― ✧ ―

❝We began as wanderers,

and we are wanderers still.

We have lingered long enough

on the shores of the cosmic ocean. 

We are ready at last

to set sail for the stars.❞

― CARL SAGAN

✧･ﾟ: * ═══════════════ *:･ﾟ✧

𝐖𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐈𝐒 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄?

Perhaps in the rawest, most primitive sense it is an illusion, a human construct foolishly attempting to measure the irrefutable concept of change - only mankind could ever mold something that brings its creator so much pain. Poets with mulberry paper skin like satin and ink of condensed smoke penned its laws, revolutionaries with twisting iron gears for conscience and twin-vacuum irises which consume the world raw sculpted its vision, and architects of methodical perception brought forth its lore to the gullible masses. But for all its torched silver and tantalizing, tarnished gold, time is simply so that we don't forget the aching, glossy-lipped children we were before, so that we can predict the whip-fanged horrors we will become. Rather decadently innocent, is it not? No one sees the harm in what is born as a plea for knowledge, a grasp at the unreachable land called infinity with calloused palms, an attempt to explain the unexplainable and conjure comfort for the wandering soul within a galaxy that cannot stop bleeding.

Yet only harm will come, for time never deserved to become demonized beyond repair, to be seen only as something trickling endlessly down a drain and burning to cinders which shall never resurrect. Brittle bones snapping, newborns screaming, all breaking like poorly tempered glass as life itself rushes towards a final end, towards a cataclysm of shattering existence. That is time, the universe whispers, fear her.

And like an artist who rips through years of brush-stroked canvas with a single furious strike, humanity has brought their greatest achievement of fermented imagination to ruin. We have carved out our own destruction from weeping willows and glinting cherry, for change has become poison to the stagnant nature of organisms. Time, in its evolutionary nature, has always been impending, unalterable, wrenchingly perennial; when people once accepted such inevitability they could be happy in the relative impermanence of themselves, for every sunset must fade into a cusp of apricot embers yet it is still beautiful in ethereal descent. But even the universe's own feverish, insatiable quest for balance is not spared from this one truth: dread and vanity corrupt all.

Time has been cursed more than death, as a thief, a dictator, the ultimate scarlet-palmed enemy to be fought against with tooth and nail. Who can blame her for living up to such brutal presumption, for becoming the rotting, heartless monster all expects her to be? The mortal can never seem to relinquish the thrill of battling deities, and so they have filled their cornucopias up to the brim with war, woven morality overflowing with blinding chaos and blazing charcoal.

It is children of flesh and bone, those congealed with specks of celestial dust and the frailty of fate's tears, who believe they can conquer the far greater incarnations of themselves. They always forget each failure of the past with reckless convenience, shunning the certain disaster to come. Time, in her flowing skirts and glowing armor - an angel coated in the molten shell of metal's wrath - will never be overthrown by the likes of such incomprehensibly small and selfish beings. It is a pity for the few who light up the darkness with their pure luminescence and the unparalleled glisten of a hero's spirit; even for them, her sympathy remains under hidden lock and key.

Much like the ones who designed her first breath, time does not forgive.

And now, as seas of the cosmos churn with reforged tides, new meaning embodies her vengeful presence, volcanized in her onyx-clouded gaze. Her scarlet veins pulse as a spiderweb of detached heartstrings, hatred oozes from her tear ducts with tarred marrow, her fists pound even the most valiant bursts of vivacity to dust.  The tender hands of far too many healers have tried to soothe time, to ease and seduce her into a soft goodnight, yet to quell such threadbare agony is futile. Each breath is a fireball which laces and smolders, petrifying, gauging, haunting all in its wake. And the rage within her core will never be extinguished, for time is no longer destiny.

𝐒𝐇𝐄 𝐈𝐒 𝐃𝐎𝐎𝐌.

― ✧ ―