thread now maintained by voiceoflightcity. check it out
yes it's sorta like the shade flight thread. ragnarok42 please don't kill me
here we'll just be thinking about the time flight
the general colors of the time flight is dark-yellow and grey, like metals
i have a bunch of drawings
[hi from 2023, nuking images]
[hi from 2023, nuking images] < yes the official eye color, it probably would be hard to make sure it doesn't look like earth or light eyes
a random time egg description: "A transparent yellowish egg with a weird shape. It seems to contain a weird liquid that flows down very slowly - however, rubbing it seems to speed up the process."
there's even a drawing of it, and it's permamently unfinished. it doesn't even look like an egg
[hi from 2023, nuking images]
here's the deity base, she's female. she shouldn't really look very much like a skydancer though.
[hi from 2023, nuking images]
+ a horrible drawing i just made that gives off a better idea
[hi from 2023, nuking images]
+ another one
[hi from 2023, nuking images]
the posts of awesomeness! consider them canon.
super long posts now have smaller font
I haven't a clue what their name should be. Appearance mainly based off Sand Lizards. Any other ideas would be great. I was a bit lazy. Might scrap this idea, not sure if I like it.
@ Amyatzu
OH MAN i just realized a thing
see id been picturing them as outside the proper universe - i.e. that nesting on the otherwards edge of our home reality thing - but i just realized that just because they're on the edge otherwards doesn't mean they can't intersect in, yk, the lowest three dimensions
so like. the parents are watching it very carefully in the higher dimensions in the actual nest but in lower dimensions theres just a pile of sand inexplicably floating around, which would sure confused me.
hm.
which also makes me think. i mean they can probably move along the time axis (or both time axii) (is that a word?) (basically, from our perspective, time-travel? except it's not so much time-travel as 'never attached to time in the first place' i guess) pretty easily, but there'd have to be a kind of countermechanism to keep them a little limited (eldritch abominations are great but they're hard on solid plotting) (not that we're going to plot?? i dont think??? i have a writer brain sorry)
(this is too many parenthetical asides let's start that sentence over)
basically: probably logically, due to running on their own independent time, they'd seem very nonlinear to a limited outside observer; they might usually swim downstream (i.e. past to future, same as all of us) when in the main time-flow but they'd still be able to see ahead and behind to an extent
so even though their own time is a straight line (like all times), their time isn't necessarily a straight line relative to our reality; if you talked to a time dragon, especially the deity, they'd probably answer questions you haven't asked yet and laugh at jokes told ten thousand years ago quite often, unless they specifically put effort into thinking linearly
aaaaagh that's completely incomprehensible too isn't it let me try one more time
[deep breath] time dragons are actually small self-contained realities; we've covered this. these realities also have their own self-contained time / history. this history is, like most independent histories (1), a straight line. it cannot be time-travelled through. they can't go into their own pasts, or see their own future, anymore than we can see ours; none of us can travel through the time we live in.
however, vitally, they live on a completely different axis of time than we do - and their time and our larger universe-time, while they are both straight lines, aren't necessarily straight lines relative to one another.. which is to say, while they swim up or down their own timestream, they can enter our timestream, and then swim up or down that, without breaking the integrity of their own linearity.
so if you talked to a time dragon, they would seem as if time doesn't apply to them - and vice versa, although they're more used to dealing with this (it happens when they meet each other too, they can swim through each other's timestreams) and though will be less bothered. this gives them a certain amount of power. sure, mostly they'll swim downstream, past to future, because that's easier - making conversations between us at least possible - but sometimes they don't, and then they'll know what's in our futures. can, theoretically, use this against us. but conversely also when they arrive in the future we'll already have experienced them using the information against us and can therefore anticipate where they'll be and what they'll be doing and use that against them. it goes both ways.
so to speak.
honestly though that would definitely also happen when they meet each other, and that fascinates me; every relationship would be a Time Traveller's Wife-style pseudotragedy, wouldn't it? if they ever separated they'd never meet in order again (unless they're very very lucky.) hmmmmmm. also, speaking of relationships, what about hatchlings? we've established i think that they nest in our universe, but before that.... is the act of breeding analogous to combining your timestreams, possibly binding them, to a) create new baby timestreams and b) solve the Time Traveller's Wife problem? menti celesti there's at least a novel in here isn't there
love from the voice of light city
(1) @ the one of u who'd know the difference, outer time doesn't count; it's rassilon's invention and therefore not independent. yes i have footnotes now have i reached peak pretentious yet
the egg is a vortex channeling the supporting stability of inner time toward the barnacle nest-clusters get too close and you might be sucked in
down down down through endless golden sand and then there's a point (the thin point of the hourglass?) where every aspect of reality seems to turn out inside out all at once and then you're in the hatchery where the only time and space are leaks from the larger universe
nahhhh jk it's just an egg
pythia though what would the hatchery etc. do to a normal dragon? i mean, charley did just fine in the Divergent Universe but that still had one timelike (it's the loss of the second that screwed the dr. up so bad) and anyway this isn't the DWU; dr.who knowledge isn't actually relevant at all, even though im still going to cite it because im terrible like htat
maybe we'd just die. starved of time and space we cease to exist, and have ever existed; there's a reason the time flight evolved its own. maybe we'd learn to cope, as long as we stayed on the surface of our universe; maybe they could extend their personal time and pull us in into that safe lil bubble of reality
maybe not
helllllp i love this entire concept
here we'll just be thinking about the time flight
the general colors of the time flight is dark-yellow and grey, like metals
i have a bunch of drawings
[hi from 2023, nuking images]
[hi from 2023, nuking images] < yes the official eye color, it probably would be hard to make sure it doesn't look like earth or light eyes
a random time egg description: "A transparent yellowish egg with a weird shape. It seems to contain a weird liquid that flows down very slowly - however, rubbing it seems to speed up the process."
there's even a drawing of it, and it's permamently unfinished. it doesn't even look like an egg
[hi from 2023, nuking images]
PixelSpiral wrote on 2017-04-27:
maybe the egg also should be a cloud of sand shaped like an egg. the hatchie just pops out of the cloud when hatching.
[hi from 2023, nuking images]
+ a horrible drawing i just made that gives off a better idea
[hi from 2023, nuking images]
+ another one
[hi from 2023, nuking images]
PixelSpiral wrote on 2017-04-27:
oh and maybe losing the shape can start at the back between the wings
the posts of awesomeness! consider them canon.
super long posts now have smaller font
Rexcaliburr wrote on 2017-03-27:
I was kinda thinking a deity that plays with time might be less... Solid? She'd look like she was made from sand that shifts and flows with time and space, there but not quite there, never truly defined as a solid, whole entity the way the other deities are.
Rexcaliburr wrote on 2017-03-27:
Oh oh and also (sorry am i spamming? I just have so many ideas) unlike the other deities who just never show up around mortals, the Timeteller does appear quite often, but because of her non-solid form it gets easily blown away so dragons who want to interact with her have to really make it count because she's only ever in one place for a short while. She's always moving, always changing.
Amyatzu wrote on 2017-03-27:
She should be a shifting cloud of sand. The back looks like just a sand cloud, but her front is a dragon. She is a dragon, except that she has an undulating cloud of sand coming off of her scales. By putting this sand in an hourglass and turning it, you can see everything that has ever happened from the tie periods that that sand came from. She collects one grain of sand for each second that Sornieth has existed. some of these are made of shells, bone, precious metals, gems, and even rocks and minerals such as salt or plain sand.
Rexcaliburr wrote on 2017-03-27:
She highly encourages dragons to take the chance they receive from that grain of sand, for if they do not, it disappears into the ground forever, and a grain of sand may never fall from her body on the same dragon again, if chance forbid it. Those who look for her sand with a good heart and a desire to use it right may find it where they least expect, while those who look for it and throw each chance away on a wasted opportunity may never find a grain ever again in their lives, simply because they cannot see good opportunities the way a pure (not perfect) soul can.
She is neither good nor evil, she passes judgement upon no one. She is the force that keeps the globe spinning, the night and the day, the river that keeps flowing and that perfect moment when the sun shines through your window at dawn.
While she herself encourages risk taking, leaping forward to catch a grain of sand, she understands if you need more time. She understands if you need to wait a little longer, and that's okay with her. As long as you have good desires and a strong heart, perhaps you might chance upon another grain in the future.
She is neither good nor evil, she passes judgement upon no one. She is the force that keeps the globe spinning, the night and the day, the river that keeps flowing and that perfect moment when the sun shines through your window at dawn.
While she herself encourages risk taking, leaping forward to catch a grain of sand, she understands if you need more time. She understands if you need to wait a little longer, and that's okay with her. As long as you have good desires and a strong heart, perhaps you might chance upon another grain in the future.
Spottedleaf125 wrote on 2017-03-27:
I haven't a clue what their name should be. Appearance mainly based off Sand Lizards. Any other ideas would be great. I was a bit lazy. Might scrap this idea, not sure if I like it.
@ Amyatzu
voiceoflightcity wrote on 2017-04-27:
suggestion: (i feel im butting in, but @ UnicornCrazy summoned me so what can I do)
how 'bout their territory is outside time
this is originally a concept from the dr.who universe, naturally, bc im completely obsessed with dr.who rn, and it goes something like this: there are five dimensions to time.
the first one is Inner Time, which is a complicated and specific dr.who-centric thing that's not rlly relevant; the second is Outer Time, i.e. the history we all know and live in and (maybe) love; three to five is where it gets complex. they aren't actually timelike dimensions, but multiversal dimensions, is the thing. you've got alterwards, which is the axis alternate worlds - i.e. universes like ours, except for some small difference, like the classic 'the nazis won www2' - lie on. you've got parawards, which is the axis parallel worlds - i.e. universes not like ours at all, with a different kind of history, possibly a different dominant species, maybe no Earth at all - lie on.
and then you've got otherwards.
this is basically the concept that our universe, and even our multiversal universe cluster, is finite. not in parawards and otherwards directions, but in that third direction.
and outside of our universe? nothing. no time, no space, not even the faintest hint of symbolism to give conceptual entities something to hang on. just. nothing. and, theoretically, other universe clusters, eventually.
but this is where it gets mindblowingly cool, which is that there is life out there. we call them Leviathans, and they are literally best described as sentient predatory universes. they are multiversal clusters in their own right, but unlike our drifting island of reality they are mobile. and they are hungry,
which, i dunno how well this concept would fight into fr bc i havent been here for v long, but seems like an awfully good place for a time dragon to live. between the Leviathans. maybe they are small Leviathans. how many planets do they contain, in that self-contained reality of shifting sand? is that glint of gold simply metal and rock, or is it a miniature star, operating on its miniature rules of physics, with a thousand tiny worlds and a billion tiny people? how many galaxies in the sparks where their flint claws touch stone? (im just making stuff up here dont mind me)
this would obvs push them closer to eldritch abomination, but oops i rlly love eldritch abominations and i love the idea of dragons that swim in time, that make their nests in barnacle clusters clinging to the safe warm embrace of bigger universes, that dance in the darkness with the Leviathans
hatchlings grow up at the very edge of our universe, playing in the edges of timeline streams, living off the endless detritus that floats in through history; they grow up where it's protected, in shadow of the brutal cold wind of otherwards, where there's no chance of a Leviathan coming by to idly snap them up (hatchlings make nice bite-size snacks, I'd expect; full-size dragons are still tiny but they fight so hard it's not worth going after them), where they won't just fade away in the wild unreality outside
but at some point they're going to have to stop depending on that larger universe to keep them real, have to start producing their own self-sustaining reality, and then they can set out to sail the places between universes like their ancestors have before them, for a time without time, a span literally uncountable because it didn't happen in years to count them in
basically what i'm saying is that they're time dragons not because they like time, or because they have power over it, but because they are time, in the most literal sense possible; to survive in the places without time or space, they have to be their own time and space, and even when they come into our larger universe (to battle for Dominance or to interact with their relatives that never evolved to live outside universes, or something) they aren't actually in our larger universe; they're a bubble of independent reality with delusions of sentience which, dunno if u like that concept, but it's an idea at least?
and I can explain the Ship of Worlds aka the Brakespeare if you like - it's a model for the whole survive-by-producing-your-own-reality thing, except that the species that built it didn't do it organically like this theoretical time flight, but simply took a great big chunk (and several hundred star systems) out of ours, it's complicated and pandimensional and trying to visualize it properly usually results in ur brain melting out of ur ears but anyway
uhhhh that's it i'm sorry it's so long I spent half an hour of homework time writing it out and I don't have time to edit it or I'll never get this essay done [cries]
- lightcity
[waves awkwardly, tiptoes backwards around the corner, runs]
how 'bout their territory is outside time
this is originally a concept from the dr.who universe, naturally, bc im completely obsessed with dr.who rn, and it goes something like this: there are five dimensions to time.
the first one is Inner Time, which is a complicated and specific dr.who-centric thing that's not rlly relevant; the second is Outer Time, i.e. the history we all know and live in and (maybe) love; three to five is where it gets complex. they aren't actually timelike dimensions, but multiversal dimensions, is the thing. you've got alterwards, which is the axis alternate worlds - i.e. universes like ours, except for some small difference, like the classic 'the nazis won www2' - lie on. you've got parawards, which is the axis parallel worlds - i.e. universes not like ours at all, with a different kind of history, possibly a different dominant species, maybe no Earth at all - lie on.
and then you've got otherwards.
this is basically the concept that our universe, and even our multiversal universe cluster, is finite. not in parawards and otherwards directions, but in that third direction.
and outside of our universe? nothing. no time, no space, not even the faintest hint of symbolism to give conceptual entities something to hang on. just. nothing. and, theoretically, other universe clusters, eventually.
but this is where it gets mindblowingly cool, which is that there is life out there. we call them Leviathans, and they are literally best described as sentient predatory universes. they are multiversal clusters in their own right, but unlike our drifting island of reality they are mobile. and they are hungry,
which, i dunno how well this concept would fight into fr bc i havent been here for v long, but seems like an awfully good place for a time dragon to live. between the Leviathans. maybe they are small Leviathans. how many planets do they contain, in that self-contained reality of shifting sand? is that glint of gold simply metal and rock, or is it a miniature star, operating on its miniature rules of physics, with a thousand tiny worlds and a billion tiny people? how many galaxies in the sparks where their flint claws touch stone? (im just making stuff up here dont mind me)
this would obvs push them closer to eldritch abomination, but oops i rlly love eldritch abominations and i love the idea of dragons that swim in time, that make their nests in barnacle clusters clinging to the safe warm embrace of bigger universes, that dance in the darkness with the Leviathans
hatchlings grow up at the very edge of our universe, playing in the edges of timeline streams, living off the endless detritus that floats in through history; they grow up where it's protected, in shadow of the brutal cold wind of otherwards, where there's no chance of a Leviathan coming by to idly snap them up (hatchlings make nice bite-size snacks, I'd expect; full-size dragons are still tiny but they fight so hard it's not worth going after them), where they won't just fade away in the wild unreality outside
but at some point they're going to have to stop depending on that larger universe to keep them real, have to start producing their own self-sustaining reality, and then they can set out to sail the places between universes like their ancestors have before them, for a time without time, a span literally uncountable because it didn't happen in years to count them in
basically what i'm saying is that they're time dragons not because they like time, or because they have power over it, but because they are time, in the most literal sense possible; to survive in the places without time or space, they have to be their own time and space, and even when they come into our larger universe (to battle for Dominance or to interact with their relatives that never evolved to live outside universes, or something) they aren't actually in our larger universe; they're a bubble of independent reality with delusions of sentience which, dunno if u like that concept, but it's an idea at least?
and I can explain the Ship of Worlds aka the Brakespeare if you like - it's a model for the whole survive-by-producing-your-own-reality thing, except that the species that built it didn't do it organically like this theoretical time flight, but simply took a great big chunk (and several hundred star systems) out of ours, it's complicated and pandimensional and trying to visualize it properly usually results in ur brain melting out of ur ears but anyway
uhhhh that's it i'm sorry it's so long I spent half an hour of homework time writing it out and I don't have time to edit it or I'll never get this essay done [cries]
- lightcity
[waves awkwardly, tiptoes backwards around the corner, runs]
voiceoflightcity wrote on 2017-04-27:
Spottedleaf125 wrote on 2017-04-27:
I love the idea of a sand cloud egg, and oooh! What if when something tried to threaten it, it would move to another dimension or space in time for a few minutes so nothing could reach while it was being threatened?
OH MAN i just realized a thing
see id been picturing them as outside the proper universe - i.e. that nesting on the otherwards edge of our home reality thing - but i just realized that just because they're on the edge otherwards doesn't mean they can't intersect in, yk, the lowest three dimensions
so like. the parents are watching it very carefully in the higher dimensions in the actual nest but in lower dimensions theres just a pile of sand inexplicably floating around, which would sure confused me.
hm.
which also makes me think. i mean they can probably move along the time axis (or both time axii) (is that a word?) (basically, from our perspective, time-travel? except it's not so much time-travel as 'never attached to time in the first place' i guess) pretty easily, but there'd have to be a kind of countermechanism to keep them a little limited (eldritch abominations are great but they're hard on solid plotting) (not that we're going to plot?? i dont think??? i have a writer brain sorry)
(this is too many parenthetical asides let's start that sentence over)
basically: probably logically, due to running on their own independent time, they'd seem very nonlinear to a limited outside observer; they might usually swim downstream (i.e. past to future, same as all of us) when in the main time-flow but they'd still be able to see ahead and behind to an extent
so even though their own time is a straight line (like all times), their time isn't necessarily a straight line relative to our reality; if you talked to a time dragon, especially the deity, they'd probably answer questions you haven't asked yet and laugh at jokes told ten thousand years ago quite often, unless they specifically put effort into thinking linearly
aaaaagh that's completely incomprehensible too isn't it let me try one more time
[deep breath] time dragons are actually small self-contained realities; we've covered this. these realities also have their own self-contained time / history. this history is, like most independent histories (1), a straight line. it cannot be time-travelled through. they can't go into their own pasts, or see their own future, anymore than we can see ours; none of us can travel through the time we live in.
however, vitally, they live on a completely different axis of time than we do - and their time and our larger universe-time, while they are both straight lines, aren't necessarily straight lines relative to one another.. which is to say, while they swim up or down their own timestream, they can enter our timestream, and then swim up or down that, without breaking the integrity of their own linearity.
so if you talked to a time dragon, they would seem as if time doesn't apply to them - and vice versa, although they're more used to dealing with this (it happens when they meet each other too, they can swim through each other's timestreams) and though will be less bothered. this gives them a certain amount of power. sure, mostly they'll swim downstream, past to future, because that's easier - making conversations between us at least possible - but sometimes they don't, and then they'll know what's in our futures. can, theoretically, use this against us. but conversely also when they arrive in the future we'll already have experienced them using the information against us and can therefore anticipate where they'll be and what they'll be doing and use that against them. it goes both ways.
so to speak.
honestly though that would definitely also happen when they meet each other, and that fascinates me; every relationship would be a Time Traveller's Wife-style pseudotragedy, wouldn't it? if they ever separated they'd never meet in order again (unless they're very very lucky.) hmmmmmm. also, speaking of relationships, what about hatchlings? we've established i think that they nest in our universe, but before that.... is the act of breeding analogous to combining your timestreams, possibly binding them, to a) create new baby timestreams and b) solve the Time Traveller's Wife problem? menti celesti there's at least a novel in here isn't there
love from the voice of light city
(1) @ the one of u who'd know the difference, outer time doesn't count; it's rassilon's invention and therefore not independent. yes i have footnotes now have i reached peak pretentious yet
voiceoflightcity wrote on 2017-04-27:
UnicornCrazy wrote on 2017-04-27:
Or maybe the egg is a spacetime distortion that supports the growing time dragon? Idk, LightCity knows more about DW EU than I do ey'd have a better idea how that'd work. XD
the egg is a vortex channeling the supporting stability of inner time toward the barnacle nest-clusters get too close and you might be sucked in
down down down through endless golden sand and then there's a point (the thin point of the hourglass?) where every aspect of reality seems to turn out inside out all at once and then you're in the hatchery where the only time and space are leaks from the larger universe
nahhhh jk it's just an egg
pythia though what would the hatchery etc. do to a normal dragon? i mean, charley did just fine in the Divergent Universe but that still had one timelike (it's the loss of the second that screwed the dr. up so bad) and anyway this isn't the DWU; dr.who knowledge isn't actually relevant at all, even though im still going to cite it because im terrible like htat
maybe we'd just die. starved of time and space we cease to exist, and have ever existed; there's a reason the time flight evolved its own. maybe we'd learn to cope, as long as we stayed on the surface of our universe; maybe they could extend their personal time and pull us in into that safe lil bubble of reality
maybe not
helllllp i love this entire concept
voiceoflightcity wrote on 2017-05-03:
@ UnicornCrazy @ PixelSpiral
Let's try this again, from the beginning:
Once upon a time, there was a universe.
That much is easy. It’s after that, as usual, that things get complicated.
This universe could be our universe, or it could not be; let's assume for the moment it is, the same space in which the Four and then the Eight and the Eleven reign. In which the fourth planet in some otherwise nondescript solarsystem became the home to gods and monsters and truth and lies and so, so many dragons. This universe has three dimensions - count them - and a simple, linear kind of time. There is a past. There is a future. Everything moves from the former to the latter, consistently, unstoppably. Everyone operates on this same wavelength.
Again, that much is easy. It’s established. We know this. Here, then, is the idea: maybe there weren’t Four in the beginning, but Five. (Except the extra is not Fifth but Twelfth, so let’s call xir that, and ignore the implied paradox[1] - a little impossibility suits xir.) And maybe the Twelfth came alive at the wrong (wait for it) time.
It could have been too early. Imagine that: the first thing to wake, to watch bloody new stars bloom on a sky shattered by its own birth, and when the four others rise out of the ground and become their elements xie’s alienated, scared - what are these others, these things that look like xir and fly like xir and think like xir and yet are not xir. Xie could have been too late - imagine that, imagine waking up and all around xir xir siblings’ battles tear the world apart, with no care for the newer creatures in the sand below their feet. Xir could have simply been too far away, born not in water or fire or air but drifting just outside of the planet’s safe embrace, where it’s cold and dark and there’s nothing but space, and time. Maybe none of these are true. For events of this scale, truth isn’t important, logic is irrelevant. In this plane of reality, you’ll learn, all that really matters is the symbolism.[2]
Whatever the reason, when xie awakes, xie didn’t find xir element. Xir sisters, upon awaking, found their homes quickly - melted into them, became them, losing that fuzziness of a newborn deity quickly. Xie didn’t. Xie stayed that way, indistinct, the concept of a consciousness more than an actual being, the idea of a god and nothing more.[3]
But whatever time xie lands in, xir siblings are fighting - and xie cannot stay neutral, not in a world where all is consumed by war, by pointless furious destruction. Xie cannot stay alone. Xie cannot stay indistinct. Xie is a god, after all, and while I am not yet intimately familiar with the physics of deities in this universe, in my experience, gods live on metaphor and half-truth and belief; xie needs a symbol, needs to be a symbol (a representation of something infinitely larger and more complicated - a form we can understand and worship[5]) to stay alive. And so find one xie does.
How is irrelevant, really - maybe xie built herself some complex machine, or maybe xie tapped into the reserves the Arcanist would later create and/or awaken, or maybe xie simply uses some power inherent to a deity, to find xir element, xir symbol, xir heart. I’m making things up here. The point is this: xie breaks free.
Let’s put it this way: the universe as we commonly perceive it has four dimensions - three spatial, and one time. Xie managed to break into the Fifth. (Or is it the Twelfth?) On the axis of the fifth dimension, entire four-D universes lie side by side - and in between them, there is space. Empty space, for more distance than we could count in all directions we could never understand; or not even space, because there isn’t space there, and no time either. There is nothing, in the truest sense of the word. Travel into this multiversal ocean without protection and you don’t just die, you cease to have ever existed; drowning in the utter absence of any past or future or present to exist in. Do you understand? That’s the place xie’d land in, in this mythology; coming out on the shore of our universe and meeting a void that can only be described as the lack of reality.
It would have erased any one of us easily. But gods are adaptable. There is a certain power afforded to a deity, even a deity with no symbolism to keep xir alive, and this is it. So: in the absence of a universe to exist in, xie creates her own.
What I mean by this is… difficult to explain, really, so I suppose I’ll have to go back to that nautical metaphor. If the universe is a bubble of air and land and life in the endless ocean[6], and xie is lost in that same ocean, then xie forms xir own bubble of air, a sort of metaphysical submarine[7]. In the style of the Brakespeare - which of course none of you have ever heard of, but that’s beside the point. Xie evolves to fit her environment by developing xir own time and space, to swim in the nothing. Xie becomes time. Xie becomes the Timeteller.
(And because the most common symbol of Time, in the world xie came from, a world xie won’t ever be able to escape entirely, is sand, that is what xie becomes. Her symbol; a snapshot that allows us to understand xir, to comprehend xir just enough to keep xir real, even if her real form is so much larger and so much darker and full of so many stars.)
A note about the physics:
I’m not sure how to explain this, to be honest. It makes sense to me, but I have a sneaking suspicion it might only make sense to people who either a) spend Too Much Time thinking about multiversal physics or b) are just kind of insane[8]. I’ll try anyway. The Timeteller - and later, xir children - runs on a completely different axis of time than we do. And that axis doesn’t have to be parallel to ours. When the Timeteller re-enters our universe, xir bubble of time stays intact; the time that passes for xir is not the same time that passes for us, and it doesn’t pass at the same rate or in the same order.
Let’s switch metaphors for a moment: say time is a river. We are all water in the river; we are always dragged downstream. Xie, however, is not - one could say xie’s water in her own river, but that confuses the metaphor so for the moment let’s say xie’s an animal or some such instead. Xie can enter our timestream, our river, at any point xie chooses. Xie’ll be dragged along by the current - although if xie swims hard enough, or holds on to some rock, xie can stay stationary or move upstream for a moment - but xie can, at any time, exit the stream and re-enter it at any other point. From our perspective, xie can time-travel.
The trick of it is of course that from xir perspective xir timeline is perfectly straight, and our timeline curves across xirs - and both of those things are simultaneously true, because they exist on entirely different dimensions.
However, the truth of things doesn’t really matter. Theoretically, xie is as bound to linear time as you or I, it’s just a different axis than the usual kind, but practically xie - the Timeteller, the Fifth dimension - is entirely nonlinear. When you first meet, xie might already have met you in the future; when you last part xie might not know you at all, because from xir perspective you have not met at all. Xie might be able to tell you the future, or xie might not. Like I said, it’s functionally time-travel - with the important difference that xie probably can’t really control in what order xie ends up where. So it’s equally possible that the time flight might have the advantage (because they know your future, because they went to the future first, because your future takes place in their past) or the disadvantage (because you know their future, because they go to your past after they are here in the present, because their future takes place in your past - so to speak[9].)
Makes sense? Probably not. Let’s move on anyway.
Back to history, then. The Timeteller, alone in the darkness, but self-sustaining, independent, builds xir Eden.
Now, as I’ve just described, the timeline of events inside the universe has now become irrelevant; her first time back in the universe could as easily be during the Beastclan wars as in the First Age. Still, though, partly because it works out poetically and partly because I can’t resist the comparison to the Yssgaroth[10] (seriously they’re like the exact same thing,) let’s say… well.
The Shade certainly aren’t from this universe, are they? In fact, I’ve been told, they aren’t from anywhere. They are nothing, and they intend to make everything like them, to erase every trace of something from the larger reality. They are no time, and no space. Do you see where I’m going with this?
The Shade are from beyond our universe. From some other, alien, world, where the laws of physics are so unimaginably different we can barely comprehend them as alive at all - or maybe not, maybe they’re a manifestation of the multiversal void itself, or maybe they’re all that’s left of the primal Khaos before our universe coalesced from the dust. I repeat myself: it doesn’t matter. The thematics matter. The Shade are from very very far away, and when they come to consume our world the first thing they meet - before they even enter our timespace - is the Timeteller.
I don’t pretend to know what happened there, but I think it might not have been as simple as a battle. Xie is, like them, an elemental of the Beyond, a time-independent power. I think they might have talked. As for what they said - I don’t dare to guess. But I think something happened there.
And it must have failed. Because the Shade went on, and fought the Eight in the First Age, and died there. And whatever happened, it seems it must have nearly killed xir.
Thus passed the Second Age: and xie can’t have been part of the Pillar, won’t have been part of the Pillar, holding xir own vigilance at the edge of all. The Third, too, came and passed. They aren’t relevant to this story; xie’s tangent to the concept of First and Second and Third anyway. Things don’t happen in order.
What I’m interested in is xir children.
Like all dragons, they are miniatures of their god - in this case, think feathers and stars and infinity in a grain of sand. I’m not a visual person - somebody else can figure out what they look like, although personally I’d consider it really fun if while they look utterly normal (i.e. no sign of their status as [ahem] technical independent universes) except for their eyes, which are… not colorless, really, and there’s a definite impression of sand, but also really hard to actually focus on, as if they don’t quite seem to belong to this reality. They’re probably… I mean, sure, they have to have some color, but you can’t really seem to identify it. Blue, maybe? No, don’t be silly, that’s a water color. No. it’s...
Then again, I’m just a sucker for eldritch abominations, so don’t take me too seriously.
And vitally, yeah, they are just as time-independent as their deity. More than that - I suspect they may even be time-independent from each other. All those theoretical out-of-order interactions that happen between the Timeteller and our universe would also happen with each other. That’s a concept I’ve written before with timeship civilizations, and one that I still find endlessly fascinating. They would never meet each other in order. Friends might have to see each other die and then meet again, both remembering the other’s death[11], and yet forbidden to speak of it, because it hasn’t - from certain perspectives - happened yet.
That gets real complicated real fast, though, and this is…. Pythia save me[12], this is already way too long.
As for hatcheries, I assume they’d lay their eggs on the side of our universe, on the shore, to return to that Others-taken nautical metaphor once again. I think, also, that mating and the connected cultural rituals focus on connecting the mates’ respective timelines / subuniverses[13], as to a) split off new mini-timelines for the children and b) kind of mitigate the tragedy of out-of-order meetings (see above.) Now, the Timeteller xirself built her own universe pretty much instantly, but hatchlings are not so resilient - so in the early days they stay close to the universe-at-large, safe on the edges, where the larger time-and-space of our world still keeps them alive until they develop their own. I imagine, also, that the first time leaving this coast is quite an event; there’s always the possibility that their timeline will collapse under the strain of the nothing outside, and then they’ll no longer exist and worse never have existed, which means they can’t even be mourned.
Interestingly, also, the fact that these eggs are raised on the very edges of our universe, means that they’ll probably also manifest in some way in our universe, by which I mean there’s probably going to be random time eggs floating around in some places. Of course these eggs are well guarded by the parents, but those parents will (on a fifth-dimensional axis) have enough sense to stay out of our universe, so they won’t be visible.
Things I want to think about but don’t have any more time to write out: if dragons can survive between universes, and so can the Shade in some fashion, will there be other things? I propose Leviathans: predatory self-sufficient realities larger than can be easily conceived, with a taste for dragons as nice bite-sized snacks. If time flight can swim / fly[14] through the Space Between, the Void, then can they make it to other universes, or are those too far away? Do they consider the more conventional flights lesser, or lucky? How often does communication take place? How hard is it to talk to people on a different timeline? Does it hurt? Is it like starving and suffocating and drowning all at once, forcing yourself to exist on only one plane of reality, to think backwards and sideways and broken? How does it change them? What do they hate? What do they love? When are they happy?
I dunno either, man.
In related news - am I going to hit some kind of wordcount limit? Is there some kind of wordcount limit? I’m so sorry.
OH YEAH and I made the Timeteller nonbinary, because a) i felt like it and b) i watch too much dr.who to be able to conceptualize fundamental forces of the universe as cis anymore, whoops
(MY OWN(PixelSpiral's) NOTE: she's still female canonically)
the voice of light city, signing off
[1] Obviously there aren’t twelve yet and so xie can’t call herself that, but hey, xie’s deity of Time, as if xie had to do things in order.
[2] In a way, this is true of all stories. If the thematics work out you can pull basically anything, no matter how improbable. Don’t worry, making the fourth wall suddenly a vital symbolic element in-universe is a speciality of mine.
[3] See also: conceptual entities. Sentient creatures that don’t exist outside the concept of themselves, as imagined by other people. I stole this off Lawrence Miles again, go look up This Town Will Never Let Us Go right tf now pls
[4] IM NEW IM SORRY
[5] I feel like this needs more clarification - if gods live off of thematics rather than truth, and thematics are at heart a human (and by extension, dragon) concept, then they cannot survive without mortal minds to conceive of them. So, if the deities stayed as incomprehensible as they presumably must be, to fight something like the Shade, they would perish very quickly; if they are inconceivable than they cannot be conceived. So they have to be symbols, have to find an element and a part of the world to represent; like all gods, they have to reconstruct themselves as metaphors for someth
[6] Or deep space, if you prefer.
[7] ‘Metaphysical submarine’ is unambiguously the best phrase I have ever written and it’s going to be my new blog description in a minute.
[8] I’m both.
[9] Vitally, though, because xie isn’t truly nonlinear, xie can’t see xir own future - so really, we’re even. Yup, this is stupidly complex, welcome to trying to think about six-dimensional concepts with a four-dimensional brain.
[10] It’s a Doctor Who thing. Lovecraftian entity-slash-force-of-nature that battles the anthropomorphic (or, technically, the pythiapomorphic) personifications of the laws of time at the beginning of the universe. Shh.
[11] Some of you may be reminded of River Song. This is not a coincidence, although I’m thinking more along the lines of whatshisface in the City of the Saved.
[12] hey if i can’t swear i gotta make do ya know (yeah, i swear by fictional dr.who deities have i reached peak nerd yet)
[13] I’m descending into technobabble again aren't I
[14] Pick your preferred metaphor: nautical or aeronautical. Neither is remotely accurate. Yeah. Sorry.
Let's try this again, from the beginning:
Once upon a time, there was a universe.
That much is easy. It’s after that, as usual, that things get complicated.
This universe could be our universe, or it could not be; let's assume for the moment it is, the same space in which the Four and then the Eight and the Eleven reign. In which the fourth planet in some otherwise nondescript solarsystem became the home to gods and monsters and truth and lies and so, so many dragons. This universe has three dimensions - count them - and a simple, linear kind of time. There is a past. There is a future. Everything moves from the former to the latter, consistently, unstoppably. Everyone operates on this same wavelength.
Again, that much is easy. It’s established. We know this. Here, then, is the idea: maybe there weren’t Four in the beginning, but Five. (Except the extra is not Fifth but Twelfth, so let’s call xir that, and ignore the implied paradox[1] - a little impossibility suits xir.) And maybe the Twelfth came alive at the wrong (wait for it) time.
It could have been too early. Imagine that: the first thing to wake, to watch bloody new stars bloom on a sky shattered by its own birth, and when the four others rise out of the ground and become their elements xie’s alienated, scared - what are these others, these things that look like xir and fly like xir and think like xir and yet are not xir. Xie could have been too late - imagine that, imagine waking up and all around xir xir siblings’ battles tear the world apart, with no care for the newer creatures in the sand below their feet. Xir could have simply been too far away, born not in water or fire or air but drifting just outside of the planet’s safe embrace, where it’s cold and dark and there’s nothing but space, and time. Maybe none of these are true. For events of this scale, truth isn’t important, logic is irrelevant. In this plane of reality, you’ll learn, all that really matters is the symbolism.[2]
Whatever the reason, when xie awakes, xie didn’t find xir element. Xir sisters, upon awaking, found their homes quickly - melted into them, became them, losing that fuzziness of a newborn deity quickly. Xie didn’t. Xie stayed that way, indistinct, the concept of a consciousness more than an actual being, the idea of a god and nothing more.[3]
But whatever time xie lands in, xir siblings are fighting - and xie cannot stay neutral, not in a world where all is consumed by war, by pointless furious destruction. Xie cannot stay alone. Xie cannot stay indistinct. Xie is a god, after all, and while I am not yet intimately familiar with the physics of deities in this universe, in my experience, gods live on metaphor and half-truth and belief; xie needs a symbol, needs to be a symbol (a representation of something infinitely larger and more complicated - a form we can understand and worship[5]) to stay alive. And so find one xie does.
How is irrelevant, really - maybe xie built herself some complex machine, or maybe xie tapped into the reserves the Arcanist would later create and/or awaken, or maybe xie simply uses some power inherent to a deity, to find xir element, xir symbol, xir heart. I’m making things up here. The point is this: xie breaks free.
Let’s put it this way: the universe as we commonly perceive it has four dimensions - three spatial, and one time. Xie managed to break into the Fifth. (Or is it the Twelfth?) On the axis of the fifth dimension, entire four-D universes lie side by side - and in between them, there is space. Empty space, for more distance than we could count in all directions we could never understand; or not even space, because there isn’t space there, and no time either. There is nothing, in the truest sense of the word. Travel into this multiversal ocean without protection and you don’t just die, you cease to have ever existed; drowning in the utter absence of any past or future or present to exist in. Do you understand? That’s the place xie’d land in, in this mythology; coming out on the shore of our universe and meeting a void that can only be described as the lack of reality.
It would have erased any one of us easily. But gods are adaptable. There is a certain power afforded to a deity, even a deity with no symbolism to keep xir alive, and this is it. So: in the absence of a universe to exist in, xie creates her own.
What I mean by this is… difficult to explain, really, so I suppose I’ll have to go back to that nautical metaphor. If the universe is a bubble of air and land and life in the endless ocean[6], and xie is lost in that same ocean, then xie forms xir own bubble of air, a sort of metaphysical submarine[7]. In the style of the Brakespeare - which of course none of you have ever heard of, but that’s beside the point. Xie evolves to fit her environment by developing xir own time and space, to swim in the nothing. Xie becomes time. Xie becomes the Timeteller.
(And because the most common symbol of Time, in the world xie came from, a world xie won’t ever be able to escape entirely, is sand, that is what xie becomes. Her symbol; a snapshot that allows us to understand xir, to comprehend xir just enough to keep xir real, even if her real form is so much larger and so much darker and full of so many stars.)
A note about the physics:
I’m not sure how to explain this, to be honest. It makes sense to me, but I have a sneaking suspicion it might only make sense to people who either a) spend Too Much Time thinking about multiversal physics or b) are just kind of insane[8]. I’ll try anyway. The Timeteller - and later, xir children - runs on a completely different axis of time than we do. And that axis doesn’t have to be parallel to ours. When the Timeteller re-enters our universe, xir bubble of time stays intact; the time that passes for xir is not the same time that passes for us, and it doesn’t pass at the same rate or in the same order.
Let’s switch metaphors for a moment: say time is a river. We are all water in the river; we are always dragged downstream. Xie, however, is not - one could say xie’s water in her own river, but that confuses the metaphor so for the moment let’s say xie’s an animal or some such instead. Xie can enter our timestream, our river, at any point xie chooses. Xie’ll be dragged along by the current - although if xie swims hard enough, or holds on to some rock, xie can stay stationary or move upstream for a moment - but xie can, at any time, exit the stream and re-enter it at any other point. From our perspective, xie can time-travel.
The trick of it is of course that from xir perspective xir timeline is perfectly straight, and our timeline curves across xirs - and both of those things are simultaneously true, because they exist on entirely different dimensions.
However, the truth of things doesn’t really matter. Theoretically, xie is as bound to linear time as you or I, it’s just a different axis than the usual kind, but practically xie - the Timeteller, the Fifth dimension - is entirely nonlinear. When you first meet, xie might already have met you in the future; when you last part xie might not know you at all, because from xir perspective you have not met at all. Xie might be able to tell you the future, or xie might not. Like I said, it’s functionally time-travel - with the important difference that xie probably can’t really control in what order xie ends up where. So it’s equally possible that the time flight might have the advantage (because they know your future, because they went to the future first, because your future takes place in their past) or the disadvantage (because you know their future, because they go to your past after they are here in the present, because their future takes place in your past - so to speak[9].)
Makes sense? Probably not. Let’s move on anyway.
Back to history, then. The Timeteller, alone in the darkness, but self-sustaining, independent, builds xir Eden.
Now, as I’ve just described, the timeline of events inside the universe has now become irrelevant; her first time back in the universe could as easily be during the Beastclan wars as in the First Age. Still, though, partly because it works out poetically and partly because I can’t resist the comparison to the Yssgaroth[10] (seriously they’re like the exact same thing,) let’s say… well.
The Shade certainly aren’t from this universe, are they? In fact, I’ve been told, they aren’t from anywhere. They are nothing, and they intend to make everything like them, to erase every trace of something from the larger reality. They are no time, and no space. Do you see where I’m going with this?
The Shade are from beyond our universe. From some other, alien, world, where the laws of physics are so unimaginably different we can barely comprehend them as alive at all - or maybe not, maybe they’re a manifestation of the multiversal void itself, or maybe they’re all that’s left of the primal Khaos before our universe coalesced from the dust. I repeat myself: it doesn’t matter. The thematics matter. The Shade are from very very far away, and when they come to consume our world the first thing they meet - before they even enter our timespace - is the Timeteller.
I don’t pretend to know what happened there, but I think it might not have been as simple as a battle. Xie is, like them, an elemental of the Beyond, a time-independent power. I think they might have talked. As for what they said - I don’t dare to guess. But I think something happened there.
And it must have failed. Because the Shade went on, and fought the Eight in the First Age, and died there. And whatever happened, it seems it must have nearly killed xir.
Thus passed the Second Age: and xie can’t have been part of the Pillar, won’t have been part of the Pillar, holding xir own vigilance at the edge of all. The Third, too, came and passed. They aren’t relevant to this story; xie’s tangent to the concept of First and Second and Third anyway. Things don’t happen in order.
What I’m interested in is xir children.
Like all dragons, they are miniatures of their god - in this case, think feathers and stars and infinity in a grain of sand. I’m not a visual person - somebody else can figure out what they look like, although personally I’d consider it really fun if while they look utterly normal (i.e. no sign of their status as [ahem] technical independent universes) except for their eyes, which are… not colorless, really, and there’s a definite impression of sand, but also really hard to actually focus on, as if they don’t quite seem to belong to this reality. They’re probably… I mean, sure, they have to have some color, but you can’t really seem to identify it. Blue, maybe? No, don’t be silly, that’s a water color. No. it’s...
Then again, I’m just a sucker for eldritch abominations, so don’t take me too seriously.
And vitally, yeah, they are just as time-independent as their deity. More than that - I suspect they may even be time-independent from each other. All those theoretical out-of-order interactions that happen between the Timeteller and our universe would also happen with each other. That’s a concept I’ve written before with timeship civilizations, and one that I still find endlessly fascinating. They would never meet each other in order. Friends might have to see each other die and then meet again, both remembering the other’s death[11], and yet forbidden to speak of it, because it hasn’t - from certain perspectives - happened yet.
That gets real complicated real fast, though, and this is…. Pythia save me[12], this is already way too long.
As for hatcheries, I assume they’d lay their eggs on the side of our universe, on the shore, to return to that Others-taken nautical metaphor once again. I think, also, that mating and the connected cultural rituals focus on connecting the mates’ respective timelines / subuniverses[13], as to a) split off new mini-timelines for the children and b) kind of mitigate the tragedy of out-of-order meetings (see above.) Now, the Timeteller xirself built her own universe pretty much instantly, but hatchlings are not so resilient - so in the early days they stay close to the universe-at-large, safe on the edges, where the larger time-and-space of our world still keeps them alive until they develop their own. I imagine, also, that the first time leaving this coast is quite an event; there’s always the possibility that their timeline will collapse under the strain of the nothing outside, and then they’ll no longer exist and worse never have existed, which means they can’t even be mourned.
Interestingly, also, the fact that these eggs are raised on the very edges of our universe, means that they’ll probably also manifest in some way in our universe, by which I mean there’s probably going to be random time eggs floating around in some places. Of course these eggs are well guarded by the parents, but those parents will (on a fifth-dimensional axis) have enough sense to stay out of our universe, so they won’t be visible.
Things I want to think about but don’t have any more time to write out: if dragons can survive between universes, and so can the Shade in some fashion, will there be other things? I propose Leviathans: predatory self-sufficient realities larger than can be easily conceived, with a taste for dragons as nice bite-sized snacks. If time flight can swim / fly[14] through the Space Between, the Void, then can they make it to other universes, or are those too far away? Do they consider the more conventional flights lesser, or lucky? How often does communication take place? How hard is it to talk to people on a different timeline? Does it hurt? Is it like starving and suffocating and drowning all at once, forcing yourself to exist on only one plane of reality, to think backwards and sideways and broken? How does it change them? What do they hate? What do they love? When are they happy?
I dunno either, man.
In related news - am I going to hit some kind of wordcount limit? Is there some kind of wordcount limit? I’m so sorry.
OH YEAH and I made the Timeteller nonbinary, because a) i felt like it and b) i watch too much dr.who to be able to conceptualize fundamental forces of the universe as cis anymore, whoops
(MY OWN(PixelSpiral's) NOTE: she's still female canonically)
the voice of light city, signing off
[1] Obviously there aren’t twelve yet and so xie can’t call herself that, but hey, xie’s deity of Time, as if xie had to do things in order.
[2] In a way, this is true of all stories. If the thematics work out you can pull basically anything, no matter how improbable. Don’t worry, making the fourth wall suddenly a vital symbolic element in-universe is a speciality of mine.
[3] See also: conceptual entities. Sentient creatures that don’t exist outside the concept of themselves, as imagined by other people. I stole this off Lawrence Miles again, go look up This Town Will Never Let Us Go right tf now pls
[4] IM NEW IM SORRY
[5] I feel like this needs more clarification - if gods live off of thematics rather than truth, and thematics are at heart a human (and by extension, dragon) concept, then they cannot survive without mortal minds to conceive of them. So, if the deities stayed as incomprehensible as they presumably must be, to fight something like the Shade, they would perish very quickly; if they are inconceivable than they cannot be conceived. So they have to be symbols, have to find an element and a part of the world to represent; like all gods, they have to reconstruct themselves as metaphors for someth
[6] Or deep space, if you prefer.
[7] ‘Metaphysical submarine’ is unambiguously the best phrase I have ever written and it’s going to be my new blog description in a minute.
[8] I’m both.
[9] Vitally, though, because xie isn’t truly nonlinear, xie can’t see xir own future - so really, we’re even. Yup, this is stupidly complex, welcome to trying to think about six-dimensional concepts with a four-dimensional brain.
[10] It’s a Doctor Who thing. Lovecraftian entity-slash-force-of-nature that battles the anthropomorphic (or, technically, the pythiapomorphic) personifications of the laws of time at the beginning of the universe. Shh.
[11] Some of you may be reminded of River Song. This is not a coincidence, although I’m thinking more along the lines of whatshisface in the City of the Saved.
[12] hey if i can’t swear i gotta make do ya know (yeah, i swear by fictional dr.who deities have i reached peak nerd yet)
[13] I’m descending into technobabble again aren't I
[14] Pick your preferred metaphor: nautical or aeronautical. Neither is remotely accurate. Yeah. Sorry.
voiceoflightcity wrote on 2017-05-05:
@ Nalora holy **** that is cool im yelling
also, update, ive changed my mind on the eyes: they should be yellow, until you look closely, and then they're actually glass globes full of swirling sand, and then you look closer, and then every grain of sand is actually a star, and between the stars is nothing but raw time
and then you stumble away with a hell of a headache and still not sure what color that actually is
also, update, ive changed my mind on the eyes: they should be yellow, until you look closely, and then they're actually glass globes full of swirling sand, and then you look closer, and then every grain of sand is actually a star, and between the stars is nothing but raw time
and then you stumble away with a hell of a headache and still not sure what color that actually is
voiceoflightcity wrote on 2017-05-09:
@ starblaziing oh gosh hi hello how are you
i’m so sorry i missed all this i was using the sleep but !!! GOOD IDEAS
it’s early and i’m only technically awake so uhhh i’ll be even more incomprehensible than usual probably bear with me
re: time magic: that is a DAMN GOOD POINT and i love you (also it reminds me of faction paradox but i should really shut up about faction paradox) and as far as im concerned it’s absolutely canon now. although, actually, it occurs to me that in the model i’ve been working with it’d probably be a different kind of warping than time dragons do naturally? let me put my arcane hat on i gotta think through this
i meeeean; what time dragons do is, despite appearances, not actually time travel at all; they have no power over time as such, it’s just that they’re made of the stuff. it’s not that they warp (our universes’s) time as much as they are completely independent from it, and we aren’t, so from our limited perspectives they appear to have abilities we don’t when they’re actually just free of the chains we’re in. so to speak. actually it’s kind of similar to the way the TARDIS works (not that she’s any less confusing, especially if you haven’t watched dr.who but uhhh anyway): she’s an independent sub-universe that lies parallel to our own, which means she doesn’t actually travel everywhere in time and space, she already is everywhere in time and space and she’s just changing where she keeps the doors
i got side-tracked
right, but the way i understand magic in the fr verse (i dont understand it very much, symbolism physics is cooler) is that it runs on a traditional limited Think About The Thing And It Happens (using some spiritual resources i.e. breath along the way.) which makes me think that all that it would need to learn to screw with time is a change in perspective - an ability to conceptualize the universe five-dimensionally and Think About It accordingly. combined with the above, i.e. the time flight (short, probably, of the timeteller xirself) doesn’t actually get to screw with time, this means that arcane scholars might theoretically be able to do some much more complex things with time than the flight itself could (i.e. time-loops, stable paradox, flux states…. oh man flux states that could get interesting); they’d just always be limited by their status as, yk, stuck in this universe
unless a time dragon decided to help, which, probably, hell i don’t know they could probably move realities if given enough breath to do it with
tbh i haven’t put much thought into the actual mechanics of a time lair, because i suck, and im only here for the bad metaphysics, but that seems about right
the way i was conceptualizing it though, while the time flight sometimes makes excursions into the wider void, the spaceless Space Beyond, to hunt or to explore or whatever (remind me to yell about how they get their resources actually); their actual home base is sort of. on the surface of sornieth’s universe - i think the comparison i made was barnacles? - because the voidsea is very very wide and very very dark and very very empty and hatchlings especially aren’t yet durable enough for their realities to survive alone in the dark. also, while u can totally sleep in the void, you’ll probably get swallowed by a passing leviathan and nobody wants that
(more on that later)
so anyway i think that dragons of other flights would be able to survive there in the same way the time flight hatchlings would; running off the ragged edges of the larger sornieth universe, staying within the thin aura of reality surrounding it . not to bring back the nautical metaphor, but imagine it like a beach - you can enter the ocean, you can talk to the naiads, as long as you stay where you can keep your head above water. it’s going to be a curiously uncomfortable sort of existence - permanently on the edge of slipping in the sand and drowning before you can get your head back up - but it should work out.
it does make me wonder how this would be perceived by a normal 4-D being like you and… like you; the thing is of course that we aren’t really equipped to perceive movement along the fifth (‘otherwards’) axis, and so if they do keep their lairs halfway in normal space we might just see… half the lair, and not notice when the distortion thereby produced actually leads us out of normal reality. which is basically what you said with the 5th-dimensional intersection isnt it darn
(although im pretty sure the ‘we can only see them as piles of sand’ is just the eggs)
yeah, that seems to work out: in the conventional three dimensions, it looks like a normal lair; it behaves very strangely in the fourth (time); and it’s actually shifted quite a bit along the fifth axis but normal beings can’t usually tell
unless, perhaps, they decide to drag you kata (ana and kata are five-d left and right) to show you, in which case your brains would probably short out and either 1) present you with a symbolic representation of what’s going on, which would look something like a city built on the side of a glass bubble with endless empty space above (there are stars, but there’s something strange about them, the way they move in the not-sky, the way they sometimes blink, like eyes); i expect the lack of reality would translate as a lack of oxygen, so you’re sort of always out of breath, or b) you’d see it for what it is and you’d just straight-up burn out your own mind, lovecraft style
uhhh. this got long again, ****
more ideas:
what do they actually eat, anyway? do they have to eat? do they survive on raw time? it’d have to be raw reality, wouldn’t it, to keep their own mini-reality going? so they can leach it off the normal universe - presumably by gathering and/or fighting for normal foodstuffs in the same way other clans do, except that they actually subsist on the hard existence of the object rather than, like, calories - or they can look for it in - oh no ive just had an Idea
leviathan hunting
i characterized them as predatory universes earlier, but of course that applies as much to the dragons as to the monsters; a cannibalistic reality-eat-reality world, and a dead leviathan can keep a clan fed for…. years, probably, speaking relative to sornieth time, although of course the term is meaningless in the Space Beyond
but imagine - they hunt in packs, with barbed spears made of paradox and knives made of shade-darkness and boats made of legends (not boats at all, but again bear with me for the length of this [shift voice] damned nautical metaphor) and they are small but they are many and they will not stop, dragging the leviathan down and tearing it apart tooth and shriek and claw; bring the bloody shreds of reality back home to their hatchlings and watch them swallow up every last still-screaming bit of the multiversal monster with gusto and glee, dark unreality stained around their mouths, and the non-timeflight dragons try the stuff nervously and find that it’s somehow quite nourishing despite not seeming to exist in the normal sense; it doesn’t feed you, but it makes you realer, which is especially useful when you’re living in a lair where you’re always too close to falling out of the universe entirely and ceasing to exist
(also, do the leviathans count as part of the beastclans? probably not, but it’s A Concept)
also, re: time flight being OP (which it is)
i think the best angle to play on that, to give them more Problems(™) to keep them down, is that really the void is not a very nice place to live??? Literally the only reason they make their homes outside of reality is because reality drove them out, because whatever actually happened to the timeteller in the dawn-times was awful enough that xie literally could not survive in that same universe. they’re a hardy people, a permanently desperate people, a hunted people; always on edge, always alone, always moving. sharks in the water; a stagnant universe is a dead universe. they feel smothered in sornieth, time too tight and layered and undeniable around them; they’re lost in the space beyond, a space that for all the adaptation they’ve done no dragon is truly equipped to survive in, always on the edge of suffocating on the nonexistence past the universe, never really managing to communicate with each other or with anyone else - i mean, they’re each their own independent universe, but it’s a universe with a population of one.
imagine how lonely that must be.
shhhhhhh you’re doing fine it’s all about the symbolism anyway not the logic remember
...
...well oTHER TAKE IT I WROTE AN ESSAY AGAIN
i rlly dont have time to proofread this so it's just going to be Like This i guess im so sorry
love from the voice of light city
i’m so sorry i missed all this i was using the sleep but !!! GOOD IDEAS
it’s early and i’m only technically awake so uhhh i’ll be even more incomprehensible than usual probably bear with me
re: time magic: that is a DAMN GOOD POINT and i love you (also it reminds me of faction paradox but i should really shut up about faction paradox) and as far as im concerned it’s absolutely canon now. although, actually, it occurs to me that in the model i’ve been working with it’d probably be a different kind of warping than time dragons do naturally? let me put my arcane hat on i gotta think through this
i meeeean; what time dragons do is, despite appearances, not actually time travel at all; they have no power over time as such, it’s just that they’re made of the stuff. it’s not that they warp (our universes’s) time as much as they are completely independent from it, and we aren’t, so from our limited perspectives they appear to have abilities we don’t when they’re actually just free of the chains we’re in. so to speak. actually it’s kind of similar to the way the TARDIS works (not that she’s any less confusing, especially if you haven’t watched dr.who but uhhh anyway): she’s an independent sub-universe that lies parallel to our own, which means she doesn’t actually travel everywhere in time and space, she already is everywhere in time and space and she’s just changing where she keeps the doors
i got side-tracked
right, but the way i understand magic in the fr verse (i dont understand it very much, symbolism physics is cooler) is that it runs on a traditional limited Think About The Thing And It Happens (using some spiritual resources i.e. breath along the way.) which makes me think that all that it would need to learn to screw with time is a change in perspective - an ability to conceptualize the universe five-dimensionally and Think About It accordingly. combined with the above, i.e. the time flight (short, probably, of the timeteller xirself) doesn’t actually get to screw with time, this means that arcane scholars might theoretically be able to do some much more complex things with time than the flight itself could (i.e. time-loops, stable paradox, flux states…. oh man flux states that could get interesting); they’d just always be limited by their status as, yk, stuck in this universe
unless a time dragon decided to help, which, probably, hell i don’t know they could probably move realities if given enough breath to do it with
starblaziing wrote on 2017-05-09:
I'm guessing they don't - at least not fully. Maybe they'd only be able to perceive part of it, like how part of a 3-D figure can be seen from a 2-D perspective, if that makes sense? I think someone mentioned normal dragons only being able to see piles of sand, the symbolic representation of time, where 5th dimensional/time lairs intersected with 3rd dimensional Sorineth. Or if you consider time lairs to be outside the boundaries of Sorineth's universe altogether, I don't think they'd even be able to exist in such an environment, let alone comprehend it.
tbh i haven’t put much thought into the actual mechanics of a time lair, because i suck, and im only here for the bad metaphysics, but that seems about right
the way i was conceptualizing it though, while the time flight sometimes makes excursions into the wider void, the spaceless Space Beyond, to hunt or to explore or whatever (remind me to yell about how they get their resources actually); their actual home base is sort of. on the surface of sornieth’s universe - i think the comparison i made was barnacles? - because the voidsea is very very wide and very very dark and very very empty and hatchlings especially aren’t yet durable enough for their realities to survive alone in the dark. also, while u can totally sleep in the void, you’ll probably get swallowed by a passing leviathan and nobody wants that
(more on that later)
so anyway i think that dragons of other flights would be able to survive there in the same way the time flight hatchlings would; running off the ragged edges of the larger sornieth universe, staying within the thin aura of reality surrounding it . not to bring back the nautical metaphor, but imagine it like a beach - you can enter the ocean, you can talk to the naiads, as long as you stay where you can keep your head above water. it’s going to be a curiously uncomfortable sort of existence - permanently on the edge of slipping in the sand and drowning before you can get your head back up - but it should work out.
it does make me wonder how this would be perceived by a normal 4-D being like you and… like you; the thing is of course that we aren’t really equipped to perceive movement along the fifth (‘otherwards’) axis, and so if they do keep their lairs halfway in normal space we might just see… half the lair, and not notice when the distortion thereby produced actually leads us out of normal reality. which is basically what you said with the 5th-dimensional intersection isnt it darn
(although im pretty sure the ‘we can only see them as piles of sand’ is just the eggs)
yeah, that seems to work out: in the conventional three dimensions, it looks like a normal lair; it behaves very strangely in the fourth (time); and it’s actually shifted quite a bit along the fifth axis but normal beings can’t usually tell
unless, perhaps, they decide to drag you kata (ana and kata are five-d left and right) to show you, in which case your brains would probably short out and either 1) present you with a symbolic representation of what’s going on, which would look something like a city built on the side of a glass bubble with endless empty space above (there are stars, but there’s something strange about them, the way they move in the not-sky, the way they sometimes blink, like eyes); i expect the lack of reality would translate as a lack of oxygen, so you’re sort of always out of breath, or b) you’d see it for what it is and you’d just straight-up burn out your own mind, lovecraft style
uhhh. this got long again, ****
more ideas:
what do they actually eat, anyway? do they have to eat? do they survive on raw time? it’d have to be raw reality, wouldn’t it, to keep their own mini-reality going? so they can leach it off the normal universe - presumably by gathering and/or fighting for normal foodstuffs in the same way other clans do, except that they actually subsist on the hard existence of the object rather than, like, calories - or they can look for it in - oh no ive just had an Idea
leviathan hunting
i characterized them as predatory universes earlier, but of course that applies as much to the dragons as to the monsters; a cannibalistic reality-eat-reality world, and a dead leviathan can keep a clan fed for…. years, probably, speaking relative to sornieth time, although of course the term is meaningless in the Space Beyond
but imagine - they hunt in packs, with barbed spears made of paradox and knives made of shade-darkness and boats made of legends (not boats at all, but again bear with me for the length of this [shift voice] damned nautical metaphor) and they are small but they are many and they will not stop, dragging the leviathan down and tearing it apart tooth and shriek and claw; bring the bloody shreds of reality back home to their hatchlings and watch them swallow up every last still-screaming bit of the multiversal monster with gusto and glee, dark unreality stained around their mouths, and the non-timeflight dragons try the stuff nervously and find that it’s somehow quite nourishing despite not seeming to exist in the normal sense; it doesn’t feed you, but it makes you realer, which is especially useful when you’re living in a lair where you’re always too close to falling out of the universe entirely and ceasing to exist
(also, do the leviathans count as part of the beastclans? probably not, but it’s A Concept)
also, re: time flight being OP (which it is)
i think the best angle to play on that, to give them more Problems(™) to keep them down, is that really the void is not a very nice place to live??? Literally the only reason they make their homes outside of reality is because reality drove them out, because whatever actually happened to the timeteller in the dawn-times was awful enough that xie literally could not survive in that same universe. they’re a hardy people, a permanently desperate people, a hunted people; always on edge, always alone, always moving. sharks in the water; a stagnant universe is a dead universe. they feel smothered in sornieth, time too tight and layered and undeniable around them; they’re lost in the space beyond, a space that for all the adaptation they’ve done no dragon is truly equipped to survive in, always on the edge of suffocating on the nonexistence past the universe, never really managing to communicate with each other or with anyone else - i mean, they’re each their own independent universe, but it’s a universe with a population of one.
imagine how lonely that must be.
starblaziing wrote on 2017-05-09:
(Take everything above with a grain of salt though, I have yet to take my high school physics class :')
shhhhhhh you’re doing fine it’s all about the symbolism anyway not the logic remember
...
...well oTHER TAKE IT I WROTE AN ESSAY AGAIN
i rlly dont have time to proofread this so it's just going to be Like This i guess im so sorry
love from the voice of light city
casuallySleepy wrote on 2017-05-09:
@ voiceoflightcity
lmao I didn't expected to get summoned but okay here we go
please note my ignorance of time related physics and universe alikeim dum dum ;^;
Let me start here. From various posts that stated the Timeteller is a special isolated sub-universe of her own, and possibly the area around her as well. That would means the Timeteller technically existed on a totally different plane of existence, but visible to others on their own plane. Perhaps she is an exception in space-time continuum, but maybe she could manipulate space and time somehow to prevent the continuum's paradox collapsing on itself on a regular basic.
If that's the case, I'd like to believe that if the Parallel Universe theory applies to Sorneith's physics, Timeteller is essentially everwhere. Maybe one place at the time in the eyes of others, but always existing. Or maybe she exists everywhere simultaneously, patching up or disappearing along with the world she's responsible for. Maybe ten of thousands of Timeteller is now dying or stuck in a time loop. I imagine time as a volatile thing, and even if she's the Timeteller, mistakes do happen and in such case, that parallel world will cease to exist. The space-time continuum may respect her, but there is only so much you can tinker with a paradox and coming out unscathed.
With going through the time flow in reverse to the past, I think she is going to endanger herself greatly, and may do so as an observer or else risk ceasing to exist at all. The future however is obviously more nice to her. Other than that she can with ease manipulate time such as stopping time or changing its pace.
And oh don't even get me started on time loops they are amazing for Time flight.
Other than that all the thoughts of her are great so far! Especially the thought that she existed on another plane, so her perception of Sorneith is different. Her territory is everywhere, but uncontested. her subjects are also granted such abilities to exist on a different, but lower plane as well.
Reality can't deal with this anomaly, so the higher plane she goes! Where the reality there can deal with her and her subjects, but it must've been a painful and abstract place to live in. Perhaps that's the reason she's composed with nothing but dense pockets of reality (read: sand. Something physical lmao), because the higher plane's abstract nature can not deal with matter of the lower plane, so she's basically shredded to pieces by reality.
okay its 1am here im not making much sense am i
lmao I didn't expected to get summoned but okay here we go
please note my ignorance of time related physics and universe alike
Quote:
she’s an independent sub-universe that lies parallel to our own, which means she doesn’t actually travel everywhere in time and space, she already is everywhere in time and space and she’s just changing where she keeps the doors
Let me start here. From various posts that stated the Timeteller is a special isolated sub-universe of her own, and possibly the area around her as well. That would means the Timeteller technically existed on a totally different plane of existence, but visible to others on their own plane. Perhaps she is an exception in space-time continuum, but maybe she could manipulate space and time somehow to prevent the continuum's paradox collapsing on itself on a regular basic.
If that's the case, I'd like to believe that if the Parallel Universe theory applies to Sorneith's physics, Timeteller is essentially everwhere. Maybe one place at the time in the eyes of others, but always existing. Or maybe she exists everywhere simultaneously, patching up or disappearing along with the world she's responsible for. Maybe ten of thousands of Timeteller is now dying or stuck in a time loop. I imagine time as a volatile thing, and even if she's the Timeteller, mistakes do happen and in such case, that parallel world will cease to exist. The space-time continuum may respect her, but there is only so much you can tinker with a paradox and coming out unscathed.
With going through the time flow in reverse to the past, I think she is going to endanger herself greatly, and may do so as an observer or else risk ceasing to exist at all. The future however is obviously more nice to her. Other than that she can with ease manipulate time such as stopping time or changing its pace.
And oh don't even get me started on time loops they are amazing for Time flight.
Other than that all the thoughts of her are great so far! Especially the thought that she existed on another plane, so her perception of Sorneith is different. Her territory is everywhere, but uncontested. her subjects are also granted such abilities to exist on a different, but lower plane as well.
Quote:
Literally the only reason they make their homes outside of reality is because reality drove them out
Reality can't deal with this anomaly, so the higher plane she goes! Where the reality there can deal with her and her subjects, but it must've been a painful and abstract place to live in. Perhaps that's the reason she's composed with nothing but dense pockets of reality (read: sand. Something physical lmao), because the higher plane's abstract nature can not deal with matter of the lower plane, so she's basically shredded to pieces by reality.
voiceoflightcity wrote on 2017-05-09:
@ casuallySleepy oh man okay that's An Angle
i was going more for 'exile' than 'actively hostile' but that's sure a way to do it
okay im going to devolve into physics talk probably because u seem like u can handle it, lmao, everyone else pls excuse me
just the timeteller, not the area around xir (apparel or whatever might get taken with, the divide is symbolic rather than practical, see my essay on metaphor in gods above); notably, however, the split only goes up to 4d and it's only significant in the timelikes
[me voice] aCTUALLY ive already factored in parallel universes - in fact, the model as I originally proposed it was a lawrence-miles-style 8d reality, though i left out the more obscure three of those because they aren’t very relevant to the Timeteller or xir children. that’s the three conventional dimensions, two timelikes (Inner and Outer) two multiversal directions - parawards and alterwards is what I tend to call them, for parallel and alternate worlds respectively - and then otherwards, i.e. the axis upon which realities, multiversal clusters, lie - what i’ve been previously been referring to as the fifth dimension.
the thing about that, however, is that the axis upon which the timeteller and xir children operate is that fifth / eighth / twelfth dimension, otherwards - when i say they travel outside of the sornieth universe, i mean they leave that multiversal cluster entirely, head into the space beyond - and if there are other clusters out there, they won’t resemble yours in anyway (unlike parallels or alternates) including entirely different laws of physic probably
basically: unless u want to change the dimensionality entirely, there can’t really be multiple Timetellers, because xie left all that, xie lives outside the ravages and impossibilities and multiplicities of time
tbh you’d be surprised
you can get away with an awful lot if you frame it right (see also: that faction paradox thing i keep mentioning)
well, it looks like xie’s manipulating time, but that’s really the very foundation of the mythos: xie isn’t changing time, xie is entirely separate from it. unless im misunderstanding you?
hmm. i suppose that’s one way to conceptualize it? really, it doesn’t intersect with your usual three dimensions much at all; while xir subjects live on a plane sort of… tangent to yours, but xie holds court in Space Beyond, i’m pretty sure; to consult xir, other dragons or deities must either build themselves a Brakespeare-style vessel, probably constructed from legend, or convince a lot of time flight dragons to help, to provide them with enough reality to survive until they arrive in the Timeteller’s aura.
actually, tbh, there are probably time flight lairs on the Timeteller too, as a sort of smaller but more powerful version of the nests on the shores of Sornieth-as-a-multiversal-cluster. that sentence doesn’t make sense but it also isn’t relevant i’ll phrase it better later
im confused i thought she was sand because of the symbolism (?)
@ Thiedo HEYYY IT’S FOUR
that’s my eventual goal on this site, tbh, once i get a coli team going: make dragons for each other drs, as in @ laurelhach’s dragonverse - i’ve been doodling around on the scrying workshop for a while, look here’s sixie
NEVER MIND LINK WON'T WORK just imagine a colorblind trash heap in red and blue and yellow and purple and... you get the idea
what a dork i love them
@ Amyatzu funnily enough they actually are, indirectly, although it’s certainly not the time that Sornieth runs on; im too tired to explain it again but im pretty sure ive spouted that bit of technobabble at least fifteen times by now /shrug
love from the voice of light city
i was going more for 'exile' than 'actively hostile' but that's sure a way to do it
okay im going to devolve into physics talk probably because u seem like u can handle it, lmao, everyone else pls excuse me
casuallySleepy wrote on 2017-05-09:
From various posts that stated the Timeteller is a special isolated sub-universe of her own, and possibly the area around her as well.
just the timeteller, not the area around xir (apparel or whatever might get taken with, the divide is symbolic rather than practical, see my essay on metaphor in gods above); notably, however, the split only goes up to 4d and it's only significant in the timelikes
casuallySleepy wrote on 2017-05-09:
[..] that if the Parallel Universe theory applies to Sorneith's physics
[me voice] aCTUALLY ive already factored in parallel universes - in fact, the model as I originally proposed it was a lawrence-miles-style 8d reality, though i left out the more obscure three of those because they aren’t very relevant to the Timeteller or xir children. that’s the three conventional dimensions, two timelikes (Inner and Outer) two multiversal directions - parawards and alterwards is what I tend to call them, for parallel and alternate worlds respectively - and then otherwards, i.e. the axis upon which realities, multiversal clusters, lie - what i’ve been previously been referring to as the fifth dimension.
the thing about that, however, is that the axis upon which the timeteller and xir children operate is that fifth / eighth / twelfth dimension, otherwards - when i say they travel outside of the sornieth universe, i mean they leave that multiversal cluster entirely, head into the space beyond - and if there are other clusters out there, they won’t resemble yours in anyway (unlike parallels or alternates) including entirely different laws of physic probably
basically: unless u want to change the dimensionality entirely, there can’t really be multiple Timetellers, because xie left all that, xie lives outside the ravages and impossibilities and multiplicities of time
casuallySleepy wrote on 2017-05-09:
The space-time continuum may respect her, but there is only so much you can tinker with a paradox and coming out unscathed.
tbh you’d be surprised
you can get away with an awful lot if you frame it right (see also: that faction paradox thing i keep mentioning)
casuallySleepy wrote on 2017-05-09:
Other than that she can with ease manipulate time such as stopping time or changing its pace.
well, it looks like xie’s manipulating time, but that’s really the very foundation of the mythos: xie isn’t changing time, xie is entirely separate from it. unless im misunderstanding you?
casuallySleepy wrote on 2017-05-09:
Her territory is everywhere, but uncontested.
hmm. i suppose that’s one way to conceptualize it? really, it doesn’t intersect with your usual three dimensions much at all; while xir subjects live on a plane sort of… tangent to yours, but xie holds court in Space Beyond, i’m pretty sure; to consult xir, other dragons or deities must either build themselves a Brakespeare-style vessel, probably constructed from legend, or convince a lot of time flight dragons to help, to provide them with enough reality to survive until they arrive in the Timeteller’s aura.
actually, tbh, there are probably time flight lairs on the Timeteller too, as a sort of smaller but more powerful version of the nests on the shores of Sornieth-as-a-multiversal-cluster. that sentence doesn’t make sense but it also isn’t relevant i’ll phrase it better later
casuallySleepy wrote on 2017-05-09:
Perhaps that's the reason she's composed with nothing but dense pockets of reality (read: sand. Something physical lmao),
im confused i thought she was sand because of the symbolism (?)
@ Thiedo HEYYY IT’S FOUR
that’s my eventual goal on this site, tbh, once i get a coli team going: make dragons for each other drs, as in @ laurelhach’s dragonverse - i’ve been doodling around on the scrying workshop for a while, look here’s sixie
NEVER MIND LINK WON'T WORK just imagine a colorblind trash heap in red and blue and yellow and purple and... you get the idea
what a dork i love them
@ Amyatzu funnily enough they actually are, indirectly, although it’s certainly not the time that Sornieth runs on; im too tired to explain it again but im pretty sure ive spouted that bit of technobabble at least fifteen times by now /shrug
love from the voice of light city
