The air in Kahului, a place perpetually clinging to the edges of the volcanic highlands, holds a silence punctuated only by the rustle of obsidian and the faintest, almost imperceptible, vibrations. It’s a silence inherited, not from absence, but from the relentless work of the Kahului Slaters – creatures of impossible geometry and unnerving patience.
They are not insects, though their segmented bodies shimmer with an oil-slick sheen. Nor are they reptiles, despite the cool, internal heat that seems to radiate from their forms. They are… echoes of the stone itself, given a horrifying, beautiful sentience.
The core of their existence is predicated on the temporal resonance of basalt. For centuries, the Slaters have meticulously worked the volcanic rock, not with tools, but with focused, crystalline attention. They don’t cut; they *unravel* the stone’s inherent chronal threads, extracting slivers of time compressed into obsidian. Each sliver, a miniature black mirror, pulses with a faint, fractured image of the past – moments witnessed by the stone itself, moments that bleed into the present.
Their movements are hypnotic, a slow, deliberate unfolding. They navigate the fissures and caverns with an unsettling grace, guided not by sight, but by the echoes of pressure, the phantom vibrations of geological ages. It’s said they can sense the geological timeline, the slow, agonizing shifts of the earth, and that their work is a desperate attempt to stabilize this chaotic flow.
The older Slaters possess a deeper resonance. Their obsidian shards exhibit more complex temporal distortions – fleeting glimpses of prehistoric ferns, the roar of extinct megafauna, the chilling silence of glacial movement. Some whisper that they've accumulated the memories of the island itself, a terrifying, layered tapestry of creation and destruction.
The process of slivering is agonizing for the stone. It’s not a process of brute force, but of sympathetic unraveling. The Slaters generate a localized temporal field, a miniature paradox, that weakens the stone’s resistance to the flow of time. As the sliver is extracted, the surrounding rock gains a faint, almost unbearable ache – a sensation of losing a fundamental part of itself.
There are legends of Slaters who have become entirely consumed by the temporal process, their bodies dissolving into a swirling vortex of fractured moments. These ‘Null Slaters,’ as they are called, are said to wander the highlands, their obsidian shards emitting a deafening silence, a void in the temporal stream.
Recent observations (documented by the eccentric cartographer, Silas Blackwood) suggest a disturbing trend: the Slaters are no longer simply extracting slivers. They are creating them. The obsidian shards now exhibit self-replication, slowly, agonizingly, multiplying within the caverns. It’s as if the stone itself is attempting to escape its confinement, to spread its temporal awareness across the island. Blackwood’s final journal entry, scrawled in frantic, barely legible script, speaks of a ‘perfected resonance,’ a state where the Slaters become indistinguishable from the stone itself, a complete, unified temporal singularity.
The Slaters are not a threat in the conventional sense. They are a consequence, a horrifying manifestation of the earth’s inherent instability. They are a reminder that time is not a linear progression, but a chaotic, interconnected web, and that some things, once disturbed, can never truly be put back together.