The air tasted of salt and something older, something that clung to the skin like a phantom’s touch. The Obsidian Coast, they called it. Not for its volcanic origins – though the black sand stretched endlessly, a silent testament to forgotten upheavals – but for the way it seemed to absorb light, erasing the edges of reality. I arrived with a map, of sorts. Not one drawn on parchment, but etched onto the back of my mind, a residue of a life I couldn’t quite grasp. A life lived amongst the Silvered Reichslanders.
They were not men, not entirely. More like echoes. Fragments of a civilization that predated the rising of the Starfall Empire. The Silvered Reichslanders – the name, whispered on the wind, carried a weight of melancholic grandeur. Their obsession was with mapping the unmappable, charting the spaces between moments, the currents of forgotten memory. It was a process that seemed to unravel them, to erode their connection to the present.
The Archivist, Silas, was a brittle man, perpetually dusted with fine grey powder – the remnants of the silvered stone they used to construct their maps. He spoke in riddles and half-remembered prophecies. “The stone remembers,” he’d say, his voice a dry rustle. “It remembers the points of severance, the places where the threads of consciousness fray.”
Their maps weren't representations of geographical locations. They were attempts to capture the *feeling* of a place, the emotional imprint left by events, by lives lived and lost. The silvered stone, when properly attuned, would respond to these echoes, revealing shimmering pathways – pathways that led not to destinations, but to states of being. The Reichslanders believed that all moments, past, present, and future, were interconnected through these resonances. A misplaced step, a single unspoken word, could trigger a cascade of unintended consequences, unraveling the delicate balance of the resonant web.
The stone remembers… but does it truly *know*?
I learned of the 'Ritual of Severance,' a desperate attempt to stabilize the resonant web. It involved a complex sequence of actions – chanting in a language that felt both ancient and utterly alien, manipulating crystalline objects, and, most unsettlingly, deliberately creating moments of dissonance – deliberately disrupting the flow of resonance. The goal wasn’t to *repair* something broken, but to create a controlled fracture, a space for something new to emerge.
Silas believed that the Reichslanders had grown too focused on preserving the past, clinging to the echoes with a suffocating intensity. They had become trapped in a loop of their own making, unable to move forward. The Ritual of Severance was a last-ditch effort to break free, to introduce a necessary element of chaos into the system. But the process was inherently unstable, leading to unpredictable results. Sometimes, it resulted in a brief, brilliant flash of understanding. Other times…it simply erased everything.
The price of remembering is often forgetting.
I found myself standing on the Obsidian Coast, the air thick with the scent of salt and something else – something like regret. Silas was gone, vanished without a trace, leaving behind only a single, perfectly formed shard of silvered stone. I touched it, and the world dissolved around me, a kaleidoscope of fragmented memories and impossible geometries.
I realized then that the Reichslanders hadn’t vanished. They had simply dispersed, fragmented into the resonant web itself. They were everywhere and nowhere, echoes in the stone, whispers in the wind. The map wasn’t a tool for navigation; it was a mirror, reflecting the endless possibilities of existence. And I, like so many before me, had become another echo, drawn to the unsettling beauty of the Silvered Reichslanders' obsession.
The resonance fades, but the echo remains.