Changes

  The rivers of any Mansus flow swiftly and deeply. And so it is with Time to the Clepsydrae. A blurring unity to our ancestors it was thusly broken by the Clepsydrae, that all might see its divisions for what they were, moments. Thus was she the division by which time might be moments, and a lifetime be memories. And thus was she frozen that they might cherish the floes upon the river, stillness to be grasped in the rushing of all others. And thus was she the caretaker of the forgotten, clipping them from the flow that they might once more be remembered. And thus was she the guardian of the lost and the broken, that they might know wholeness. And thus has she gone, that the Collision might not be. Yet a Name remains to speak of those floes, out of hate or love none might say. Yet he waits for that moment, praying and cursing a return unknown.

  When Stone had laid flat like an ocean floor, time had been a deluge. It carved floors into mountains, the earth into sky, the Clepsydrae into wading. There she dredged for that eroded sediment that had sat like silt and sand under the auspices of time. She would gather up these sands that would slip between fingers, even as mountains were raised behind her, even as waters ran to seas, to oceans. Still, she dredged. Gathering all that time had eroded, all that it had drowned. And she froze them, stone in ice, fossils in sand, mortals in undeath. As she has known, in these frozen moments, these divided seconds, ice might float upon the rivers. Even as it died.