Book One – Chapter 3

There was no stillness. While the structures he saw differed, depending on where Yves shifted, one sensation was always the same. It never failed to receive him: the ominous swelling; a vast, soaring resonance that penetrated the dispersed boundaries of his translated form.

It carried the magnitude of mountains breaking apart in the far distance, and of the ceaseless fall of sand. Underneath, nestled deep within that immense convergence of motion, ran a finer articulation. There was subtle clicking and ticking, a never-ending succession of thousands upon thousands of minute impulses that threaded through everything. They came with such speed and precision that they ought to have merged into continuity, and yet, each retained the faintest distinction, a last impossible trace of individuality. If you needed a physical comparison, you would have to envision the greatest and finest of tairan constructions: a mechanical clock that expanded until its workings stood on The World Scale, with its mechanical measure not of rhythm, but of all the time.