The Lithos isn't a place, not in the way you understand it. It’s a severance. A point where the geology of the world argues with the current of time itself. It began, they say, with the fracturing of the Sky-Stone – a shard of the original celestial body, fallen and embedded deep within the Spine of the World. The Lithos is the residue of that impact, amplified over eons.
“The stone remembers,” they whisper. But what it remembers is not history, but *potential* history. Each layer of rock holds not just the weight of pressure and erosion, but the echoes of choices unmade, pathways never taken.
The air around the Lithos tastes of static and regret. The stone is not solid. It shifts, subtly, with the passage of time – a slow, agonizing dance of compression and expansion. Instruments calibrated to measure its density register only fluctuations, not values. It’s as if the stone is actively resisting quantification.
For centuries, a sect known as the Keepers have resided within the shadow of the Lithos. They aren’t warriors, nor scholars, but something… in-between. They wear clothing woven from lichen and shale, their faces perpetually obscured by hooded veils. They communicate through a complex system of hand signals and, unsettlingly, through changes in the coloration of the stone itself. The Keepers believe they are tasked with ‘stabilizing’ the Lithos, preventing it from unraveling entirely. But stabilization, in this context, isn’t about preserving. It’s about containing.
“Containment is the only truth,” one Keeper, identified only as Silas, muttered during a rare, fragmented observation. “The universe resists coherence. The Lithos reflects this.”
Their rituals involve intricate patterns etched into the surface of the Lithos, accompanied by rhythmic chanting that seems to vibrate not just in the air, but within the stone itself. Photographs taken near the Lithos become distorted, blurred, as if the very fabric of reality is attempting to reject their observation. There are accounts – unverifiable, of course – of Keepers disappearing entirely, absorbed into the shifting textures of the stone.
The unsettling thing about the Lithos is that it doesn’t just reflect the past; it presents alternatives. It’s been hypothesized that by standing near it, one can experience – fleetingly – the branching timelines created by pivotal decisions. Not as memories, but as sensations: a chilling gust of wind carrying the scent of a different war, the phantom weight of a sword you never wielded, the bittersweet taste of a love that never blossomed.
“Each grain of stone is a possibility,” Silas again, his voice a barely audible tremor in the air. “And the Lithos… it amplifies them.”
This isn’t a conscious process. It’s a subtle intrusion, a disorientation. Those who linger too long report a growing sense of unease, a feeling of being adrift in a sea of potential outcomes. It’s said that the Lithos feeds on regret, on what might have been. And that the more intense the feeling of regret, the stronger the echoes become.
This perpetual distortion, this shimmering effect, is attributed to the presence of the temporal ripple. It originates from the Lithos, a byproduct of its interaction with the currents of time. The Keepers, in their attempts to ‘stabilize’ the Lithos, inadvertently amplify this effect, creating a localized zone of temporal instability.
“The stone is a wound in time,” Silas’s final words, a chilling whisper carried on the static-laden air.
The ripple, visible only through subtle shifts in the air and light, serves as a constant reminder of the Lithos’s dangerous nature. It is a visual representation of the countless possibilities that exist, and the potential for catastrophic consequence.
Observe the ripple.