Time and Fate rule Arcadia; Time is the gross Arcanum of the pair, governing the progression of events through the ever-advancing present in a way perpendicular to Fate’s subtlety.
General Description
Some Acanthus liken Time to a loosed arrow, and Fate to the archer’s aim. Time governs the history and diverse potential futures of the Fallen World. All things must pass. Legends rise and fall.
Even gods die and fade into obscurity. Nothing is eternal, save perhaps for time itself.
Spinning the Thread of Time
Sleeper philosophers and scientists debate and make inferences about the nature of Time, discussing theoretical problems and paradoxes, measuring the distortion in the light of distant stars, but always knowing that they are locked into Time’s endless march.
Mages who study the Time Arcanum have practical experience to marry to Sleeping theory, and quickly discover that while some thinkers have approached something like the truth, thought experiments don’t fully prepare them for the reality of temporal magic.
Sleepers often describe time as a river, but traditional Acanthus instead describe it as a spinning wheel, gathering strands of unspun material and binding them into a tight thread.
The Future is Unwritten
The unspun material in the metaphor, the future is protean and ever-changing. Using Time spells to access the future only reveals the most likely future at the time the spell is cast, and foreknowledge can and often does then immediately change the outcome.
Advanced Time spells rewrite the future like any other Pattern, dictating how immediate events will go or constructing theoretical futures mages then examine and let dissipate into the shifting flow of probability.
The Past can be Rewritten
In contrast, the past is like the spun thread — set and decided, unless magic alters it. Sleepers theorize about temporal paradoxes; if someone goes back in time to avert a disaster and succeeds, surely they would never then have to travel back, so would never have changed events?
Magic defies causality; a mage who travels back in time can alter the cause of his own trip and more, the magic accounting for any contradiction caused. When an object or person is in the past, the distortion is visible to onlookers using Active Mage Sight with Time, and as she changes history everything she alters also picks up a tell-tale temporal aura.
When a time traveller returns to the present, any changes he made to the timeline “set,” becoming Lasting, and the distortions vanish. Dying while in the past “sets” any changes made up to that point.
Travellers are insulated against the alterations of history; a mage who prevents her own birth returns to a world that does not know her, but does not vanish from existence. While still in the past, if the spell that projected the traveller backwards is dispelled, he returns to the present but any changes he made to history are reversed.
The Present Moves On
The Fallen World has a present, the point at which the future becomes the past, which constantly advances. Mages who travel back in time and look forward find that the intervening span is still set, spun from probability to realized future history.
While it may be their subjective future, it’s in the Fallen World’s past. From their perspective, the present is frozen at the moment they left — if they “catch up” to it, anything they changed becomes real, and the normal flow of time resumes.
Spells to travel into the future jump the subject out of time until the destination becomes the present.
Temporal Sympathy is another additional tool the mage can use to their advantage to better manipulate time, but also another roadblock to overcome.
Purview
- Prophecy
- Change
- Postcognition
- Time Travel
- Time Contraction and Dilation
Spell List
Initiate (1 Dot Arcana)
Apprentice (2 Dot Arcana)
- Choose the Thread
- Constant Presence
- Hung Spell
- Shield of Chronos
- Tipping the Hourglass
- Veil of Moments
Disciple (3 Dot Arcana)
Adept (4 Dot Arcana)
Master (5 Dot Arcana)
Related
- Gross Arcanum of Arcadia
- Ruling Arcana for the Acanthus path
- Involved with Temporal Sympathy