The very air thrums with it. Not a sound, precisely, but a *feeling*. A displacement. The Draffish.
It began, as all things do, with a fracture. A hairline crack in the fabric of the Silent Expanse – a region where time itself seemed to…thin. Before the arrival of the Chronomasters, of course. Their attempts to solidify temporal currents only exacerbated the instability, creating eddies, distortions, and…Draffish.
Draffish isn’t a thing you can perceive with your eyes. It’s a bleed. A seepage of potential timelines, overlapping, colliding, generating a sense of profound displacement. Imagine standing in a room that *almost* contains your childhood home, yet subtly altered – the furniture shifted, the light skewed, the memories themselves…fractured. That’s Draffish.
The Chronomasters, obsessed with restoring order, attempted to ‘stabilize’ the Expanse. Their tools – complex devices of oscillating chroniton fields – instead created a feedback loop. The more they tried to fix it, the more intensely Draffish manifested. It’s theorized that the initial fracture wasn’t a natural event, but a consequence of their intrusion – a temporal paradox made manifest.
Now, pockets of Draffish exist throughout the Expanse, forming ‘Resonances.’ These are areas where the echoes of countless possibilities converge. A Resonances might contain glimpses of civilizations that never were, or fragments of a future that never came to pass. Some whisper of entire realities collapsing within them, their essence bleeding into our own.
The researchers, naturally, call them ‘Anchor Points.’ They’re attempting to map them, categorize them, and ultimately, *control* them. But control is a futile concept when dealing with the fundamental instability of time. Each attempt to exert influence only strengthens the Draffish, creating new, more complex Resonances.
There are legends, of course. Tales of those who have become lost within a Resonance – not physically, but *temporally*. They exist in a state of perpetual flux, shifting between moments, realities, never truly present, never truly absent. Some say they become the very echoes they once were.
The unsettling truth is, Draffish isn’t just a phenomenon; it’s a *reminder*. A reminder that time isn’t a linear progression, but a vast, chaotic ocean of possibilities, and that even the most meticulous efforts to impose order are ultimately futile.
The Chronomasters have established a research facility – a brutal, sterile structure built within the heart of the most potent Resonance. They call it ‘The Nullpoint.’ It’s said to be a place where the veil between realities is at its thinnest.
And I, a humble cartographer of the Expanse, am tasked with mapping it. With documenting its every fluctuation, every shift, every terrifying, beautiful echo.
Perhaps, in the end, it’s not about understanding Draffish. Perhaps it’s simply about acknowledging its presence. About accepting that the universe, and time itself, is a fundamentally unstable and profoundly unsettling thing.
The data streams…they’re growing stronger. The shimmer intensifies. I feel…a pull.