There is a stretch of the Ashfall waterfront where the boards have gone soft, and if you stand on it at dawn you will hear the whole harbour complaining at once — rope against cleat, hull against fender, gulls arguing over something that was a fish yesterday. Stand on the same boards at midnight and you will hear water, and only water, and once in a while a voice from a window that has no business being awake.
Same boards. Same harbour. You would not describe them to a friend in the same words.
Six Hours
The realm keeps six of them, and they are not evenly weighted.
Dawn is short and grey and belongs to people whose work starts before anyone is watching — bakers, dockhands, the watch coming off a long night with nothing to report. Morning is the longest stretch of honest daylight and the only hour in which most doors are simply open. Afternoon is heat and noise and business concluded badly. Evening is the hour of the second drink, when a conversation you were not going to have becomes a conversation you are having. Night closes the shutters. And midnight is the longest of the six by a wide margin, which surprises visitors until they have spent one.
A stranger passing through will tell you the realm has a day and a night. Anyone who lives here will tell you those six are six different places.
The Same Door, A Different Room
The Rusty Tankard at midday is a room where a man can eat. There is light through the front windows, there is a bowl of something, and Grim will answer a direct question with a direct answer because he has a rush coming and no time to be interesting.
The Rusty Tankard at midnight is not that room. The light is down to the fire and two lamps, the crowd has thinned to the people with nowhere better, and the conversations have gone quiet in the particular way that means they are worth overhearing. Ask Grim the same question and you will get a different answer, or the same answer with something on the end of it.
Neither room is the true one. Both of them are the tavern.
While You Were Elsewhere
This is the part travellers take longest to believe: the hours turn over whether or not anyone is standing in them.
A storm that was building over the water when you went inland is not waiting for your return. It arrives, it does what it does to the boats that were not brought up, and by the time you walk back down the coast road the harbour has already had its argument about whose fault it was. You will not see the storm. You will see the wreckage, and the argument, and a price on rope that was not that price last week.
The realm is not a stage that goes dark when you leave it. It is a place with its own appointments to keep.
So: go at dawn if you want the truth from someone too tired to shape it. Go at midnight if you want the truth from someone who has stopped caring who hears. Go in the afternoon if all you want is a bowl of something and directions.
Just do not expect the road to be where you left it.