> As far as canonical Glorantha is concerned, it is pretty straightforward. Before the Dawn, Time as we understand it did not exist. Not linear time, not cyclical time, not causal time. It was the logic of poetry and the rationale of myth, not science.
The logic of poetry and that of science aren't that far apart. Logic is nothing but a syntax for telling a story about facts. Poetry beyond senseless onomapoeia has cause and effect, like e.g. Lewis Carrol's epic poem about the Jabberwock - which has an enormous amount of onomapoeia embelleshing the story, strongly setting a mythical context but telling a linear story. True, the poem itself doesn't care where the Jabberwock comes from - but to the character in the story there clearly is all this context, in a way that can be experienced and pursued.
Where there are people involved in the pre-Dawn, there are logical structures. Only where it comes to Green Age stuff of "the first of X" these considerations get meaningless, from the early Golden Age on there are limitations in the form of ever more consolidating mundanity of the stories. The Darkness is about the non-causal that used to work in the narrations failing. The Sword Story really is about separation between the "everything is possible" of Creation Age in the moment of definitions and the imposing of structures, to the almost complete collapse of possibilities and the meagre structures of reality emerging into the mundane world. Magic still can carry the wonderfully impossible into reality, to some degree, but subject to decay where there was none before the defining moment of the Green Age, and hardly any in the Golden Age. The Storm Age, born from breaking the rules of the Golden Age splendour, imposes more and more rules upon the cosmos. Then Chaos comes and consumes rules and rulesbreaking alike.
"Time as we understand it"... we don't understand time, a select few people like Stephen Hawking possibly exempted. We just float along.
When entering stories, we get the ability to move in that time. We may reread (relisten or otherwise repeat) parts of the stories. We still don't tell the story backwards, or randomly arrayed (without indicating the time jump in the narrative). We obey the flow.
Like Chris, I see a need for causality in the memories and second-hand memories of what went on before the Dawn. Those memories may not have been an objective, measurable and reliably repeatable thing, but they are a shared vision with a structure. Gloranthan myth introduces structure to its stories, and changes in the importance of structure marks the turning points between the ages of the world, whether in Malkioni actions, in elf songs or in Vithelan cycles.
Searching the structure in the shared vision of the Gloranthans of their memories of before the Dawn helps conveying these stories. We'll never manage to tell all the stories, and we will encounter conflicting truths, but within a story only one of these truths will be applied. Only when we look at a compilation of related stories these conflicting truths may create problems.
The cataclysms of Glorantha - whether pre-Dawn or post-Dawn - are the result of unstructured creation creating conflicting and mutually exclusive truths or realities. This usually reduces tension by shattering much of the world in the collisions. Dragons taking flight or land sunk are mere symptoms of that.
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