Urza - Time bubbles

They, of course, made forays back into the ruins, to bury the dead and salvage equipment and food stores. These trips were far from safe. On the first such excursion, the group lost four of its members who wandered into extreme time rifts and were torn apart. Jhoira and the remaining four learned to avoid such rankling crevasses of time.

Some zones were dark and dry, their flora withered away. These were fast-time areas, where a week might pass in a day. Such places received perhaps a day’s worth of sunlight and rainwater in a week and so became chill deserts. The darker and drier the zone, the faster the time in it and the more extreme the rent between it and the temporal flow of the rest of the island. Other zones were bright and wet—steamy swamps. These were slow-time areas, where a day took perhaps a week to pass. In such areas, the sun was intensely bright, moving visibly across the sky, and rain came in constant, short, drenching downpours. Most slow-time areas had not had time to adjust to their new climactic conditions, flooded to their edges and filled with drowned trees. In others, time moved so slowly, the fires of the original blast still stood in orange curtains.

***

Jhoira’s tone of gloom returned as she described to the crew the temporal distortions of the island. They resembled the physical topography after the blast. At the detonation point was a wide temporal basin like a blast crater, where the explosion uniformly ripped away the natural flow of time. Near the edges of this slow-time crater were a series of concentric rills of time, tightly packed fast-zones. The center would be unreachable except for avenues of force that radiated spoke-like from it and joined the outer island with the inner. Many of these avenues were deep slow-time rents, though others allowed a gradual descent into the crater. Others still had admixed with the fast-time shells nearby to make bridges of normal time. Beyond these concentric fast-time rings were large, irregular regions of extreme time shift, many contiguous square miles of territory unreachable to those outside—sheer time plateaus and deep time canyons. In these areas, whole new ecologies had evolved and cultures with them.

***

Time Streams, Chapter 7-8