Chapter 26: The Time Paradox

Movement One — What Time Wants From Us

Time. What is it, and what does it actually want from the rest of us who have to live inside it?

I don't think anyone has ever properly asked that question before, or if they have, I haven't been told about it, which in a narrator amounts to more or less the same thing. I might know more of the answer than I'm letting on. I generally do. But I've made something of a habit, across every one of these accounts, of telling you only as much as the story actually needs, and I don't intend to break that habit tonight, however tempting it is to show off a little of what I've picked up along the way.

Consider, for a moment, what time actually does to the people living inside this household — how differently it moves for each of them, despite all of them sharing the same gray, patient stretch of afterlife. For Vesalia, time has always felt like something to survive rather than something to inhabit, each century simply another distance put between herself and the worst of what happened to her, never quite far enough. For Wren, it has settled into something closer to a private joke — she genuinely cannot tell you, if you ask her plainly, how many years she and Eremos have shared, only that it was somewhere past the second century that she finally stopped bothering to count. For Flora, time barely registers as a concept at all in the ordinary sense; she measures her existence less by years than by the specific texture of moments, the particular gold of a given afternoon, the particular warmth of a given conversation, stacking one against another the way a person stacks stones rather than the way a person reads a calendar.

This book was originally published on NovelPhoenix. Check it out there for the real experience.

And for Iris, time does something else again — something none of the rest of them, however long-lived, can properly understand, because none of the rest of them have ever had to hold the past, the present, and the future all at once, the way she sometimes does, on the nights her own vast attention slips its usual careful containment and shows her more than she asked to see. I think this one is better told from where Flora and Iris were standing, rather than from anywhere I could stand myself. So let's start there.

Flora looked at Iris, who was looking at a mirror that held nothing in it but her own lovely reflection.