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| - There are the old, and then there are the truly old. People usually die within a century or so. Cities and nations may last a few millennia, and we think them old, but the truly old are so much older. They were already old when all the nations we know were born, even those now vanished into history. They can speak of Ancient Athens and Babylon as casually as we might have yesterday, for to them those ancient cities are but recent memories. They were there when brick was first laid on brick, over five thousand years ago. They may have watched the trilobites come, and go, with eyes older than the stars. They may even be older than time itself.
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| abstract
| - There are the old, and then there are the truly old. People usually die within a century or so. Cities and nations may last a few millennia, and we think them old, but the truly old are so much older. They were already old when all the nations we know were born, even those now vanished into history. They can speak of Ancient Athens and Babylon as casually as we might have yesterday, for to them those ancient cities are but recent memories. They were there when brick was first laid on brick, over five thousand years ago. They may have watched the trilobites come, and go, with eyes older than the stars. They may even be older than time itself. Contemplating such immense spans of time is like looking into an abyss, an inducement to vertigo, for they are more than we can grasp. Oh, we can talk about them easily enough, just more big numbers, but we can't intuit them. We all know what a second or a week feels like; a million years is beyond all human experience. It is from this incomprehension that this trope draws its power, when done right, an evocation of incomprehensible age that appeals to our sense of wonder. While a Time Abyss is normally a person -- perhaps not technically human, but a person nonetheless -- objects can also qualify, everything from cities to coins. Imagine an alien monolith that has been sitting on the moon for three billion years. Think about all it has seen; the slow dance of the continents, the long march of evolution, the sudden flowering of civilization. Think, and wonder. Geographical features can't qualify, though. We expect the hills to be old beyond measure. We do not expect people, or any of their works, to be older than the hills. Naturally, a Time Abyss must experience all the years they claim. It doesn't count if they skip over them, sleep through them, or forget them. It is also important that they feel genuinely old, witness to more years than the human mind can grasp. If it feels like the writers just picked a random big number, they probably weren't aiming for this trope. Mary Poppins, for example, is claimed to be as old as the Earth but, quite frankly, that just feels like boasting. Mary Poppins feels perpetually young. Tom Bombadil, on the other hand, is considered old even by the oldest immortals, and reminisces about seeing the first raindrops, long before the elves awoke. Tom is a true Time Abyss. Five thousand years or so is a decent estimate of the minimum age needed to qualify for this trope, comfortably older than Ancient Greece or China, but in Science Fiction a Time Abyss will typically be far older than that. Geological time scales are usually involved. In modern-day works of a religious bent (or not), Adam and Eve (or Cain) are likely candidates. A god or major Eldritch Abomination is often a time abyss, as are Precursors and Elves (depending on how much better the elves are, many aren't old enough to follow this trope). These characters may decide that there's Nothing Left to Do But Die because Who Wants to Live Forever?. May even oscillate between Living Forever Is Awesome and bored eternity. Few of these characters look visibly old, until you see their eyes. Only then do you sense the weight of years behind their gaze, an experience which often leaves people reeling with temporal vertigo. Meta-trope of Living Relic, where the being in question finds themselves the last survivor of their civilization, race, or even species long after their kind has become myth. Being a Time Abyss will often lead to a work's creator wanting to engage in some Exposition of Immortality to show just how much they remember. Examples of Time Abyss include:
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