CycleConcept
A Cycle is a unit of time used across IntEarth, functioning roughly as a measure of a year or longer period. It is used to describe lifespans, waiting periods, and the endurance of civilizations, and is observed even by Lum, which dims and brightens through its passage.
Where it appears (78 mentions in 6 books)
Found Journal of a Traveler · 26 mentions Read the book →
- ¶1The world I called home for many Cycles is known to its inhabitants as "Sphereverse", sometimes also called "Intearth". It is a place that is similar to my original home. Here is an addr…
- ¶5…rface. The most distant cities and wonders are unreachable within a single mortal span of Cycles. Any immortal who attempted to cross the entirety of the surface would find that after re…
- ¶11I witnessed such a phenomenon myself during my third Cycle in the Sphereverse. A merchant's cargo wagon, overloaded with crystallized wind from the deeper caverns, had been ascending th…
- ¶12…walkers informed me that seventeen such objects had joined that wagon over the past dozen Cycles - tools, tumbled boulders, even an unfortunate sky-sailor whose wing-membranes had torn d…
- ¶13…hose bound to the surface. A wooden cart wheel that had been trapped there for over fifty Cycles showed no signs of decay, its spokes as sturdy as the Wake it first ascended. Yet a cryst…
- ¶14…had attempted to retrieve a valuable artifact from the Hanging Garden nearly two hundred Cycles ago. Through their far-seeing lenses, they claimed his body could still be observed among…
- ¶21…the campsite started to thicken, taking on a quality never before experienced in all the Cycles within the Sphereverse. It felt as though the air had become liquid light, each inhalatio…
- ¶23…something between old iron and the particular silence of a chamber sealed for a thousand Cycles, now opened for the first time.
- ¶28…thing more considered, the stillness of a being reassembling the habit of intention after Cycles without need for it.
- ¶30Elder Thoss: "Four hundred and twelve Cycles, Walker. Four hundred and twelve, and seven Spanths beside."
- ¶36Elder Thoss: "The Singing Stones of Vorthak sang for two hundred Cycles after you ascended, Walker. Then the great subsidence took the chamber that held them. What remains is rubble and,…
- ¶38…nd. It was still the voice of a thing that had been suspended for four hundred and twelve Cycles and seven Spanths beside, still carrying that particular flatness of long disuse, but ben…
- …and 8 more paragraphs
Expos-Zeshin · 16 mentions Read the book →
- ¶2Expos: "Ah at last! My successor, I have waited many Cycles for you."
- ¶14…horter figure's dark eyes held depths that suggested knowledge accumulated over countless Cycles, yet something flickered there, perhaps uncertainty, or the weight of long transition.
- ¶18…me moves strangely within these walls. I have seen Lum dim and brighten through countless Cycles, watched civilizations rise and crumble through the tower's highest windows. Yet each Wak…
- ¶30Zeshin stepped closer to the archway, drawn toward mysteries that had waited countless Cycles for their attention. The lights beyond shifted and danced, and for a moment they seemed to f…
- ¶32…ooth and warm to the touch, as though the stone had held a fire within it for uncountable Cycles without ever consuming itself. Where Zeshin's hand trailed along the surface, faint impre…
- ¶42…It was, at last, a key. Not of any metal or material Zeshin had encountered in all their Cycles on the surface, but of something that behaved like crystallized intention, transparent in…
- ¶43…jaw and steadiness of breath that seemed to satisfy a question they had carried for many Cycles without knowing its precise shape.
- ¶48…res a particular care, the way one handles a vessel whose contents have settled over many Cycles and must not be disturbed by haste. They moved at last, crossing the chamber floor with s…
- ¶53…the weight of accumulation, as though the chamber itself were pressing the sum of all its Cycles into the soles of Zeshin's feet with every stride, asking without words whether those fee…
- ¶55…t to receive it, and it carried in its small economy of motion the full length of all the Cycles that had passed between the making and the keeping.
- ¶60Expos: "I should tell you, before you go further, that I never saw the light. In all my Cycles of vigil, I passed through every chamber in this tower, pressed my hands against every wall…
- ¶66…keeper found a chamber I have never found, and they spent what I reckon to be three full Cycles within it. When they emerged they walked the halls for a long span without speaking to an…
- …and 3 more paragraphs
Authorian Paladin · 11 mentions Read the book →
- ¶4…o pens the parchment of this world with precision, who determined the Lumspan and set the Cycles in motion, hear my words. I am Your instrument in this story, a sword within the eternal…
- ¶8…am clothed in finery, my coffers overflowing, and I have knelt to no Author, bowed to no Cycle. Where is your so-called reward? If such virtues are written into your precious Text, the…
- ¶19No. 2: "O Great Author, who set this Cycle in motion, who wrote each character with care and burden alike, forgive this one their folly, though judgment must fall. Have mercy upon the i…
- ¶31…Vissira: "I was made this way when I still resided in my bubble. My creator dedicated 30 Cycles to my creation, which is what has set me so far above all these other citizens here befor…
- ¶53…es and withdrew a small crystalline pendant that had hung around their neck for countless Cycles. The pendant, crafted from transmuted amber and inscribed with the mathematical formulae…
- ¶54Vissira: "I have spent forty-seven Cycles believing that knowledge and reason were the highest powers in this Spherve. I calculated the trajectories of merchant caravans, measured the fl…
- ¶59…n, their voices weaving together into harmonies that had not been heard since the ancient Cycles when the Author's hand was said to move more directly through the world.
- ¶61…bed person whose skin bore the pale, almost translucent quality of one who had spent many Cycles in the subterranean passages beneath the city. Their eyes, wide and colorless as quartz,…
- ¶66…he patient recognition of one who has seen this same instinct play out across uncountable Cycles: the mortal impulse to name what has happened, to press it into material form before it c…
- ¶76…of someone who has heard this particular rhythm before, in some other city, in some other Cycle, long before the current age had a name.
- ¶88…ngth from the sealed fracture in the paving stone. They studied it the way they had spent Cycles studying market ledgers, tracing the line with their eyes from one end to the other witho…
A Wizard's Journey · 4 mentions Read the book →
- ¶8…g. He stood at the fence and studied them, noting how they endured the cold of the winter Cycles without any covering upon their skin.
- ¶22…Each Wake and Leep spanned twelve Lumers. A Spanth was thirty six Wakes and Leeps, and a Cycle was twelve Spanths in length.
- ¶150…spective of a bird. The town was completely changed from when Egast had visited seventeen Cycles before. Where wooden huts once sat there were Stone towers. The windows of the towers had…
- ¶290…ing imperfections that should have required a tanner's tools and knowledge gained through Cycles of experience. The boy worked as if guided by instinct older than learning, shaping the m…
The Castle of Wizards · 15 mentions Read the book →
- ¶8…assembled wizards shifted their attention between the two figures, sensing the weight of Cycles of preparation behind this moment.
- ¶9…itution through seven major transitions, weathering the great Lumstorm of the forty-third Cycle and the Transmutation Crisis that nearly shattered our foundations."
- ¶24Water Weaver Thessarian: "Master Caldris attempted this trial sixty Cycles past. The stone accepted his hand, then showed him visions of what his ambition would cost. He withdrew from co…
- ¶30Ancient Keeper Vorthak: "The trial does not disqualify. It illuminates. In seven hundred Cycles of this Castle's keeping, only twice has the stone returned neither light nor darkness, bu…
- ¶33…rial. Let them show what the stone returned. And let whoever reads those records in forty Cycles, or four hundred, understand that we were here on this Wake, in this chamber, and that we…
- ¶34…surprised by the weight a single sentence can carry, and who has learned, across the long Cycles, that the ones who speak that weight plainly are generally more dangerous than the ones w…
- ¶35…icular expression of those who have witnessed something they suspect they will spend many Cycles trying to accurately describe to those who were not present.
- ¶37…a catastrophe. The second names the same change as a restoration. They describe the same Cycles. The same events. The same Castle. I used to believe one account was mistaken. I have sin…
- ¶39…"Then perhaps the question worth asking is not which account is correct, but why the same Cycles required two contradictory truths to be carved at all. A catastrophe that is also a resto…
- ¶43Wizard Maren: "I have kept the Castle's memory for nineteen Cycles and I will tell you what I have observed in that time. The trials do not choose leaders. They reveal what the candidate…
- ¶44…r short, and they moved with the particular economy of someone who had spent a great many Cycles working with materials that punished carelessness: no gesture wasted, no step placed with…
- ¶46…t happened. Memory is what persists in the stone regardless of what we carve. In nineteen Cycles of keeping the one, Maren has also been accumulating the other, and those of us who work…
- …and 2 more paragraphs
Sam · 6 mentions Read the book →
- ¶79Sam: "Yea I finished a road from her castle to the North East corner of the farm a couple Cycles ago, she used to let me read the books in her library on my breaks. That's why I am so mu…
- ¶145…attered strones in the field did, that cold metallic gleam beneath the grime of uncounted Cycles, but together they gave off a low, resonant hum that Sam could feel in his back teeth and…
- ¶152…s of certain fingers and nowhere else, the kind left by a tool used the same way for many Cycles without variation. The bag at the wizard's waist was closed again, though Ed had not seen…
- ¶166…on of the witch's castle, in the direction of the road he had laid with his own hands two Cycles prior. He stood there for three full Lumins, long enough that Ed opened his mouth twice a…
- ¶175…though the castle and the land around it had arrived at some long accommodation over many Cycles. A single tower rose from the western corner, its upper apertures open to the air, and fr…
- ¶176…of fitted stone, and in the center of it, beside a low well whose rim had gone mossy with Cycles of disuse, a figure stood watching them arrive. She was not tall. She was not old in the…