A very close friend once asked me what it is like to be a time mage.

Time is not a road stretched out before me. Other magic involves the creation and manipulation of energy, and time is no exception, although no mage that I know about can create time energy from nothing. It is more like a river than a road, filled with flowing energy that rushes over everything in the universe. You can think of us as the rocks at the bottom of the river. We are slowly weathered away by the water, until we can no longer hold on, and we are carried away into the next world.

As a commander of time, I can't move upstream or shake myself loose from the riverbed, but I can control the speed of the water around me. I could speed it up and experience more time than everyone and everything else, or slow it down and experience less. There is no traveling up or down the river into the past or future, only commanding the flow in the present. As much as I boast control over time, I must still obey its laws.

Stopping the motion of time entirely is one of the most difficult spells in a mage's arsenal. Controlling the flow of time over one small area of space is easy, relatively speaking. But to freeze time is to hold the flow still in as large of a radius as possible – ideally the entire universe, but even I'm not that accomplished. It requires indescribable amounts of mental strength. Strength I just do not have.

Instead, if I want to approximate this feat, I increase the speed of my own timestream – that is, the flow of energy around me – as much as possible. A moment of time for those around me stretches into minutes, hours, even days for me. If I could push my timestream's speed into infinity, I could achieve the same effect as freezing time – the relative motion of time outside my own stream would reach zero – but I have read countless tomes that deem this task impossible. I like to think this isn't the case; in fact I often see it compared to the Trinity spells of New Magic.

I would never push myself that far, but I can't deny that slowing the stream of the outside world to a crawl is incredibly useful. The saying "there is never enough time in the day" doesn't mean anything to me. For me, there is always more than enough time. At first, I was excited by the concept. I used my magic for everyday tasks, from preparing meals for my family at the last minute to constructing small devices in no time and making others smile. But as my life went on, concepts like my age and the true length of an hour began to lose meaning, and I lost control.

Time magic is not something I would push onto anybody, even if I could. I have experienced a little over forty years now, but twenty of those years were artificial, conjured from nothing as time rushed over me far faster than normal. When Alex took me in, I was the youngest of the seven, and now I am the oldest by some distance. I still look back on the times I spent entire days holding my timestream at a faster pace simply to quiet down the noise outside while I worked, and I wonder if it was truly worth it. My magic is a wonderful boon, one of the most powerful and useful elements to control, but it is also a terrible curse.