The air in the Valley of Whispers hung thick with the scent of something both beautiful and profoundly wrong. It began as a shimmer, a heat haze that distorted the already surreal landscape. Then came the bloom – an obsidian flower, impossibly large, pulsing with a light that wasn’t light, but a compression of time itself. Each petal resonated with the screams of forgotten empires, the laughter of children who never grew, the silent, agonizing death of stars. The locals, the Stone-Kin, spoke of a ‘Resonance’ – a fracturing of the Chronarium, the fundamental fabric of existence. They attempted to destroy it, of course, using rituals involving shards of solidified regret and the bones of extinct leviathans. It was futile. The bloom simply… shifted. A small portion of the Valley, approximately 27 square kilometers, was erased from the timeline, leaving behind only a polished, grey void, and the lingering sensation of being watched by something older than memory. The cycle of dissolution, they called it. It's theorized that the bloom feeds on moments of intense emotional trauma, accelerating the entropy of reality itself.
Master Theron, cartographer to the Obsidian King, was a man obsessed with capturing the impossible. He believed that time was not a linear progression but a tapestry, and his ambition was to map every thread. He constructed a device, the ‘Chronal Loom,’ using captured echoes and solidified temporal anomalies. It wasn’t pretty. It resembled a gigantic spiderweb woven from polished bone and humming with barely contained chaos. Theron claimed he could ‘stitch’ broken timelines, but his attempts invariably resulted in further distortions. One particularly disastrous expedition sent a party of his men spiraling through a pocket dimension filled with reversed waterfalls and conversations from alternate selves. They returned weeks later, utterly broken, speaking in fragmented prophecies and exhibiting a disturbing tendency to age backwards. His final entry, scrawled in a frantic hand, reads: “The Chronarium resists. It doesn’t want to be mapped. It wants to… consume.” The Loom was subsequently destroyed, but the valley remained stubbornly anomalous, prone to spontaneous temporal shifts – a flash of prehistoric jungle, a glimpse of a city built of silver, a brief, agonizing return to a moment of one’s own death.
The discovery of the Obsidian Seed was the catalyst for the current state of the Valley. Found deep within a collapsed Chronal Rift, the Seed isn't a seed in the traditional sense. It’s a locus of temporal instability, a point where the boundaries of time and space have become… porous. The Stone-Kin believe it’s the physical manifestation of the Chronarium’s ‘will’ – a desperate attempt to heal itself after centuries of abuse. However, the Seed’s influence is accelerating the valley’s decay. The flora and fauna are mutating at an alarming rate, exhibiting traits from across the timeline. Giant, iridescent beetles stalk the ruins, while carnivorous vines grow at a rate of several meters per day. The air itself is thick with echoes of potential futures and forgotten pasts. Recent scans indicate a significant increase in temporal radiation – a phenomenon the Stone-Kin attribute to the ‘hunger’ of the Seed. The most terrifying aspect is the ‘whispering’ – faint voices that seem to emanate from everywhere and nowhere, offering promises and threats in languages that predate humanity.