Coiled dawn. Serib’s eyes blinked hard as cliffs collapsing eroded onto their shores and all was darkness as a strange liquid surrounded her weightless and she awoke relieved - her feet on the ground again - standing in a similar hall-Hadaean though bright with sunlight through its all-coloured windows. Each complete pane dedicated to the distinct myths of Courtdom’s founding. A roof unfinished and walls unlaid. Her left hand was touching the grandclock even taller, its form polished and anew. Its oak decorated or defaced with runed graffiti.

∞

She pulled her hand away from the construct stunned at her surroundings, and she had a sense that holding on a moment longer would propel her elsewhere yet. The forests of Hadaeon were around her, those ancient trees that made lush the shores of Lake Arruikikn: The Woodlands Old of Gap’elyhond.

No longer in Haven-o’er-Hadaeon, but upon the ground from which the angelic city once had come, she found herself lost.

‘How’ was furthest from her mind as she little believed her senses, squinting in the sunlight, thinking some waking dream had visited her, that Gadail’s salve-tea or the farbark had been too strong.

‘What was in that tea at the lake…’ her thoughts wandered over the ruins that moss and root held together.

With the roof unfinished and walls unlaid, it was either a ruin she stood among or otherwise abandoned plans.

Wildflowers were in bloom everywhere - the ruins indeed of the same Hadaeon-hall she had just been standing in with Gadail and Ithuriya - yet smothered in Spring’s leaves and petals as though having there lain untouched for ages. For a Spring too long.

∞

Question it as she did or may, sunrise otherwise was bright through the unfinished roof as has been said though it must be repeated, as she repeated such thoughts to herself deranged in her uncertainty, trying to understand what was and was not. For a mere touch had flung her so from one place-of-aeon to another. She recalled her training, flexed her toes through the rough grass, saw clear the snowy mountains crowning the warming horizon. Focusing on those details she could realise and return.

She explored. In all rocks of old and brick unused she touched or held there was no sturdiness inherent, no foundation nor frontier for which the element of Earth is to shamans known. Even pebbles in her pocket, those Gadail took from her back at the lake, would not have helped her remain grounded. The windows were perhaps the closest thing, yet far removed with the process of their making.

∞

Awhile Serib stewed in thought until the grandclock, though similarly overgrown with vines and their blooms, began to discordantly chime out its former glory. As one note rang another would start and a third which had not yet begun would end abruptly. Unwelcome she felt ushered to leave, that in her absence would the dire chimes of dissonance cease. All of its inner slime was behind oak and numbered masks she could no longer read.

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Only we know Serib has joined - since the lake or before it, and will join the rest of us - in Timeless aftermath. ‘Aftermath’ the wording Ithuriya had chosen, and so shall I.

∞

Cupping her ears from the chimes grinding unnaturally she walked away from the overgrown hall as to search for answers, as in her heart a dark hope had fully hatched. It seemed not only space she had travelled through with only a touch; she had trespassed through what once was Time’s sole concern. A hope until then and now unthinkable, yet encompassing all she had ever wished for, ever since she was old enough to know her mother’s own fears. If Time was dead then all she feared could be changed - rearranged - and who among us has not considered such reordering, sad with fantasy?

∞

Though as you might imagine, a shaman’s way for which she has been raised, is a bridging between Nature and Human Nature, not a tale of one lording over the other. As far as she knew, all she wished for was a quake unsettling all that was true, against The Truth which had made possible cities soaring O’er worlds rather than Upon them, and had dispelled tumultuous ages dark before her own. The Truth from which the stars and their darkness first spun: Reality and its laws ultimate.

∞

And which of these wonders Human or otherwise would have been possible without Time’s pass? Without mistakes by Hindsight's comfort discovered and discarded? Without ideas allowed to die through discourse, for is that not what separates us from the rest?

How else could Courtdom have cured itself out of an age when Humanity was ruled by Need? Another tale for another tome, how Greed’s age followed, when Need’s mouth at last was shut.

Cured, Serib knew, though in so curing Humanity had found a new uncertainty to resolve, and shamans more than ever were in demand. Entertainers as well; of all things what a strange pairing.

∞

Threading back to our tale here, what did Serib care for floating cities and all they symbolised? Better she thought if the angels had nothing of crawl or prowl upon the earth to fear at all. Her thoughts dwelled not on wonders but on suffering and pain, on the loss of wonders as is Time’s impermanent, yet infinite way.

Dwelled on the future loss of Old Gadail.

∞

Time flowed always with Entropy, whose name Gadail once had said, had a different meaning in a different age, though she knew well enough it was Time and Entropy that had given her master to her and would take him away. They had already taken her family away, or her away from them, lest her shamanic traits untrained become ‘a hole or wound in the order of things.’

All these - the scenes of Reality’s nameless frames.

All these - the reality Chaos, Chance and Change have made of their happenstance without design.

∞

It is here or there in that forest Serib found herself and some believe, that she began to confuse Tragedy and Evil. For Evil was conquered when Falsehood fell under Courtdom’s ways gone with Need’s hungering aeon; and hearts as hers and Lillian’s were left with one enemy.

A tragedy incurable of the human fable, that shamans and entertainers were helping to ease as the new age found its footing.

Do we not always want more and more?

∞

Time’s disappearance had shown only sadness to her among the angels-Hadaean - sadness that the disappearance perhaps had already happened, sadness that it perhaps had not - and never could. And so with dark notions she went, her coiled heart marred and all at once certain of two extremes.

‘Time is missing - what now?’ she asked herself striding through the woodland-murk, her own master and student, and Gadail’s faith went with her.