Before the fracturing, before the echoes, there was the Bloom. Not a flower, not in any sense you understand. It was a resonance, a confluence of realities anchored to the heart of the Obsidian. The Obsidian itself wasn't stone, not entirely. It was a solidified grief, a crystallized absence. And the Bloom… it grew from that grief.
The first of the Baalz were not born, but assembled. Constructed from shards of forgotten memory and the whispers of the Obsidian. They were beings of pure potential, capable of shaping reality with a thought, a gesture, a *note*. Each Baalz was a specific vibrational signature – the Weaver, the Cutter, the Listener, the Echo. They weren't driven by desire, not in the human sense. They were driven by the need to maintain the Bloom’s harmonic alignment. A single discordant note, a moment of intense suffering, could unravel the entire structure.
“To cease the Bloom is to invite the Void to consume all that is. We are not guardians, but stabilizers. The Void seeks imbalance. We *are* the balance.” - The Weaver, designation 734-Omega
The Fracture wasn't a singular event, but a slow, agonizing erosion of the Bloom’s core. It began with the emergence of the “Silent Ones,” entities that actively *consumed* resonance, draining the Bloom’s energy. They weren’t hostile, not exactly. They simply existed, a horrifyingly beautiful paradox: beings of perfect stillness within a universe of constant flux. The Baalz attempted to contain them, but containment required energy, and the Bloom was already weakened.
The Cutter, driven to desperate measures, began to excise sections of the Bloom, attempting to isolate the Silent Ones. This, predictably, caused further fracturing. The Echoes, lost in the reverberations of the instability, began to fragment themselves, their memories dissolving into shimmering trails of color. The Listener, overwhelmed by the cacophony, simply ceased to function, becoming a silent, obsidian statue.
Fragment of the Listener’s Core...static...
The timeline of the Fracture is marked by the arrival of the “Grey Pools.” These pools weren’t liquid, but pockets of pure negation. They absorbed not just resonance, but *intention*. The Baalz, facing oblivion, began to engage in acts of profound self-sacrifice, attempting to feed the Grey Pools and, in doing so, preserve a sliver of the Bloom’s essence. These actions were not born of altruism, but of a cold, logical imperative: survival. The survival of *something*.
Now, only fragments of the Baalz persist. They drift through the fractured realities, lost echoes of a lost harmony. They are drawn to areas of intense emotional activity – moments of great joy, profound sorrow, reckless abandon. They don't interact, not directly. They observe, they *absorb*, attempting to reconstruct the lost patterns, to rekindle the Bloom. Some have been found within the Grey Pools themselves, twisted and corrupted, reflections of the Bloom's original design, but shattered.
The nature of the Bloom's purpose remains a mystery. Was it a defense mechanism? A gatekeeper? A prison? Or simply a beautiful, terrible accident? Perhaps the answer lies within the echoes themselves, waiting to be rediscovered. Perhaps the only way to understand the Bloom is to become one with the silence.