The Breaks in Time

Lower the water levels, see them cast their ships; memory blown across the sea, back to the old continents, the broken ziggurats and cathedrals, shhhhhh…

LISTEN — the echoes of iron prayers.

They sought the Second Age like you seek the Third, clawing back to the magic of primal places, the wellsprings of anima, raw, and powerful.

Scratching through the surface of Agartha they stripped what they needed to construct engines of time. A and B connected by C — WARNING — please keep your extremities inside the tomb. We are now approaching the limit.

The Third Age built machines for every purpose. Their minds strained forward as their hearts clawed back. In the desert, among the remnants of the old cities, they charted where the black holes rotate. They focused their energies, energised their focus.

Harness the machines, reclaim the hocus-pocus!

Countdown to blast back: zero, zero, zero. Cue the cosmological nightmare.

WITNESS — the speed of memory. The boundaries blur.

The time, they are a-changing.

TRANSMIT — Kakudmi and Urashima — RECEIVE — the zero point module — EASY DOES IT — slink past the suns of Caligula — WITNESS — the shifting tides.

The universe is a warped water park. A series of slippery tubes. You’re not the first sweetling to slip back in search of…what? The Primordial Pool? The Big Splash?

Roman sticks and supplies?

Cue the Casimir effect.

Your current curviture breaks the mind but feeds the heart. Oh, sour sweetlings, how you long to change the past. We know the things you did tomorrow. We know the fear, the ache, the sorrow.

You shifted what you’ll go to shift, recall what others will occasion. You saved some then so others die when. it just doesn’t seem fair, will it?

Cue the cause.

Their time tombs were functional, but imperfect. They couldn’t transport them to the pre-break moments they sought. Limited by their construction, limited by cosmic continuities, limited by the need for anima, limited by their conceptions of time.

LIMITED TIME ONLY!

Cue the system of singularities. Peepshows of the past; fuels of the present; bombs of the future. Look long enough and see the void in all things. Every age a snowflake, responding in its own way: the age of paradise; the age of awe, worship and sacrifice; the age of the engine; the age of fear.

Initiate the FNF frequency. Don’t fear It. Fear Nothing. Fear the Foundation. It’s no wonder; they say once you hit four, it’s all downhill from here.

You, of all ages, have so much reason to claw back. So much has been lost.

So feel free to punch your ticket to the past. Go ahead, glance back. Don’t sweat it, sweetling. You won’t turn to salt and you can’t make yourself impossible. History will conserve itself. The continuities will hold.

You’ll slip back as into a dream, sift through the sands of your collective mind map. The best you can hope for is to wake up, suddenly remember where something was buried.

Such sweet scrabbling in the dark. This. The age of what? Fear. Nothing. Stopping the second can’t undo the the first. Nothing would have and nothing will. The one break in time. The greatest event of all. Nothing. It has ripped through all possible past and unmoored the future.

There are no clocks in Tokyo. This is the end, o honeyed friend.

This is the end.