I looked up and beheld the great tree which had been his home, unburnt and unmarred. It loomed over me, tall, vast, and majestic, crowned with golden leaves. From this close, I could see some similarities to the steelwoods utilized by the elves of today. Perhaps they are descended from those mighty Vanir trees, who can say?
There were differences as well, one of those being lifespan. Steelwoods last a very long time, but I do not believe they last tens of thousands of years. I can say with reasonable certainty that this particular tree did. I watched its entire lifespan in reverse. I made out the last few generations of Dexarren's forebears moving and playing under its shade and among its vast branches, living out their lives in reverse. It wasn't long before the speed of my regress through the ages once again became too great for me to make them out. However, judging by the looks of that tree, it was inhabited for a very, very long time.
I noticed with some surprise that the moons in this age of the world moved from east to west before they also started moving too quickly for me to track. It took me a moment to understand this, because from my perspective, they moved in the same direction those in our present time do. Because I was moving backwards in time, I was seeing them move in reverse. The very thought of it made my head ache, and I pondered them and their retrograde motion no more.
I made no effort to move from where I stood. There seemed to be no point in doing so, since my destination seemed to be in a different time, not another place. As I observed that ancient tree ever so slowly begin to shrink and revert to earlier stages of its growth, I pondered all the many theories on the origins of the universe that have been discussed in this Citadel over the years. Would I eventually find myself drawn into the First Singularity, the Wellspring of Existence? Would I find Ahura Mazda there? I hoped there was some good reason for all this insanity. There had to be. How could my current ordeal have come to pass without some great cosmic intelligence orchestrating it?
I watched the very earliest epochs of this world in reverse. I missed most of the major events because I was travelling too quickly to witness anything less than the most catastrophic, world shaking changes, but those were spectacle enough. There were many more auroquakes, hurricanes, floods, droughts, and other changes in the environment. The plants grew ever stranger until I finally reached an era where there were no trees. Patches of greenery expanded and withdrew across the landscape for a few more eons, then even they were gone.
Next, great streams of magma flowed over an utterly inhospitable landscape, and I realized I had reached the very first age of this world's history. Rocks rose into the heavens as I witnessed tremendous cosmic impacts, all in reverse, yet none of it had any effect within my sphere of nullity. Finally, the very ground vanished from beneath my feet. I had been drawn into a time before the world we call Auronis and the ancients called Vanaheimr existed, and still my temporal sojourn continued.
I stood suspended in the midst of a vast cloud of dust which in turn hung suspended in the void. The sphere which encased me had appeared more like a dome while I still stood upon Auronis firma was now clearly revealed as a sphere which completely encased and insulated my frail human form from the cosmic elements. The young star which would one day be called Aura shone over all with a pure white brilliance. Slowly it began to recede away from me, and I became conscious of moving through space as well as time.
That's how it looked and felt, at least. Perhaps this had more to do with the fact that my rate of travel had increased to such a "speed" that I was remaining perfectly still in space, but moving through time fast enough to see the very structure of the universe collapsing back towards its original state around me. The experience was so far outside anything I had ever experienced before, even with my extended life span, that I doubt anyone who reads this will be enlightened by my dwelling on it in the attempt to explain it. It was as if I were witnessing soapy water being thrown from a bucket, but in reverse... and I was falling back into the bucket with the suds.
