Work Text:
Time, a Visualisation:
On Tapestry Units, Thread-Hoppers, and Time as a Singular Tapestry
Ephimeziler Asotin[1] and Jean-Richard Opame[2]
Peacespinner’s Institute of Theoretical Space
Department of Peradventures
House of the Arcane and Eldritch, Circadia Council Library
With Special thanks to Grego Of-The-Flowers for his work on materials
Seventeenth Day, Third Month, Second Season, 1321 NR
I have made no small study of Time in my many experiences. Popular contemporary thought sometimes places Time as a long line, with a definite past and a continuing future. Other theories suggest Time as something like a branching tree, different choices splitting off into other places, never crossing paths, only splitting into more and more specificity.
In my many studies of both literature on the subject and data from varying levels of advisable experiments, along with my own unique and occasionally unfortunate relationship with Time, I have formed a, what I believe to be, better, or at least, more accurate, form of which to imagine Time.
To start off with, Time, as a singular concept, is rather a misnomer, as the idea of Time as one cohesive thing is a rather inaccurate way of looking at it. What is happening to a particular being right now is not like what may be happening to a character in a book, where there is only one way the book has been written. This is actually a rather good example of what Time is not, Time is not a book, with a definite start and eventual end, where you can stop and easily analyze what it is that led a certain character to a certain place. Time and Fate are not so intertwined as is commonly believed, there is little assurance in any place or with any being, the book has not been written waiting to be read. Rather, Time is most like a complex three dimensional tapestry. I would say a large knot of thread in shape, but not nearly as chaotic nor is it only one thread. A mass of uncountable threads weaving around and through and up and down, woven so tightly together that to remove one would be completely impossible. It is mostly rather uniform, but in certain places there is much looping and knotting so that the weave appears more of an abstract sort of lacework than the neat lines of tapestry.
When I first explained the tapestry unit imagery to a few other scholars, they assumed that each thread in the imagining was a time stream, a concept evolved out of the initial Time as a long line theory, where each dimension, as it is called, has its own events, and where the threads intersect were events that could not be bypassed, somewhat jokingly referred to as canon events. This was a common, but incorrect assumption. My theory is much less inevitable. Each of the threads in the tapestry unit is a being[i][3] and each being is a thread that interacts with many, many others, and the interfaces of those meetings shift other threads into meeting other threads who in turn nudge others. Sometimes the interactions are jarring, causing loops and snags, but most often they cause only gentle shifts. This theory is much more being-centric. We influence our setting, we, as beings, change the very face of our tapestry unit, though the change on a large scale takes a very long time. The treads are not static, woven in their complex pattern, but constantly snaking along, shifting and knitting and changing the patterns near them, which in turn affect the ones near them in a sort of ripple effect. It is all about choices, not about predestination.
The tapestry unit appears, at first glance, to be self contained, and to a certain extent it is. The threads tend to stay in their own area, changing the tapestry unit as a whole through a myriad of ripple effects only. However, tapestry units are not Time. The tapestry units are more like universes, where very little outside an individual universe affects that which is within it, and very little outside an individual universe leaves to affect others. However, very little is not nothing. Notable beings have done so, but most often it is the universes, the tapestry units themselves, that shift things outside. For each tapestry unit is, itself, another thread in another tapestry, and this tapestry of a size and complexity beyond comprehension is Time.
To summarize so far, beings are threads that interact with other threads through choices that form universes, and these universes themselves are threads in an even more incomprehensible tapestry that forms Time itself. The tapestry of Time is much more uniform than the universe tapestry units, because each tapestry unit universe moves along at a slower pace, because it itself is moved by trillions upon trillions of being-threads, and enough being-threads rarely shift together to cause significant change to their universe for it to be felt outside of it. Again, not impossible, but rare. Individual, extraordinary beings that cross into other tapestry unit universes are much, much more common, even though they are still not common at all. Some universes have many in comparison to most, though I have yet to have heard of a universe without at least one[4]. The universes where these beings are most common have names for them: planeswalker, bounder, and hoid are a few I have heard. Something of note; while these thread-hoppers[5] do cross over to completely different universes, they can only, to my knowledge, cross over only one universe at a time, and cannot skip over several in one go, so the thread-hoppers are also localized, if to a lesser extent than most beings.
What does this mean, though, for the beings in their own tapestry units? What does this mean for the beings in their own space and time? Nothing practically applicable perhaps. The only universes this paper can reach are those already with thread-hoppers, their existence is nothing new, if not well circulated. The value of a good conceptualizing was what I have mostly written about. However, I will end this with a warning. In my research I found evidence of a catastrophe on an unimaginable scale. As best as I can figure out, something happened to a tapestry unit. Something, for a lack of better phrasing, caused a universe to burst. It violently exploded out, jarring the whole of the tapestry of Time, ripping and shredding threads and simply dissolving a large chunk of them. We are still feeling faint vibrations of the effect today. My method of learning of the tapestry of Time[6] was unable to see much of anything around the disaster. Afterwards however, the tapestry was significantly thinner. Over half of the total threads, simply gone. From what I could gather, most would not have even known what happened. So be aware. There are things that can hurt everyone everywhere.
[1] Former Steelstaff, Master of Divination, Master of Forms, Librarian of the Arcane and Eldritch
[2] Student of Theoretical Space, Apprentice Watchmaker
[3] What defines a being is a long-debated topic, but for the purposes of this example a being is something or someone capable of action and/or choice.
[4] Although I very well may have never heard of a universe without one because there would be less than half as many opportunities for me to have heard of it, as the only beings who would be outside the universe with that knowledge would have had to cross into the universe, rather than into or out of. So there is no way to be certain if there are universes without at least one traveller of this kind until one such is found.
[5] Thread-hoppers is the name I used for them before learning of other names, despite the name thread-hoppers being technically incorrect, a holdover from an earlier theory.
[6] My method has been documented in a few of my other papers, specifically Dollux, Watches, and a Family Curse: Time Reactionaries. Essentially I studied others who had tried to see Time as a whole and gone completely insane or died, and modified their method so I could not glimpse any actual information of specifics, only the shape of Time. It was completely overwhelming, but I retained enough wits to continue writing papers on the experience.