The Ceasures

[PitchDude]

Q: What do you get when a time-traveling tornado chews up a bit of the One Forest?

A: A Ceasure salad!

That joke is like a puissance of formication crawling across my... HEY! Don't touch me!

I am content.

I am Jim.

[Aleksandr]

Following that, why not simply enter a caesure, travel a thousand, two thousand, or even three thousand years into the future, and see what it has to offer.

I don't think the Falls extend into the future. Their terminus point is the time when they are being created by Joan. I think if someone enters a Fall in this "present" they don't go anywhere and are just trapped there, frozen out of time. Such at least was more of less what Linden experienced until she was able to get a grip on Joan's wild magic and the aid of the Ur-Viles and Ranyhyn.
Also I think that entry into a fall even in the past is normally rather lethal. Anele was protected by his inherent Earthpower (an even so ended up quite mad). The Ur-Viles and Demondim have their lore, which also used to preserve Linden and her companions. Perhaps this is why we haven't found all sorts of people and beings being spewed out of the past and into the present.

[ur-bane]

I don't think the Falls extend into the future. Their terminus point is the time when they are being created by Joan.

An excellent point, which shoots my idea dead.

But given that information, their terminus would then have to be point in time of their creation + time elapsed since their creation.

And here, at last, I have found Esmer's explanation:

(Linden):

"Tell me about the caesures, Falls. What are they? What do they do?"
Without shifting his gaze, Esmer nodded. "They are flaws in time, caused and fed
by wild magic."
He sounded oddly gratified, as though this question, at least--or his ability to
answer it-- vindicated him in some way.
"Within them'" he explained, "the Law of Time, which requires that events transpire
in sequence, and that one action must lead to another, is severed. Within them,
every moment which has ever passed in their ambit as they move exists at once."

So the future does not exist in a caesure.

[Aleksandr]

While I’m fairly sure that Donaldson isn’t thinking in these terms, I have a physics background, and I tend to see the “Arch of Time” conceptually in Einstein’s four dimensional time-space contiuum: the “Arch” is the 4th dimensional curvature of 3 dimensional space (don’t ask! if you don’t know the geometry there’s no way I can explain it) The caesures are then like “wormholes” or “cracks” bored by wild magic through this 4th dimension. They have two “ends” however (in both space and time), even if all space and time between these two ends is accessible from “within” them. The ends moreover have both spacial extension (obviously they aren’t pure points; they take up a certain amount of landscape, enough for a party of Linden’s size to enter into them) and they also have extension in time with each “end” lasting from moment A to to moment B in time. And just to make things more complicated these “ends” don’t just sit still but move around a little bit.
For anyone to actually function inside a caesure one must create some sort of internal time bubble, allowing for perception, volition and movement. Presumably the Ur-Viles do this with their lore, Anele’s Earthpower (and maybe the Ranyhyn’s, and certainly also Esmer’s) maintains at least some sort of connection with the Earthpower outside the Caesure (thereby importing some sort of very localized time order) and the Wild Magic can also do this.
By the way note that there is still a natural flow within a caesure, running from past to future so in a sense the Caesure does not completely violate every aspect of normal time even if it warps it beyond recogniztion.

[UrLord]

I never thought about it that way Aleksandr, but it sounds about right.

Actually, now I'm a little upset that I never even considered the Arch of Time in terms of 4th dimensional curvature! Damn you for pointing out my own inadequacies!

[tonyz]

>I don't have the timelines at the forefront of my mind, but is it possible that the caesure that Linden created is the one that brought Anele forward?

Very possible, I think -- do we know of any others that reach that far back?

>I know that creates all kinds of headaches...

Which is why breaking the Law of Time is such a bad idea. As I mentioned in another thread, I think that Linden's realization of what she's done to the Land will be just as gutwrenching as Covenant's realization of what he did to Lena.

[AMOK]

Q: What do you get when a time-traveling tornado chews up a bit of the One Forest?

A: A Ceasure salad!

That joke is like a puissance of formication crawling across my... HEY! Don't touch me!

I am content.

I am Jim.

Ok first of all - LMAO!!! Good one Pitch.

My brother and I had a little "discussion" about time travel stories - we had been talking about the Back to the Future movies. He got stuck in his mind that Marty and the Doc did everything to stay within the timeline, yet it was obvious that stuff they did actually changed the timeline (i.e., Two Pines Mall changes to Lone Pine Mall - hmmm well that actually is the only one I can think of.) So in my mind, Back to the future was not a "save the timeline" type of time travel story.

Runes however is - I believe that Mr. Donaldson is going to try to weave the story in such a way so as not to break the time line - it would break the arch of time.

Just my two cents.

By the way - the book totally blew me away. I have to read it again - I always get anxious to get to the end so I end up rushing through the last few chapters.

[Jerico]

This really depends on the time line that SRD is using.

First time line...The Staff is lost but still active and hidden when Linden arrives.
Or second time line...The Staff is not active because Linden will/ or has already gone back to get it.

Or both and she changed the Time line.

If it's both this could be what free's TC from the restictions of the Staff, and makes it possible for him to be brought back to life.
Before Linden goes back TC talks with her through Anele, so I assume he is still a spirit, but when she goes back to retrieve the staff it weakens the Law and so once she comes back to the present the last 3000 years have been without the influence of the staff.
This makes the 'Find me' more like 'release me'. unless TC is more tied to the Staff than we know?

[Fist and Faith]

What I find most interesting about the caesures is the fact that they "run forward."
That their normal flow of time is forward, and that Linden had to exert an effort to "reverse" the caesure to get into the past.

Now, follow me here...this is confusing me even as I write it... apparently the caesures' appearance coincided with Linden returning Joan's ring.
(About 100 years according to Stave). Now, if that indeed were true, and the exit of a caesure is always in a future time from the entrance, (except when altered by an interdiction of power by one within it) it should not be possible for Anele to have gained the time in which he is living when Linden entered the Land.
People from a hundred years ago may be able to go into a future of the Land that hasn't even taken place yet..........but prior to that, no travel should have been possible.

My impression was that, although all points of time exist inside a caesure, someone entering one, regardless of when in the timestream they entered it, always exits in the future. (Unless you have white gold, of course. )

[ur-bane]

My impression was that, although all points of time exist inside a caesure, someone entering one, regardless of when in the timestream they entered it, always exits in the future. (Unless you have white gold, of course. )

Exactly my point.

Which is why it doesn't seem possible for Anele to have gotten into Linden's present in the Land, based on Stave's given timeframe for caesure appearance in the Land.

But there's another thing, too........(and another reason why the whole time-travel thing is difficult.......)
How do we know that Linden's present isn't someone elses past? In which case, Linden could in fact travel ahead in time, because that moment has already existed and therefore would be within a caesure.
I mean, if the Land exists at a timerate of about 3000 years for every 10 years on Linden's real world, then isn't it also possible that another world exists where 10 years there is 3000 years in Linden's world? A future she has not yet gotten to could already exist as a past in that case........and, following that a bit further, although Linden perceives that she is in the Land's present, perhaps that time too is past......

There's more to these caesures than SRD has let us know. I am sure, however, that we will all find out eventually as the stories unfold.

[Satansheart Soulcrusher]

"There's more to these caesures than SRD has let us know"

Right, more like there's more to the whole theory of time travel than ANY of us know. Maybe SRD has spent enough time working on space operas that he decided to bring the whole time travel theme to the Land. If so, he is the one that make it work from a literary point of view.

[ur-bane]

Absolutely! It his SRD's world, and he will mold it as he sees fit.


You have a great point, Soulcrusher......but sometimes these discussions get my imagination going as well. But I'm not the one writing the Last Chronicles......

[Satansheart Soulcrusher]

I'll be interested to see a traditionally sci-fi theme expanded upon in a fantasy setting. If anyone can make it work, it's SRD.

[Fist and Faith]

My impression was that, although all points of time exist inside a caesure, someone entering one, regardless of when in the timestream they entered it, always exits in the future. (Unless you have white gold, of course. )

Exactly my point.

Which is why it doesn't seem possible for Anele to have gotten into Linden's present in the Land, based on Stave's given timeframe for caesure appearance in the Land.

But if all points in time of any given place exist within a caesure, then, in some way, the caesure is in that place at all times. Granted, not in all ways, because the caesure originated at a specific point in time. Physically, one is in a place only after Joan or Linden creates it, but in some non-physical way, it is always in that place. Covenant didn't see one the two times he was at Kevin's Watch, and Linden didn't see one when she was there in TWL, because neither was ever attuned enough to, and neither knows enough lore to learn of, such things. But Anele's nature and knowledge are certainly remarkable, and the lore of the ur-viles is mysterious and powerful, so both could sense and find a caesure even when it was not physically there.

(I really hate time travel stories. But I love TCTC, so I'm willing to put a lot of thought into all this in the attempt to enjoy the whole thing.)

[ur-bane]

...Covenant didn't see one the two times he was at Kevin's Watch, and Linden didn't see one when she was there in TWL, because neither was ever attuned enough to, and neither knows enough lore to learn of, such things. But Anele's nature and knowledge are certainly remarkable, and the lore of the ur-viles is mysterious and powerful, so both could sense and find a caesure even when it was not physically there.

(I really hate time travel stories. But I love TCTC, so I'm willing to put a lot of thought into all this in the attempt to enjoy the whole thing.)

Although you bring up an interesting point, I have to disagree.
Covenant and Linden didn't see one in their previous ventures to the Land because they didn't yet exist. If Linden returned Joan's white ring 3 months prior to entering the Land, and we know that the timescale of the Land is about 300:1 (10 years is approx 3000 years)*, and Stave said their appearance in the Land began about 100 years ago, then how is it possible that 7000 years ago, when covenant first entered the land, and 3000-4000 years ago when Linden first entered the Land, either of them could have seen a caesure? It just doesn't add up. Joan hadn't created them at that time.

Unless the Haruchai were mistaken about their onset, and Joan was making them while under Covenant's care before he traded himself for her at the fire behind Haven's Farm......then the timeline would work.

Other than that, I can't see how it is possible, without delving into multidimensional universes, where all timelines exist simultaneously at all times, without end. Where you could then travel to any moment in time as if you were getting off at a train depot. The station at which you get off is the equivalent of one moment in time in one timeline. So if you then rode another train on another track to another station, that would be yet another timeline, and another moment in that timeline, and so on. With that analogy, it should be possible to maneuver through time as easily as if you were buying a ticket to that time.

AArhg! I have lost my train of thought. I'll get back to this later.

[ur-bane]

OK, ok, bear with me here. I just had a brainstorm that belongs in the "DOH!" category.

Let's take the following as given:
1.) Joan initially created the caesures when she was reunited with her wedding ring
2.) They had been around in the Land for 100 years at the time Linden arrived.
3.) They encompass all moments of time that ever existed.

Given these facts, then it is possible that Anele has reached his future. He couldn't have reached it more than 100 years ago, but from that time on, a caesure which Joan created could have appeared in his time 3000 years ago, since once created, the caesure then encompassed Anele's time.
And the Demondim's time, and Kevin's time, and Berek's time.....

So by altering the present, Joan has significantly altered the past, and therefore has greatly compromised the integrity of the Arch of Time. (Another "DOH!")

But what does all this information mean? It means that the real question of the caesures as they pertain to Linden may not necessarily be how to use them to travel through time, but how to stop them. How to put an end to their slow tedious assault on the Arch. (Remember Covenan't story in TIW? The old Lady that sat on the side of the road chipping away at rocks? (paraphrase)"It took a long time, but eventually big rocks became little rocks." That's what the caesures are doing to the AoT.)

I am getting more and more impatient for the publication of the next book!

[CovenantJr]

Sounds very Terry Pratchett. "100 years ago, the Falls suddenly had been there for thousands of years"? I just read The Last Continent, and that idea was a recurring theme. I hope we're not going to discover the Land is carried on the backs of four elephants standing on a turtle

[ur-bane]

Sounds very Terry Pratchett. "100 years ago, the Falls suddenly had been there for thousands of years"?

Unfortunately, in my interpretation of events, that is exactly what SRD is telling us.

I just hope he puts a different spin (pun intended) on the whole time travel thing. But if anyone can, he can.

[srtrout]

I believe it was Stephen Hawking who said that he thought time travel was either impossible or would never be invented; otherwise, we would be seeing time travelers by now!

SRD will have fun with the consequences of time travel in the next 3 books. So far he's been taking the Star Trek approach; there is potential for changing the "time stream" but it can be managable.

srtrout

[Fist and Faith]

Yes, ur-bane, I think we're on the same page now. Since a caesure encompasses all moments of time that ever existed, they can be accessed from any point in time. But not everyone has the knowledge or power to access one in a time that the caesure does not physically exist - which only started happening 100 years before Linden met Stave. (Except, of course, for the one Linden created in the past.)

Sounds very Terry Pratchett. "100 years ago, the Falls suddenly had been there for thousands of years"? I just read The Last Continent, and that idea was a recurring theme.

In DC Comics' hugely important - and, unfortunately, hugely laughable - Crisis on Infinite Earths, that's sort of what happened. Suddenly, everyone at all points in time saw a huge tower that was never there before. Your first thought is, "Well if they see it in the past, why don't people remember it a year later, and why don't people decades and centuries later have records of it? Why are the future people just as surprised and mystified?" Well, it's a comic book. And now, it's a fantasy series. We can come up with concepts that can't/don't really happen, and I'm willing to bet time-travel is one of them.

I hope we're not going to discover the Land is carried on the backs of four elephants standing on a turtle

As someone here at the Watch (Brinn?) recently reminded us, it's turtles all the way down! In some Q&A lecture, a woman told the speaker he was wrong that the earth is, basically, floating in space, because everyone knows it's on the back of a turtle. When he asked her what the turtle was on, she said someting like, "Don't get smart with me, young man! It's turtles all the way down!"