De Facto Times

It had been hundreds of years since Trevor had last seen Ariana, and he fully expected to never see her again – which was why he was shocked when she walked through the front door of his shop, skin weathered into sandpaper and eyes old enough to have seen the universe itself grow up.

“Ariana?” he asked in disbelief.

Ariana’s wild eyes locked with his and she came straight towards him, and without a word she ceremoniously deposited a pile of wood and metal shrapnels on the counter in front of him. He peered curiously at it.

“Is this…Is this the hammer?”

“The hammer for which I gave all I had to give,” Ariana growled, and Trevor almost jumped to hear her voice. It had always been heavier than most voices but now there was rough texture to it, rough enough to shave the splinters out of a plank of wood if she spoke to it. Trevor couldn’t reconcile the fact that such an old acquaintance was before him yet again, almost in the guise of a completely new person. Ariana had always been a little wild but still carried herself with grace and smoothness, not the haggard gruffness he was looking at right now. 

What had happened to her?

“Your shop has been here my whole life,” Ariana told him. “Always the finest products, you never made anything less in the time that I knew you. Has anything changed in the last nine centuries?” Now her tone was conversational, pleasant, like he remembered. What was going on?

“Has anything changed? Ariana, what–?”

“Sorry– How is business going? Let’s start there. It’s been too long.”

“Business is good. It’s as good as ever, which I’m very grateful for. Where on Earth have you been for nine hundred years? I mean, you’ve always come and gone, but not a word in all this time? You were about to embark on a voyage, you told me, the same exact voyage that had taken you under three months previously. What changed? Talk to me!”

“There was a complication,” Ariana replied. “I…I got caught up with something, but the point is that you made me this hammer yourself, I paid you all the money I had for it with the guarantee that it would be invincible, and now it lies here in pieces.”

“Yes, yes, now I remember. What a ridiculous purchase that was, I told you myself! I had to use every last bit of my alchemy knowledge to create the substance that was used to build that hammer, I didn’t sleep for a week! And even then you didn’t answer me, what was it that you needed the hammer for–”

“That is my own business. The fact is, your invincible creation proved to be anything but. Thankfully, I have accumulated ten times the sum I paid you last time, and for that price I would like a better hammer, one that truly can withstand anything.”

Trevor’s eyes widened, and he almost salivated at the thought. “Ten times… That would be hundreds of millions… But Ariana, it can’t be done, at least not by me. I am sorry, but this” and he gestured to the fragments on the counter, “is the best I can do. You will not find a more durable substance in this physical world, I built it specifically to be unbreakable–”

“Unbreakable?” Ariana roared suddenly, making Trevor jump. “Look!!”

Trevor looked sheepishly at the pile of rubble. “Clearly I was wrong about that – but I sincerely don’t know how. I have been running this shop since this planet was born and I know everything there is to know about metalworking. Ariana, you have to tell me how this happened – what were you doing that caused this hammer to break? I cannot help you unless I know.”

Ariana clenched her jaw, but reluctantly loosened it. “I attempted to use this hammer to destroy an object–”

“What object? A star, a black hole, an interdimensional portal–?”

“A wall!”

Trevor blinked in shock. “That’s not–”

“A stone wall. That is all I will say. I have spent centuries trying to use your indestructible, unstoppable, all-powerful hammer to bring down a stone wall and I could not. After what had been the four-trillionth blow, the tool shattered, and the wall did not have a dent.”

“Impossible. There is no solid substance that can withstand a blow from that hammer. It must have been some illusion, the appearance of a solid wall that had some sort of extra-dimensional power–”

“It was a solid stone wall. Nothing more.”

“Then I cannot help you,” Trevor replied. “All the money and power in the world would not allow me to build a stronger hammer than what you had. There is nothing more.”

Ariana turned on her heel and stormed out of the shop, leaving the remnants of her hammer behind. Trevor shook his head in disbelief. He, of course, believed Ariana had completely lost her mind. There was no way that what she was describing was true. It violated some of his most basic knowledge of molecules and chemical bonds – no, it was not true, not worth thinking about.

Outside the shop, Ariana’s boat was docked, and she furiously climbed into it and set sail out into the Great Universal Sea. Her whole life – she had long since lost count of how old she was, though it was at least four millennia – that Sea had been her home, and she had learned how to live with it, but never to trust it. The Sea was teaming with disasters, monsters, dangerous folk, a million different faces for Death to wear. She needed a boat to keep her out of the Sea and away from all the dangers under the surface, and a hammer to defend herself from anything else. Right now she only had half of those things.

An hour later, she docked at a different shop, and she selected a single coin from the hundreds of millions she had stolen and used that to pay for a small, pathetic hammer, a crumb compared to what she was used to wielding. But it would suffice until she could get her hands on what she was looking for – she needed to defend herself somehow as she travelled, and she was definitely capable enough that even a child’s toy would be lethal in her hands. Any hammer that was technically made from metal she could use to devastating effect, so she tucked her new one into her belt and sailed confidently on, planning her next stop.

The boat moved slowly, weighed down by the mountains of metal money she was carrying. It was a disgustingly huge fortune, the sum of perhaps forty different piracies she had committed. The Sea had no shortage of merchants and luxury cruisers from all over the Universe, and Ariana took advantage of any source of money she should happen upon, so over the years she had become one of the most dangerous pirates alive. In spite of this, she was not widely known, for she never left anyone alive to spread stories about her. She burned every ship she raided, leaving the bodies to burn with it, so the blackened mass would sink beneath the surface and no trace would remain of her crime. She was such a skilled fighter and patient killer that she was extremely successful, increasing her wealth at perhaps five times the rate of an average pirate.

She had vowed in her youth – and how long ago that was! – that she would be a peaceful sailor, and her past self would probably be disgusted by her present actions, but time had told her how impossible it was to be peaceful when out on the Sea. Those who showed mercy and love to strangers ended up dead at best, tortured and mutilated for life at worst. She had suffered greatly for her initial lack of ruthlessness, so now she automatically assumed the worst in everyone she met, and she was usually right. When she came upon a ship that was vulnerable enough for her to attack and rich enough for her to justify the risk, she did not hesitate to do so. Over the millennia, her hammer had tasted the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocent sailors, and even non-sailors that had been brought along for the ride. 

But her wealth was great enough for what she needed, and so she sailed and sailed and after years more she came upon a new metalworking shop, one even more ancient than Trevor’s, and it had indeed been founded by a smith from another universe, who had knowledge Trevor lacked. Ariana had kept a fragment of the hammer Trevor had given her, and as the new smith, whose name was Eric, examined it, he informed her that it was technically possible to build a material stronger even than that.

“I must warn you, though, it will take a long time – probably centuries – until the technology is available to do so. Even after that, it will likely be twenty-two years at least until such a material can be fashioned into a wieldable weapon.”

“I don’t care. All of this money will be yours as soon as you complete it. I will wait.”

Eric agreed, and got to work immediately. Centuries of labor would be easily worth it for the price Ariana was willing to pay. For two hundred and eighty years he worked solely on developing the technology necessary to create a material stronger than what this Universe’s physical laws would obey, and spent fifty years after that developing it into a solid hammer. All the while, Ariana sat patiently outside the shop in her boat, fishing for food when she needed to, sleeping when she needed to, but always waiting, her mind fixated on the completion of the ultimate weapon. She was attacked frequently, as her hoard of treasure was like a beacon for every greedy pirate within a hundred million miles, but she fended off all her attackers with ease. She was beyond them all.

Eventually the day came: “Finished!” came the call inside the shop, and Ariana leapt from her boat and ran inside.

Eric proudly handed her the new hammer, which was taller than she was and probably three times as heavy. She wielded it with little effort.

“It feels so light, can you be sure it will work?”

“There is not a material in this universe that can withstand a blow–”

“So I’ve been told before,” Ariana replied grumpily.

Eric shrugged, and Ariana could tell that this hammer was miraculously stronger than the last. Truly, there was no science that could surpass what had been used to create it, so she paid Eric what he was owed and took to the horizons once more, armed with the most destructive weapon in the universe. She was sailing to the end of the world.

This was a trip she had made several times before, and so she was almost used to the excruciatingly long voyage. Hers was an excellent boat, and now that it was free of its golden burden it could travel at extraordinary speeds, able to make most trips between any points A and B within five or six days. The destination she was heading for was an eleven-month trip, assuming she didn’t stop for any reason.

The Great Universal Sea had all of the islands and continents and planets and stars, but there came a point when you had sailed past all of those things, and from that point on it was generally assumed there was nothing but undisturbed water for infinity. Theoretically one could continue sailing forever, going endlessly in one direction and never seeing anything but water ever again. For as far back as anyone could remember, this belief was accepted by everybody.

In her past, a bored Ariana had decided to do just that: sail past everything, and just go on forever into nowhere at all. Many people did that when they were fed up with life or had seen all there was to see, and they were never seen again. A long time ago, Ariana had been in a very bad place, having all the power anyone could dream of and bored to death by existence, and so she forsook all she had, climbed in her boat with nothing but her hammer, and decided to end her life by sailing as close as she could to the end of the world, which of course was no closer than she had been when she started, but it was the thought that counted.

Now she recalled that time in her past when she had absentmindedly pointed her ship towards the unattainable horizon and begun moving, and she replicated the direction perfectly. It was imperative that she did so, that she retraced her steps exactly, because the destination she was heading for was so far away from anything else in the Sea that if her angle was a fraction of a degree off, she would end up hundreds of thousands of miles from where she wanted to be.

What a peculiar time, she thought to herself. That day she had been certain that there was nothing left for her to discover in life, and it was that specific day and the random decisions she made on it that led her to discover the most important thing in the world.

She clutched her hammer as she left everything else in the Sea behind her, moving steadily into the infinite uncharted waters, making sure not to veer off course. She didn’t notice the days passing, which soon was months passing. She hardly ate and slept even less. After several hundred years waiting for the construction of her new hammer to be completed, her fixation on her goal had not been dulled even slightly. This was her life, and there was no sense in thinking about anything else.

A little over twelve months later, her eyes had been staring at unmarked, identical ocean for every moment they were open, and so when she found something new to look at her heart almost failed with excitement. It was the place.

It was a single, very small island, and on that small island was a tall white castle.

So far removed from the rest of the world, way out here the Sea was very dark, yet the castle shone as if it was reflecting sunlight – but there were no stars anywhere nearby. The castle appeared to be made out of solid, unblemished marble, but Ariana had reason to believe it was some other material that was naturally luminescent. The castle dominated the island, leaving only a small strip of sandy beach to surround it. Ariana sailed in coolly, her boat lurching out of the water and resting on the sand, and she climbed out and stood before the castle.

By pure chance she had happened upon this castle, all those years ago when she had sailed off to die, and was astounded by it. There was no logical explanation for where it had come from, or how it had been constructed. Ariana had analyzed the sands around it and discovered that they had not been disturbed in billions, maybe even trillions of years, and that was how long this castle had been standing for, but it was still completely immaculate. The walls were perfectly flat, the corners at perfect right angles, with not a crack or a wear to be found anywhere on the building’s striking white surface. Nothing about the castle made sense, and it drove Ariana mad that she couldn’t make sense of it.

Now she stood before it again, her mighty hammer in hand, and her mind was made up. This was all she had left to live for. She would not set foot off this island for as long as she lived.

She looked at her weapon once, and then turned and swung it lightly at her faithful boat, which had never failed her in all her endless and wildest travels. One strike from her new hammer and the entire boat was instantly reduced to plasma, and the blast nearly knocked Ariana off her feet. 

So the hammer worked.

Now it was just her, the sand, and the castle. She walked forward and put her hand on its perfect white side, which was warm. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and then she clenched her hammer and swung with all of her might.

The impact sent such a tremor through her arm that she was forced to drop the hammer and shake out her hand to relieve it of the vibrations. The force of that blow could have destroyed a mountain. Ariana kept her eyes firmly closed, working sure to get the feeling back into her hand and turning around so she was facing away from the castle.

The first time she had discovered the castle, she had taken her then-hammer to it out of curiosity, and discovered that she was unable to make any sort of impression at all in the perfectly smooth stone. She hadn’t thought much of it at the time, because back then she was using a hammer that was not particularly strong. But then she had returned with a stronger hammer with the intent of knocking a piece of the castle off, and she told herself it was so she could bring it home and study it, but in reality it was just to prove to herself that she could. She didn’t like the lack of an impact she had made on the castle the first time. But that hammer had left no mark, and she had returned later with an even stronger hammer that she used to no avail. It was incredible; not a crack, not a scrape, no mark of any kind could be made on the castle. She scooped up wet sand and flung it at the castle wall, and the wet sand smeared on the side, so she knew that the material was tangible and did not naturally repel other matter. The only explanation was that it was truly so strong that Ariana could not make the smallest dent in it.

After failure after failure to impact the white castle, Ariana had sailed until she found Trevor, a contender for the greatest alchemist in the universe. She refused to divulge any information about the castle, not wanting to get the rest of the world involved with something she wanted to keep for herself, and she couldn’t bring back a sample of the castle for analysis as she was unable to chip even the slightest crumb of material from it, so she merely asked him to build the strongest hammer that was physically possible. Once it was completed, she returned to the castle, and there she spent almost nine hundred years pounding the structure as hard as she could with her new tool.

If even the slightest indentation was made, the smallest sliver broken off, Ariana could have made peace with herself and died happily. But the castle refused to yield. Trevor’s incredible hammer had no more effect on the castle than any other. In all the time Ariana knew it, it looked exactly the same, and this was horrifying for her. She had outlived civilizations, species, even landmasses, watching the winds of time grow and raze all sorts of things throughout the span of her life. She wasn’t used to anything remaining even a little the same, and yet here was this inexplicable creation that defied all her power and seemed to be eternally locked into one state.

At the end of the nine hundred years Trevor’s hammer had finally shattered upon impact, and she had almost broken down in defeat, but she refused. She had returned, and the hammer she held now was truly as powerful as anything, and if it didn’t work nothing would. Still she kept her eyes firmly closed, facing away from the castle, her hands shaking from the impact. She imagined what she would see when she turned back around.

Just a mark, she prayed. Please, please, please, let me have made a mark on the castle. It can be small, it can be completely insignificant, but please don’t let this all have been for nothing.

Now it was over a thousand years of dedication that had led to this moment. She took a deep breath, and, shaking, turned and opened her eyes.

They fell on the side of the castle where she had struck it. It looked exactly the same as it always had.

Ariana wanted to scream, wanted to rage, wanted to rip herself limb from limb and die horribly, but there was truly no physical action that would correctly represent the despair and frustration she felt in that moment. She stared at the clean white wall for hours, before picking up her hammer and striking it again. Still no effect.

She swung her hammer at the ground, and on impact a massive spray of sand and soil and water went flying everywhere, and she was knocked off her feet. The blow had nearly split the Earth’s crust, but apparently the castle’s foundations were much deeper underground than she could imagine, for the displaced sand only revealed more white stone disappearing beneath the surface, also perfectly smooth and undisturbed. 

She kept striking and striking, her arms screaming with agony from the reverb as the hammer met unyielding stone over and over again. With each swing she said the same prayers, hoping that the end was coming soon. As soon as a mark, any mark at all, appeared on that wall, she would be able to stop and rest. But no matter how hard she tried, she could not make any kind of impression. 

The hammer was as mighty as anything else. It just couldn’t damage the castle.

How? she whispered to herself in her mind. What is so wrong with me that I cannot damage this castle? There must be something I can do! Something that hasn’t been thought of…

But what else? There really was no way for her to make a dent. She couldn’t leave, having destroyed her boat, and even if she could there wouldn’t be any greater power she could find than the hammer she held in her hands right now. It was conceivable that there were no options.

Time, she thought.

Time could destroy the castle. Time could destroy anything. Time was the great universal enemy, the true greatest power in existence that everything was doomed to experience. For trillions of years this castle had stood, and it had remained the same in all that time. But trillions of years was less than a blink in the face of Eternity, and Ariana was immortal. She could wait for the unceasing assault of time to weaken the castle walls, if only a little, so that her hammer would leave an imprint on them. Then that would be it and she could die happily.

She had been waiting for so long, and the last thing she wanted was to wait any more. It wouldn’t be until her current lifetime had been multiplied by several billion times until she would be able to do anything, and there would be absolutely nothing to do in that time but stare at the cruel perfect building that was mocking her with its endurance. She could just die now and save herself the pain.

But she was so bothered by the existence of this phenomenal, everlasting, untouchable object that she sat herself down in the sand and moved as little as possible so as to conserve energy. A minute passed, then two more, then an hour, then a year, and she was horribly bored and not even close to being done. It needed more time. If she held out for long enough, the castle would change.

And over the course of the next billion eons, lots changed. The sky above her, the sands, the sea, their temperature and appearance went through various cycles. Ariana lived for longer than anyone ever had and ever would, and the rest of the world, which was far behind her out of sight, died and was reborn slightly differently hundreds of millions of times. It was unnatural for anything to exist as long as she was, but she was determined.

A blink in the face of eternity, she thought. It can look perfect for a billion years, a trillion years, a trillion trillion. But nothing can survive eternity. That’s when I’ll get it.

She took care of her hammer. It survived this grotesque quantity of passing time. Eventually she had done this for so long that she began surpassing time itself, the passage of the world sped up before her eyes, so that whole millennia went by in a single second, and soon there were more years in Ariana’s past life than atoms in the universe, and still she and her hammer remained seated before the unchanging castle, waiting for it to age. It never did.

Eventually the universe imploded, as scientists predicted it might, and the Great Universal Sea compacted into a single point and spawned an entire new universe, which lived its lifetime and did the same thing, and still the island remained, the castle remained, and Ariana and her hammer remained. In her eyes, time was now going by so fast that the universe would be born and die and be born again several times in the span of a day. It was more time than could be conceived by anyone – googols of eons had passed – and still nothing compared to the vastness of eternity.

Nothing compared to eternity… that was what Ariana told herself as she waited so patiently for time to catch up with the castle.

By now, of course, she realized that the castle was perhaps magical, or otherworldly to a degree never imagined by scientists. It was literally surviving events that were destroying the universe, and remaining completely unfazed by any of them. It occurred to Ariana that it was her proximity to the castle that was allowing her to live so long – she had stopped aging long ago, as had her hammer. Time was irrelevant to this place – it could speed up or slow down or stand still or not exist at all. The concept of the castle ‘aging’ was a contradiction, for it did not feel time at all.

Ariana struggled to her feet, having not stood in nearly one googolplex years – or was it one minute? On this island, they were one and the same.

I cannot make a mark on something that exists outside of time, she thought. If it looks a certain way one minute, that’s how it will look forever. It is naturally immune to any kind of change.

This was completely logical, and yet she still screamed and pounded it with her hammer, again and again and again, consumed by the fury of being unable to exercise her power.

It truly is eternal. It always has been here and always will be. I could be anyone anywhere and anytime and still expect to find this castle at this location, looking this way. The thought absolutely incensed her.

Then someone poked her head out of the castle window.

“Hello?”

The hammer fell from Ariana’s hand, and her jaw dropped, and she stared up at the face in the window in shock. It was a young girl with green eyes.

“You’re making quite the racket! What are you doing?”

Ariana stammered.

“I have been trying to destroy this castle my whole life… How did you get inside?”

“I found this castle a couple hours ago and they let me in!”

“They?”

“Oh, sure! There’s more people in here than I’ve ever seen before! You wouldn’t believe it, but it’s so much bigger on the inside! Why are you trying to destroy the castle?”

Ariana did not answer her, but stood with clenched fists, her hammer at her feet.

“You should come inside! It’s fun inside!” the girl said cheerfully. 

“Can I?”

“Certainly! You just have to leave behind the hammer.”

“Why?”

“Don’t ask me. That’s just the rules. What do you say?”

The perfect, smooth, indestructible wall split from top to bottom, and the two halves swung open as if they were gigantic doors, releasing a flood of brilliant warm light from the interior. Ariana could not see what was inside, but it smelled and sounded incredible. She looked down at her hammer.

“Are you sure I can’t bring it? I promise not to use it–”

“Sorry, you gotta leave it outside. That’s how it is. But that’s all you have to do!” The girl looked hopeful, excited to show Ariana around this amazing place.

But Ariana picked up her hammer, and immediately the wall closed up again, and the fissure disappeared, and it was as solid and untouchable as it had always been. The girl looked sad, but went back inside, disappearing from the window.

Once more Ariana began fruitlessly hammering away, as all the time in the world passed her by.