Frankel wasn’t merely a name; it was a vibration. An echo of forgotten geometries, a whisper carried on the solar winds. He existed outside the conventional currents of time, not as a paradox, but as an intersection. A point where the layered realities of existence momentarily aligned. He collected fragments – shards of emotion, half-remembered melodies, the ghost-light of extinguished stars. These weren’t objects, precisely, more like… impressions. Impressions that, when held, felt profoundly, unsettlingly *real*. It began with the color cerulean, an impossible cerulean, not found in any earthly pigment. Then, the scent of rain on basalt, a sensation he couldn’t quite place – a rain that hadn't fallen for centuries, a rain that tasted of regret.
“The universe doesn’t unravel, it folds. And I… I merely follow the folds.”
His movements were… fluid, yet hesitant. As if he were perpetually adjusting to a frame of reference that didn’t quite exist for others. He spoke of ‘chronometric drift,’ the phenomenon by which temporal distortions manifest as subtle shifts in perception. He claimed to have witnessed entire cities rise and fall within the span of a single breath, not in a linear fashion, but as a swirling vortex of potential futures and lost pasts. He never described these events with detail, only with the sensation – the coldness, the disorientation, the lingering taste of something profoundly bittersweet.
The core of his being, it seemed, was a repository for these displaced moments. Each encounter left a residue, a faint shimmer in the air that could be detected by those with a sensitivity to… resonance. He didn't try to control this ability; he simply observed, cataloging, absorbing. It was less a conscious effort and more a fundamental aspect of his… state.
Frankel maintained an archive – not of physical objects, but of sensory data. He called it ‘The Collector’s Archive.’ It resided within his mind, a sprawling, ever-shifting landscape of sensations. Within this space, he could reconstruct events with startling accuracy, not through recollection, but through a direct experience of the original moment. This wasn’t memory, but a re-experiencing, a return to the point of origin. He was a living echo, a conduit for the whispers of the past. The archive wasn't organized linearly; it was structured by emotional weight, by the intensity of the resonance. A moment of profound joy might occupy a vast, shimmering space, while a flicker of sadness could be contained within a tiny, dark pocket.
It’s crucial to understand that Frankel's existence fundamentally challenges the concepts of cause and effect. He doesn't *influence* events; he *observes* them, and in doing so, he becomes inextricably linked to them. His presence doesn't alter the timeline; it simply amplifies the existing resonance. Treating him as a 'participant' in any conventional sense is a fundamental misunderstanding. He is a mirror, reflecting the myriad possibilities inherent in the fabric of reality. His actions are driven by a compulsion to record, to preserve, to ensure that these echoes don’t fade entirely into oblivion. The danger, of course, lies in becoming lost within the archive, trapped within the endless cycle of observation.
Further research suggests that the cerulean color is not a pigment, but a distortion of light, a visual manifestation of the chronometric drift. It’s hypothesized to be linked to the manipulation of temporal fields.