Time isn’t an arrow. Nor is it a line. No, dear child. Time... is a map. Sit down and join me by the fire, I shall explain. Most mortals only ever travel in one way. They start upon a point and travel forward from it, never swaying from their straight and narrow path. Stopping is not something they can easily do, and though they dream of it, turning to go back to the days they have left behind them is all but impossible. That is all they can see. A line that stretches from infinity to infinity. The past is locked away and only can be touched through memory, the future can only be reached when it becomes the now, and not before that. But, what if... you could turn and go in a different direction altogether? Choose a path that is neither forward nor back, but to the side? What would it be like? To move sideways in time in a world where most can only ever go in one? Picture this in your head, if you can. A castle built in the midst of a bustling human city, rising up over the towers of steel and glass, a castle of wonder and incredible beauty where Faeries dance and laugh and look out over the world below. You might think that the humans would see this castle, such a huge thing. It has nothing to hide it. No enchantment, no glamour, no disguise at all. Yet, the humans see nothing. The whole city is still and silent, unmoving. Automobiles stopped at lights ever glaring red, pedestrians like statues even as they seem to be in an unmoving hurry, and even birds have paused their flight midair. Time has ceased to move forward. Or... has it? Perhaps our Faerie friends have simply changed direction, stopped moving in the same direction as mortals do, and chosen to head towards a different compass point upon the rose of time’s map. A different destination. To we mere mortals they would only ever seem to exist exactly between 12:30:23 and 12:30:24 of Saturday the 16th of August, 2024. Nestled away into a single moment of our time. Perhaps if we were to visit we might stay a hundred or even a thousand years in their shining halls, and the moment we step back into our time, we find ourselves as aged as the hills, but to all our friends and family, no time at all has passed us by. And of course, we cannot go back. The moment has passed, the gate is forever closed to us, because it lies behind us, like a house we might have passed on the road and cannot turn back to find because the vehicle we are on will not stop. We hardly know where it is we are headed, our future path is a mystery to us, though we have become quite good at guessing. So what of them? Who could say where they are headed. What is their destination? Their future upon that different arrow of time? What seasons could you experience? What secrets might you find in an time that for us exists only within a fraction of a second? Is it still difficult for you to picture? Let us try another thought. What if you were to walk along a pathway in the snowy woods, and you found a large stone wall with a gate of silver set into it. If you were to open the gate and enter through it, you might find a garden of perpetual springtime.
No matter how often you move through the gate it is always springtime. Or something very like springtime. Yet on the outside the seasons change. Summer to Autumn, Winter to Spring, and onward. It would seem that for them, time has paused. Yet it has not. There are changes here and there, slow changes, seasons that turn imperceptibly. A cycle, just like our own, but that looks enough like our springtime at all points of the cycle that we with our mortal eyes could never know its truths. It has merely been moved to the side a little on the map of time, still moving in the same direction as we move, yet somehow just to the side of us, a little further away from the time we know and understand. But hidden castles and gardens of perpetual springtide are not the only things that can be wrought with time. Once again I ask you to picture something in your mind’s eye. A terrible force of power building up within a small vessel. A whirlwind of magic, a maelstrom of devastation and chaos. When it can no longer hold all of that within, the vessel will break, and from it springs all that terrible force, roaring with thunder and winds howling like wild wolves. The powerful storm might persist and grow, ripping up people and objects and even places from their rightful place upon the landscape that is time and pulling it into the hurricane. What would such a strange thing as this look like from the outside? Events that happen out of order, people arriving home from work only to find that they somehow hadn’t even been born to their beloved mother yet, items that end up in the wrong time and place or even multiple places as they get pulled in again and again. Time would look broken and too terrifying to contemplate. To our mortal minds, the inside would be confusing. And there is no guarantee that everything could be set right. Even should we manage to escape the storm, who is to say that we would do so in the right time? We could land in the days of the Romans, or a time long after the death of everyone we know and love. In fact, why must we necessarily land in any part of our own line of time? Were we to be flung far off in a direction facing any other way, we with our mortal minds and abilities would not be able to turn and find the time that is ours, and instead we would wander off in a straight line, following a line of time across an alien world where nothing works as we remember it. Hopefully we are not alone there, or... maybe it would be safer to remain alone. Would it still look like our world? I ask you, what does reality look like in a strange realm between photons of light? Is it dark? Or are there other photon-like things to strike our eyes and create something akin to colors? Is there matter that evolves and changes and vanishes within a fraction of a second? It could be the same as our world, perhaps moving slowly, so slowly. Or it could be entirely alien, our time existing to them only in that one long ago fraction of a second just as they are to us. You seem, my child, like your thoughts are spinning as wildly as that tempest. I’ll leave you with this thought. Time is not an arrow nor a line, but a map. Maps show landscapes that one might explore and traverse if one only knew the way to travel. So the question I have for you is this... If you could travel out across the deepest and strangest reaches of time as we can travel through a physical space, what wonders or fearful things might you discover there in the lands beyond our humble line of time?
