Observations of the Fox

Scene: A sprawling marketplace in Tangiers. The noise of hundreds of local merchants and thousands of tourists blends into a cacophonous relentless din. The smells of spices and street foods fill the air. It's warm in the shade, but feels like it would be a scorching inferno out in the sun.  One of the tourists picks up a small copper lamp from a stall, he looks to his friend and goes to make a comment...probably something about Alladin like all the tourists do.  Tourist : Dude, I got this deja vu.  He turns to his friend, who is frozen still.  *Record scratch sound effect as time slows down to a standstill* In the middle of the frozen crowd, one of the vendors looks up from the table of spices in front of her. She's been working this stall for centuries; she's seen Nazis, the French, the vassal legions of the Ottomans. She'd sold to them all, the herbal concoctions that created subtle shifts in perception. Every couple of years, a mystic and occultist would come to ...

The thing about a non-descript book is the fact that it's easily overlooked. For a temporal leverage agent, that can mean that a lot of people don't notice it and therefore it's easy to steal because people don't even realise that it's gone; on the other hand, it's hard to ask people if they've seen it because it might have been in plain view and people just didn't give it a second glance.  Most non-descript books fit the description because they just aren't very interesting. A single sappy romance novel from a publisher that produces a dozen similar sappy books every month. Number eleven in a series of mathematics textbooks, where the interesting topics have already been covered, while this one is the third book of revision notes. One of the many self-published books of poetry by an author who couldn't get the notice of any publishers (but who believed in the quality of their work, and sank their life savings into a run of books that only sold a...

This was the second time I'd found the book. The last time was almost fifty years ago in a private collection. I wasn't looking for it then either. The first time I saw the book, it was on an old bookshelf filled with occult tomes bound in burgundy leather or black. Those sombre tomes were lettered with gold leaf and were titled deeply esoteric names like "An Unabridged Discourse on the Origins of Theosophical Mystery, volume 47" or "De Vermis Mysteriis". These were heavy tomes, and reading them required both physical and mental effort. However, this book was a small thing; maybe 6 inches by 9, about the size of an A5 page, and just under half an inch thick (perhaps thicker than a centimetre). Unlike the other books, it had no title, and was bound in leather dyed a colour between blue and green. It's cover adorned with a stylised dragonfly in a circle. It was an unremarkable book, and easily overlooked. Yet once noticed, it was incredibly distinct.  I ha...

Some of us last for a fraction of a second, making our impact on the world before vanishing into the nothingness from whence we came. Some of us linger for centuries, millennia, epochs...  Few of us remember the moment of our conception, the time when our essence was brought into being... whether that might be in the physical world or one of its shadowy echoes. Some claim that moment isn't important anyway, it's what you do with your time that matters. You might burn out in an explosive instant, or you might slowly impact the universe around you. Anyone connected to the physical plane has a finite time there...what they do with that time is up to them.  We live, we die. Do we live again? Does something else use the energy of life which was formerly ours to fuel its existence? Is it constant? Is there a finite flowing continuum of life in the universe? Life is filled with more questions than answers... ...and the same questions keep repeating. Often the answers are universal co...

If you're reading this when I hope it's been inserted in the timeline, you can watch some TV series that explain quantum causality loops. By this stage in the timeline, there should even be a couple of blockbuster movies with time-travel as major plot points.  Some of them get things right, some get things wildly wrong. But that's what happens when a multi-planar being tries to convey the complexity of timespan to physical beings. It's not my place to tell you the truth. revelations of that nature end up with prophets and religions, and that leads to more fire sprites getting out of control. Fire sprites like destroying things, inflaming emotions across the physical plane, and starting wars... that's not for me. I'm not even going to mention which stories got close to the truth, that's probably something for dreamers, philosophers, and scientists to work out for themselves. My reality is mine, and yours is yours.  I can't talk directly to you, so I'm...

I remember when he was an enthusiastic sprite, I recall when he threatened the universe with his special blend of hubris and hate. I will have seen him at his weakest and his strongest.I will tell planar travellers things that they have only been able to reveal to me in riddles. Maybe I will tell them in riddles to prevent causality paradoxes, maybe they know better. In the grand scheme of things I will have been there at the beginning, and at the end.  To explain things best to you, the physical world is like a rippling pond when viewed from the outside. If you're outside the pond, you can throw a rock into it and watch the ripples spread outward. You can also see the ripples made by other people throwing rocks into the pond. I can't throw metaphysical rocks into reality, that's something I might have already told you about, or it might be something I tell you later, I can never tell how things work when you're stuck in linear time... I'm sure this gets discussed a...