4/28/2023 0 Comments Princess mononoke tree spirits![]() We do not expect people, or any of their works, to be older than the hills.įive thousand years or so is a decent estimate of the minimum age needed to qualify for this trope, excluding any hypothetical Contemporary Caveman, and yet, in Science Fiction, a Time Abyss will typically be far older than that. ![]() Geographical features can't qualify, though. Think about all it has seen: the slow dance of the continents, the long march of evolution, the sudden flowering of civilization. Imagine an alien monolith that has been sitting on the moon for three billion years. While a Time Abyss is normally a person - perhaps not technically human, but a person nonetheless - objects can also qualify, everything from cities to coins. It doesn't count if they skip over or sleep through them. Naturally, a Time Abyss must experience all the years they claim. It is from this incomprehension that this trope draws its power, when done right, an evocation of incomprehensible age that appeals to our sense of wonder. We all know what a second or a week feels like a million years (or even ten thousand) is beyond all human experience. Oh, we can talk about them easily enough, just more big numbers, but we can't intuit them. They may even be older than time itself.Ĭontemplating such immense spans of time is like looking into an abyss, an inducement to vertigo, for they are more than we can grasp. They may have watched the trilobites come, and go, with eyes older than the stars. ![]() They were there when brick was first laid on brick, over five thousand years ago. They can speak of Ancient Athens and Babylon as casually as we might speak of yesterday, for to them those ancient cities are but recent memories. They were already old when all the nations we know were born, even those now vanished into history. They are even shown to be The Oldest Ones in the Book in some Literature. Cities and nations may last a few millennia, and we think them old, but the truly old are so much older. People usually die within a century or so. There are the old, and then there are the truly old.
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