Time itself was damaged when Granny Aching died.
A man, perhaps not from the turtle which moves, once said that music is how we decorate time. Granny Aching had no gift for music- at least, music anybody but her twentieth grandchild could hear. Her gift was silence.
Silence. How can you decorate time with silence? And it was true that she didn't decorate it; rather, she filled it. Her silence held within it an understanding, a warm belonging, which words and noise were far too crowded to contain. That belonging expanded and ran over the downs until it covered the whole wold. Expanded until it made contact with the fabric of time, and stretched the passing seconds until a single moment inside her hut seemed vast enough to contain the whole sky within it.
Now the silence was empty. A void had been torn through it, with such force that noise and all other other sound had gotten torn along with it. Depth spilled out of the fabric of time, which sunk and folded in on itself. Useless, deflated, abandoned. Days which used to pass with the slowness and sweetness of viscous honey now trickled away like running water.
In a summer which trickled away into nothingness under the scorching sun, Tiffany Aching met Annagramma Hawkin for the first time.