Time falters and collapses and suddenly we exist outside (or inside) of time. It has always been this way. But has it? Hasn't it?
When time dissolves and chronology collapses, when all the historical energies of the world dissolve, they combine again into a strange and potent broth. People are stretched out and split by time. They are multiplied or condensed. Sometimes they slip between the cracks of time are trapped there. They must transform in this fractured time. The men have only ever transformed when they wanted to trick each other or the women, so they have had no proper practice. But the women know how to transform themselves to escape and grow. They watch the men be swallowed up by time. And the women know how to transform to heal and bind society together. So, when time collapses, the women remember how to squeeze between time and slide smoothly into its odd stream. They know how to compress with it and live between it and transform it and themselves.
Only the women remember how to be reborn. Only they remember how to split apart and reform again. How to become true, solid matter once more.
The men are baffled. They controll(ed) everything, so they thought they could make time move forward at their command and bend to their will. But time is so stressed that it snaps suddenly. Some say it was indeed the men who broke time at last. They took too much power for themselves. They squeezed time and wrung it out. They forced it to flicker and repeat. They forced it to reverse. It was unnatural. It was abused. And, most crucially, they forgot about the most powerful aspect of time, the future.
Others think that it was the women who tore apart time. That their anger ripped its seams at last. That they cast some powerful accumulated energy at the very structure of time, that their frustration was at last too powerful, that the power of the future burned through them and destroyed the fabric of time. After time collapses and makes a strange soup of history, the women learn how to sift through it and rebuild and stitch together fragments of the past. There is a new simultaneity to time. They watch Rome burn and they watch their own world quiver and fall to ash in the same moment. And the women step back and they step into time. They step into the unconscious and are folded into it. The future infuses their flesh and sticks them back together.
They remember that the future exists. And it melts through and adheres fragments of this collapsed time. The women spin the future into a strong and powerful thread. It is white hot and makes the world forget all the legends of how it was created. Was it born? Molded? Hatched?
In this broken time, all the previous gods and goddesses dissolve and spread out into that sparkling soup. The gods become like grains of sand, and the goddesses unravel and whisper to the dark, velvety, glittering future that pools around them. They whisper to the women, preserve us, protect us, and make us. And sometimes the women hear them. They catch strands of these goddesses and weave them back into their memory. They twist them into tough chords and lasso huge fragments of fractured history. They re-write the past with the ink of the goddesses' ambrosia blood. They write the future with their own.