The Geometry of Time

Why orderly metric time felt dead, and why a messy oscillating Great Year feels alive

Sometimes I try to be too clever for my own good. Throw in my perfectionism and you end up with results that just feel…wrong. Possibly elegant and beautiful, but overall just wrong.

I really like tidy, geometrically symmetrical designs. Designs in the broadest sense of the word. When I started working out how time would function within the hexaverse, for the planet of Zeer in particular, I fell into this trap that I can only describe as metric.

There would be ten seconds in a tick. Ten ticks in a beat. Ten beats in a minute. Ten minutes in an hour. Ten hours in a day. Ten days in a week. Ten weeks in a season. Ten seasons in a year. Little time dolls nesting perfectly one inside another, all the way up to eras (okay, infinitely, but I would never attempt to track that much time).

It was certainly beautiful on paper. It followed a beautiful logic. And basically immediately it felt so contrived and manufactured that I hated it. It absolutely reeked of a system someone designed rather than a pattern that emerged from the cosmic soup.