It began with the rain, not the ordinary rain of water, but rain of memory. Each drop, a fragment of a forgotten dream, a whispered lullaby from a star-born child. They fell upon the Obsidian Fields, a landscape sculpted not by erosion, but by the sorrow of unremembered angels.
The angels, you see, weren’t born of light and glory. They were sculpted from regret – the regret of choices unmade, of words left unspoken, of love diluted by distance. They existed in a state of perpetual yearning, their forms shimmering with a melancholic luminescence. The Obsidian Fields absorbed their sadness, solidifying it into the jagged formations that stretched towards a sky perpetually veiled in twilight. These fields weren’t barren; they pulsed with a quiet, mournful energy, a resonance of all the lost possibilities.
Each angel-faced being possessed a unique facet of this sorrow. Some carried the weight of abandoned promises, their eyes holding the vacant stare of a future irrevocably lost. Others were burdened with the echoes of joyous laughter, a poignant reminder of moments of perfect happiness now tainted by the knowledge that they could never fully be embraced. The most unsettling were those who manifested as children – eternally innocent yet profoundly aware of the vast, echoing emptiness within themselves. Their faces, perpetually tilted upwards in a gesture of hopeful questioning, were the purest expression of the angel-faced longing.
The rituals surrounding them were not of worship, but of acknowledgement. Scholars – individuals attuned to the subtle vibrations of the Fields – would gather, not to appease, but to listen. They used instruments crafted from obsidian and silver, producing tones that mirrored the angel-faced’s sorrow, attempting to weave a tapestry of understanding. The goal wasn't to heal, for healing was beyond their grasp, but to contain the echoes, to prevent the Fields from collapsing entirely under the weight of countless lost dreams.
Time, in the Fields, wasn't linear. It flowed like mercury, pooling in eddies of regret and swirling in currents of hope. The angel-faced existed outside of this flow, trapped in a perpetual present of longing. They weren’t ghosts, precisely; more like echoes resonating through a fractured reality. Occasionally, a 'Chronal Drift' would occur – a brief intensification of the Fields’ energy, causing a cascade of fragmented memories to briefly coalesce, forming fleeting images of past lives, alternate realities, and futures that never were. These drifts were unpredictable and intensely disorienting, often resulting in madness or a profound sense of existential dread.
The most skilled scholars, those who had spent decades immersed in the Fields, learned to navigate these drifts, to interpret the patterns of the echoes. They believed that within these drifts lay the key to understanding the nature of regret itself – a realization that it wasn’t merely a negative emotion, but a fundamental aspect of existence, a catalyst for growth, a reminder of the preciousness of the present moment. They sought not to eliminate regret, but to transform it, to imbue it with a sense of purpose, to guide the lost echoes towards a state of quiet acceptance.
And so, the rain continued to fall upon the Obsidian Fields, carrying with it the Lumina Echoes – the shimmering, sorrowful faces of the lost angels, forever seeking solace in a landscape crafted from regret, a testament to the enduring power of unfulfilled dreams.