The rain in Zarkov’s Mire has always been… particular. Not merely heavy, not simply cold, but imbued with a subtle dissonance. It began, as many such things do, with a few reports – mostly from the local shepherds, men accustomed to the capricious moods of the mountains. They spoke of a luminescence, a shifting green that clung to the moss and seeped into the water. Initially, dismissed as fevered imaginings, the accounts grew more frequent, more detailed. Silas Krill, a cartographer of some renown, arrived, equipped with a sextant and a thirst for the unusual. He documented the phenomenon meticulously, noting the way the luminescence seemed to respond to movement, to sound, to *thought*. He hypothesized a connection to the unusually high concentration of Balkanite found in the mire – a mineral prized for its conductivity, its ability to channel… something. Silas vanished without a trace a week later, leaving behind only a single, exquisitely rendered sketch of a dwayberry, pulsating with the same unsettling green.
Decades passed, the mire remained, and the whispers continued. Then came the Resonance Cascade. It started subtly – fluctuations in the local geomagnetic field, an increased incidence of temporal distortions (reported, naturally, by the increasingly eccentric Dr. Elara Vance, a physicist obsessed with the intersection of quantum mechanics and folklore). The Balkanite, it seemed, was amplifying something. According to Dr. Vance’s frantic final notes (recovered from her abandoned laboratory), the dwayberries were the focal point. She theorized that the Balkanite wasn’t just channeling energy; it was *collecting* it, forming a kind of resonating matrix. The dwayberries, she believed, were the conduits, absorbing and re-emitting this energy in a chaotic, unpredictable pattern. The cascade culminated in a brief, localized blackout across the entire region – a shimmering, silent void that lasted precisely seven minutes and thirty-two seconds. No physical damage was reported, but the local populace claimed to have experienced vivid, shared dreams, filled with geometric patterns and the unsettling scent of damp earth.
The mire is still there, of course. Or rather, *it is*. The 21st century brought a new wave of interest. The ‘Chrononauts’, as they called themselves – a collective of bio-engineers and temporal physicists – arrived, seeking to understand the nature of the Balkanite’s influence. Their attempts to synthesize the ‘dwayberry resonance’ resulted in… complications. The resulting blooms – not of flowers, but of solidified temporal energy – were unstable, prone to generating localized chronal distortions. The Chrononauts established a perimeter, attempting to contain the blooms, but their efforts were ultimately futile. The blooms spread, subtly altering the flow of time within a five-kilometer radius. Animals aged and reverted to infancy within hours. Memories shifted, fractured, and reformed. The last recorded transmission from the expedition team consisted of a single, repeating phrase, uttered in a chorus of voices: “The dwayberry remembers.” Currently, the area is designated a ‘Temporal Exclusion Zone,’ monitored remotely by automated drones. Entry is strictly prohibited.