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edenfallingSeriously random ficlet here, more a philosophical musing than an actual story. The title's the first line of a poem I wrote a long time ago using a magnetic poetry kit. The poem sucked, but I always liked that line.
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Time Turns in the Shadowed Sky
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There were two names for the clockmakers' village -- Sukien and Inien -- for the two commands of the Lady of Hours. "You are capturing Time," she'd told the first clockmaker. "Your clocks must be like Time itself. Precise. And graceful."
Sukien was easy to define. Either a clock ticked steadily, pendulum swinging, weights unspooling, coils unwinding in measured pace -- or it didn't. There were numbers and patterns to keep the gears meshed, to judge the tension of a spring or the arc of a pendulum.
Inien was vaguer. What was graceful about Time? Its inexorable flow, perhaps. The way it touched all alike. The way it brought change, yet seemed to cycle back with each new generation. The way it could dance lightly over the hours, minutes fleeting as seconds. The way it could stretch a second into eternity.
The arithmeticians and mechanists grumbled when people talked about the fluidity of Time. "It's all in your heads," they told the philosophers. "One second lasts exactly as long as any other second. Stop talking about minutes that take hours to pass."
So the philosophers invented new ways to speak of Time. Sukien and Inien were two different kinds of Time, they said, not just two different characteristics. And while Sukien Time ticked away evenly, measured out by clocks, Inien Time stretched and bent and wrapped itself in and around the perceptions of living beings. "Sukien is a machine," they said. "Inien is life."
The mechanists disagreed. Inien meant grace, nothing more, nothing less. And their gears were graceful, the simplicity of their clocks was elegant, using exactly the parts needed and no more. No waste.
The carvers and painters acknowledged that there was something to the idea of gears being graceful, but they preferred to speak of Inien as art, as ornamentation. The insides of a clock were precise, but when they brought form and fancy to the outside, that was Inien. "Grace is in the shape of things, in color, in texture. Gears and weights and springs can't make a person dream, and without dreams we'd be nothing but clumsy beasts. Inien is art."
So the clockmakers talked and argued and wrote learned treatises. And they kept building clocks and sending them to all the corners of the world, until the steady tick of passing hours was heard in every land, anchoring people into Time. They moved through their days, bodies tracked by the precision of striking bells and sweeping hands, minds sliding in and around the ticks of the seconds as the river of Time flowed around them.
When the last house in the world had a clock, when a young girl wound the spring for the first time and the pendulum started its swing, the Lady of Hours glanced up at the twelve signs around the rim of the heavens, and nodded.
The stars struck one.
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Inspired by the 1/30/05![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
15minuteficlets word #92: strike
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Time Turns in the Shadowed Sky
-------------------------------------
There were two names for the clockmakers' village -- Sukien and Inien -- for the two commands of the Lady of Hours. "You are capturing Time," she'd told the first clockmaker. "Your clocks must be like Time itself. Precise. And graceful."
Sukien was easy to define. Either a clock ticked steadily, pendulum swinging, weights unspooling, coils unwinding in measured pace -- or it didn't. There were numbers and patterns to keep the gears meshed, to judge the tension of a spring or the arc of a pendulum.
Inien was vaguer. What was graceful about Time? Its inexorable flow, perhaps. The way it touched all alike. The way it brought change, yet seemed to cycle back with each new generation. The way it could dance lightly over the hours, minutes fleeting as seconds. The way it could stretch a second into eternity.
The arithmeticians and mechanists grumbled when people talked about the fluidity of Time. "It's all in your heads," they told the philosophers. "One second lasts exactly as long as any other second. Stop talking about minutes that take hours to pass."
So the philosophers invented new ways to speak of Time. Sukien and Inien were two different kinds of Time, they said, not just two different characteristics. And while Sukien Time ticked away evenly, measured out by clocks, Inien Time stretched and bent and wrapped itself in and around the perceptions of living beings. "Sukien is a machine," they said. "Inien is life."
The mechanists disagreed. Inien meant grace, nothing more, nothing less. And their gears were graceful, the simplicity of their clocks was elegant, using exactly the parts needed and no more. No waste.
The carvers and painters acknowledged that there was something to the idea of gears being graceful, but they preferred to speak of Inien as art, as ornamentation. The insides of a clock were precise, but when they brought form and fancy to the outside, that was Inien. "Grace is in the shape of things, in color, in texture. Gears and weights and springs can't make a person dream, and without dreams we'd be nothing but clumsy beasts. Inien is art."
So the clockmakers talked and argued and wrote learned treatises. And they kept building clocks and sending them to all the corners of the world, until the steady tick of passing hours was heard in every land, anchoring people into Time. They moved through their days, bodies tracked by the precision of striking bells and sweeping hands, minds sliding in and around the ticks of the seconds as the river of Time flowed around them.
When the last house in the world had a clock, when a young girl wound the spring for the first time and the pendulum started its swing, the Lady of Hours glanced up at the twelve signs around the rim of the heavens, and nodded.
The stars struck one.
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Inspired by the 1/30/05
15minuteficlets word #92: strike
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-02 08:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-03 06:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-02 11:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-03 06:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-03 03:06 pm (UTC)the last lien was killer. the whoel thign was a kiler and i'm i ntears for no reason at all .I ahven o idea whaththe hel thisis doignto me but apparenlty it touched something?
Are sumien and inien invented words? is the lady of horus a concept of yoru own? Ican't bleieve this coudl jsut rol lform your pen like that. DO yo ukwno how much this acutaly inspires me to go withe flwo of my own novel ideas and try my hand a t them? i decided to havea good deal of research-reading-experimenting time and wait forthe next nanowrimo to inofficially write m y50-000 words. buthis is jsut proove that people who love to write can acutally really creat miracles whe nthe muse hits the mhard.
This was so ubnelievably fantastic! I lvoe dthe concept ,everythign fel itno place, it had jsut enough messages/ideas withotu becomign moralistic, it didnt' have morals per se but jsuthe metaphors you suedi norder to bring soem schools fo thoguth across (or were those metaphors at all?) it's liek aparabel or legend of sorts,. it happens to sort of quickly ru naway before someone/the creater coudl turn it into soethign didactic.
I'm amazed.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-03 03:50 pm (UTC)My brain does odd things when I'm just bumming around.
I'm glad I managed to write something that spoke to you. And good luck with your novel!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-04 02:11 am (UTC)