Work Text:
Time is fluid.
That fluid is information.
That information clusters, and becomes overlapping narratives.
Narratives are change.
Change is transformation.
Transformation is the wheel of the future.
Control the narrative.
Control the transformation.
Control… the future.
- "Mary (Jessica Singer)" Hello Helen, The Ballad Of Lost Hollow Act 3, by Paul Shapera
Time was an odd thing in the multiverse.
Wholly nonlinear and completely baffling. You enter a world at one point in time and the next time you visit the point will be a complete mystery. Will the friends you made during your last visit be alive? Who knows! Is that because they're dead or just because they haven't been born yet?
The only people who seemed to have any semblance of control over the when of entering a narrative strand were the gods, and even then, whether they actually had this control or were just better at either guessing when they'd arrive or pretending that it was exactly when they'd intended, no one was really sure.
It was, because of this, completely possible to run into yourself. And not alternate versions of yourself - though that was common too - but past and future versions of yourself.
Luckily, you only risked this while inside a narrative. Outside of AUs time seemed to move in what seemed to be a slightly more linear fashion at least.
Which of course, begged the question. What if there was a next level up - an omniverse?
Okay, at some point you had to stop thinking too hard, or you'd be stuck in a never ending cycle of hypothetical next levels.
How long you spent in an AU had absolutely no bearing on how long you would be missing from the spaces between them. A five minute check of an AU could take "days" in relation to the time of the antivoid. Which by definition did not have time, instead existing as every conceivable thing, in every conceivable time. But the denizens had mostly come to some sort of agreement about how to measure time.
Those who lived outside of reality were varied.
Those who resided in the Omega region generally just stayed there, never straying far as they built an ever expanding city. The vast emptiness would drive a typical person crazy, if you looked for too long, and none were particularly enthusiastic about the idea of losing their minds.
Yet others would find an isolated area of the antivoid, and call it their home, building structures of some description, so that they could find it later (Nightmare, for example, built a large castle, where Error was content to just surround himself with strings)
And the final kind of antivoid denizen did not make their home there at all - they would instead travel between narratives, for all manner of reasons. Some stepping between them quickly, spending no more than a few days in any one narrative, while others would stay in one narrative for a few years before moving on when they had no other options.
Dream was convinced his brother wanted to kill him and was pursuing him through the multiverse - his brother was more concerned with staying out of any narratives, not wanting to risk losing massive amounts of time on that particular headache when he could get a much less painful one if he stayed home, with the other people he had brought there.
Blue was from one particular narrative found in a certain region, and had bounced between several nearly narratives, and started traveling with Dream after a lot of failure. He hadn't meant to leave his AU in the first place, and now he had no idea how to find his way back. No one had explained how blurry time was to him so, of course, he'd probably visited the correct narrative strand several times over without realizing, never hitting the right point in time. It was worth noting that he was, however, one of the rare people who could exist in the antivoid and retain his sanity - and not because there was no sanity left for him to lose.
So yes, time in the multiverse tended to be a very difficult thing to explain, harder to comprehend, and maddening to actually experience.
And that was before considering reincarnation, which no one was really sure of the extent of, beyond the fact that it was as tricky to pin down as the narratives themselves. People could reincarnate between strands, obviously, a person's life was a number of smaller narrative strands making up a whole, and less obviously, between AUs.
All of this was as unconstrained as time. You could reincarnate as someone you knew, or even go thousands of years forward or backwards, and that was just if you stayed in your own AU.