TIME IS FICKLE, ever changing and flowing, ebbing like the sea. A vast ocean of moments brushing against the next, rippling beneath waters both turgid and calm. It slips between our fingers when we wish to hold it, yet moves with sluggish stubbornness when we seek to flee it, riding upon our shoulders like an oppressive yoke. Time is a burden we cannot escape. Our lives are swallowed in the cold, dark waters of its unfathomable depths; never to be remembered or recalled, fading like a whisper that never was. On occasion—a very rare occasion—one moment will brush against the next and a spark will flare to life that refuses to be extinguished. This is the moment, the spark, and this is how the end begins for a shattered realm—with a small nymphling who was cold.
“The Supreme Grand Master smiled in the depths of his robes. It was amazing, this mystic business. You tell them a lie, and then when you don’t need it any more you tell them another lie and tell them they’re progressing along the road to wisdom. Then instead of laughing, they follow you even more, hoping that at the heart of all the lies they’ll find the truth. And bit by bit they accept the unacceptable. Amazing.”
”Vimes had half expected the Scone to explode, or crumble, or flash red-hot. Which was stupid, said a dwindling part of himself – it was a fake, a nonsense, something made in Ankh-Morpork for money, something that had already cost lives. It was not, it could not be real.
But in the roaring air he knew that it was, for all who needed to believe, and in a belief so strong that truth was not the same as fact … he knew that for now, and yesterday, and tomorrow, both the thing, and the whole of the thing.”
Terry Pratchett (2000), “The Fifth Elephant”, London: Transworld Publishers, Corgi Books
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