I’ve been called Kron, Father, the Muse of Time. I contain inside me not all of time itself but the idea of time, of passing, of aging, and of progress. The Muse of Death and Decay is another, and I don’t know him as well as one might think. I had a human name once, billions of years ago and a universe-length away, but I have long since forgotten it. The idea of once having been human keeps me going, but thinking about it too hard bothers me deeply.
My appearance is complex and has a great deal to do with an observer’s attitude towards me. Optimistic children see me as a great marble palace of hanging gardens and flowers, surrounded by water. They prance through the halls happily, not seeing the flowers on my furthest ramparts beginning to wither. Adults see me as a turbulent place, the sun and moon rapidly passing overhead as plants grow and die around them. The old see me as a granite castle on a rock, filled with nothing but quiet passageways and great statues of figures from their lives.
Other Muses get to be pretty clever with their metaphors, but mine are pretty cut and dry. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t as much of an intellectual as some of them were. The Muse of Human Spirit and Zeitgeist (or something like that) remembers best how we got to the purgatory state that we live in. She says that we rode out on a great ship from our then-home planet (which may or may not have been Earth) and drove for light years upon light years until the Universe collapsed around us. Those of us who blasted away on escape pods as the physics driving the ship broke down landed on a planet at the very end of space. Here, we were blasted into a million pieces and survived as something post-human. We wandered that planet for a long time, not really understanding each other, before the Muse of Personhood (or something like that) united us and had us figure out what we were.
All of us soon discovered that we could wander through time, but I was best at it. I was a tree next to some ancient hunter-gatherer campfire, the reflection in a mirror some time before the bombs dropped, the wrinkles on the face of a space captain. I then pushed forward in time more and more. I wanted to stop us from becoming obsessed and riding off to the edge of the universe, stop us from creating our own nonsense existence. Of course, this was a bad idea. I pushed even as I felt things break around me, and as I reached the time that I was born everything shattered. This was the first thing we ever did that humans understood (though I don’t let them find out it was me for fear that they might find a way to kill me.) The reason I cared about dying after this point was because this was when everything became fun.
The one, boring timeline ending in tragedy was now thousands, even millions, each moving off in its own direction thanks to the changes made in my shattering. The other Muses and I reveled in new events that we didn’t know the outcomes of, and had a great time living up to our names and causing chaos and inspiration. Some of them became stunningly cruel, subjugating whole worlds even though they could never experience something like material gain. I personally enjoyed taking on particular disciples and driving them to extreme prominence before making the point to them that such a thing could not last forever. Now, you could call me retired. I sleep on one of my garden benches and spread myself as wide as I can, hopefully bringing peace to those who need it and chaos to everyone else.
This is the reality you live in, and there’s why it’s like that. If you don’t like it, I apologize. If you do like it, you’re welcome.