected to an AP in the hallway. If someone closes the door to the conference room, the path loss drops, resulting in a lower received signal level because the signal has to go through different paths to reach the destination. This scenario is a fade.
The different signal paths between a transmitter and a receiver correspond to different transmission times. For an identical signal pulse from the transmitter, multiple copies of signals are received at the receiver at different moments. The signals on shorter paths reach the receiver earlier than those on longer paths.
In wireless communications, signal fading is caused by multi-path effect. Multi-path effect means that a signal transmitted from a transmitter may have multiple copies traversing different paths to reach a receiver. Thus, at the receiver, the received signal should be the sum of all these multi-path signals.