Thief of Time - Slowed

But time enough to watch a bird, thought Lobsang as he let the world around him become blue and fade, and the thought was comforting. It was easier going without the snow on the ground, provided he avoided the strange resistance offered by bushes and long grass. Lu-Tze walked on ahead, looking oddly colourful and unreal against the faded landscape.

They went past the entrance to dwarf mines, but saw no one above ground. Lobsang was glad of that. The statues he had seen in the villages yesterday weren't dead, he knew, but merely frozen at a different speed of time. Lu-Tze had forbidden him to go near anyone, but he needn't have bothered. Walking around the living statues was invasive, somehow. It made it worse when you realized that they were moving, but very, very slowly...

The sun had barely moved from the horizon when they came down through warmer woods on the Rim side of the mountain. Here the landscape had a more domesticated air. It was woodland rather than forest. The game trail they'd been following crossed a creek at a point where there were cart tracks, old but still not overgrown.

Lobsang looked behind him after he'd walked across the ford, and watched the water very slowly reclaim the shape of his footprints in the stream.
He'd been trained in time-slicing on the snowfields above the valley, like the rest of the novices. That was so they couldn't come to any harm, the monks had said, although no one actually explained what harm they might come to. Outside the monastery, this was the first time Lobsang had sliced in a living
landscape.

It was marvellous! Birds hung in the sky. Early morning bumblebees hovered over the opening flowers. The world was a crystal made of living things.
Lobsang slowed near a group of deer cropping the grass, and watched as the nearer eye of one of them swivelled, with geological slowness, to watch him. He saw the skin move as the muscles underneath started to bunch for flight...

'Time for a smoko,' said Lu-Tze.

The world around Lobsang speeded up. The deer fled, along with the magic of the moment.

***

The Thief of Time - p208-209