Temporalis Codex II: The Flow of Duration

On Time as Living Continuum
By Aevalis the Chronarch, Celestial Archivist of the Hours

“Moments do not pass. They unfold within us,
and we mistake their bloom for motion.”
— Aevalis the Chronarch, The Flow of Duration

I. The Sea Beneath the Clock

Aevalis wrote that mortals built clocks not to measure time, but to defend against it.
They feared the sea beneath the ticking — the vast, uncountable swell of moments felt but never numbered.
He called this sea the Continuum Breath, and warned that the more tightly one measures time, the less of it one truly inhabits.

This mirrors Henri Bergson’s concept of durée, or duration: time as a qualitative, continuous flow rather than divisible instants.
To live within durée is to feel time as emotion — to know that joy stretches a minute into an hour, and grief can collapse a decade into a heartbeat.

“The clock cuts what the heart only waves through.”

II. The Elastic Soul

Among the Eladrin of the Silver Tide, Aevalis observed the Elastic Soul — beings whose very essence shifts with season and mood.
They do not age by years but by intensity of experience.
A single night of passion may carve centuries into their faces, while an age of serenity leaves no mark.

He used them to illustrate Bergson’s claim: that consciousness is motion itself — an unbroken flow where past and present interpenetrate.
The Eladrin memory is not archival but tidal; recollection is a current that carries them backward and forward simultaneously.

“The past is not gone,” Aevalis wrote. “It swims.”

III. The Melancholy of Still Water

Some sought to escape time altogether — the Stilled, a sect of monks who froze themselves in perfect mental calm.
Their minds became pools without ripples; their lives, reflections without depth.
But Aevalis condemned this stillness as the illusion of mastery.

In philosophical terms, this challenges mechanical determinism — the belief that time is a series of identical, measurable units.
Aevalis insisted that life’s richness lies in irregular rhythm: the uneven beat that makes perception human.

“A flawless rhythm is not eternity,” he wrote, “but paralysis.”

IV. The Pulse of Continuance

To experience true time, the Chronarch said, one must stop standing outside it.
He taught his disciples the Rite of Continuance — a meditation of pulse and breath performed under moonlight.
Each inhale was to be imagined as drawing in every past breath ever taken, each exhale as releasing it into the future.
After hours of this, initiates claimed to sense their entire lifespan humming simultaneously inside them — neither past nor future, but resonance.

This resembles Bergson’s idea that consciousness is not a linear path but a melody that carries its own history within itself.

“Time is not a road,” Aevalis said. “It is a song that remembers each note.”

V. The Memory of Movement

The fae engineers of the Gossamer Halls built kinetic gardens — fields of glass reeds that moved when no wind stirred.
They believed motion itself was memory made visible.
When asked why the reeds never ceased their slow swaying, they answered: “Because we have not yet forgotten.”

Aevalis saw in this a metaphor for embodied memory — akin to the way a dancer remembers through motion rather than recollection, or how the body retains habits beyond awareness.
Time, he concluded, is inscribed not only in thought but in posture, muscle, ritual.

VI. The Lantern of Duration

At the heart of the Chronarch’s monastery burned a lamp that was never refilled, yet never went out.
Its light pulsed softly, rhythmically, with the heartbeat of the monks who meditated nearby.
When one died, the rhythm changed but did not falter.
Aevalis claimed the lamp was not fed by oil but by continuance itself — the lived duration of the community, their shared experience folded into illumination.

This is Bergson’s durée made sacrament: the merging of inner and outer continuity into one living flame.

“The flame,” he said, “is not what burns — it is the burning.”

VII. The Ripple of Return

In his later teachings, Aevalis described Temporal Refraction — the phenomenon where powerful emotion makes time circle back upon itself.
Moments of revelation, love, or loss do not pass; they refract, echoing throughout a life.
Every joy repeats in future laughter; every grief shapes the silence that follows.

He wrote that each soul carries temporal scars — not wounds, but spirals where time has folded upon itself, altering the rhythm of being.
This foreshadows Ricoeur’s narrative identity, in which time’s meaning lies not in sequence but in reconfiguration through memory.

“The river does not flow away,” Aevalis wrote. “It bends inward.”

VIII. The Flow of Duration

In his final pages, the Chronarch abandoned all diagrams of time and wrote only images:
a hand trailing through water, a child chasing sunlight, an old man listening to rain.
These were, he said, the truest clocks.

He concluded:

“When you remember, you do not move backward.
Time folds to meet you.
Each heartbeat is the world returning to itself.”