Disclaimer: The following document fragment is presented from an in-character perspective, it should not be taken as the truth of the setting.
Context: You know how times flies when you are having fun? Do you think it’s the same for something that has lived for millennia already? In this excerpt, a mage speaks of the non-linear perception of time among the different inhabitants of the Cosmos and how it brings us closer to near-eternal minds.
For a human being, contact with an entity that has lived for millions of years can be a daunting experience. Yet, our experiences with such entities, with such eternal minds, are quite different. Not only is the difference in cognition understated, but there is almost a kind of reverence they feel for our short lives. The intensity of our existence that some of them even find overwhelming to follow.
“You cultivate within yourself a myriad of experiences, like a young galaxy of thought born out of every moment, every fleeting fragment of time. I close my eyes and a century passes, and you, the little brethren of the Cosmos, you change. And I feel regret about the ephemeral nature of your existence, that gives place to a realisation, anew. Within that lapse of my perception, you’ve lived a life of innumerable thoughts and feelings, a whole universe of qualia, like an arrow, fired through time, sparking whole constellations of galaxies to be born from its flight. Meanwhile, my mind endures against the tides of time, an changeless, inert monument. And your lives clash against me, like foam upon the surface of this Cosmic ocean of time. You are beautiful, to me, despite the queerness of your forms.”
We find written down in the Mysteries of Ḥeḥ. Though it is a sentiment oft-repeated among our allies in the Cosmos. In particular, those who reside upon Earth.
From our interactions with these beings, it can be extrapolated that lifespan is not a linear experience of time. Rather, especially among the oldest beings in this universe, time can be seen as a logarithmic progression. Not in a literal fashion, of course, but rather in the sense of the subjective experience. The shorter our life, the more value we place on any specific unit of time. When we were but children, a day sometimes seemed to stretch into forever, but as we get older, they begin to sift through our fingers like grains of sand. So too, to those ancient beings, millennia become nothing but glimpses seen from the depths of their languid, eternal apathy.
There is a reassurance in knowing this, that our short lives register to them as intense and vibrant. And in that way, our lives seem less futile, less brief in the grand scheme of things. It is more that our whole existence is condensed into a short span of time, yet the substance of our life weighs not substantively less upon the Cosmos as the lives of entitles millennia of years old. Or, perhaps, that is but our hope, to find meaning and recognition during our short lives.
Some extrapolate this further, reflecting this upon the eternal Elder Gods and their thoughtless existence. Perhaps, for these universal constants, the flow of time becomes so distorted, they appear frozen in place for us, amidst every thought they have, every one of their experiences in being the flesh of this world. Indeed, there is something even more eldritch to their existence if this is true. A presence wholly unfathomable, not due to the scale of its existence but due to the sense of its ignorance of time flowing around it, as if it meaningless. An existence lonely and isolated from all but its own kind.
Esoteric Musings... 