Before the Great Stillness, before the stars fell silent, there was Linguinis. Not a man, not entirely. He was a conduit, a collector of whispers carried on the currents of the Old Sea. His purpose, shrouded in a perpetual twilight, was to map the echoes – the remnants of emotions, forgotten histories, and the raw potential of existence itself. He believed that every ripple, every silence, held a fragment of the original truth, and it was his task to assemble them, creating intricate charts of impossible beauty and profound sadness.
Linguinis didn't wield swords or command legions. His tools were far stranger. He crafted instruments from solidified starlight, polished bones of extinct leviathans, and the solidified tears of celestial beings. The most notable was the ‘Chronometer of Shifting Sands,’ a device that measured not time, but the rate at which memories decayed. He used the ‘Resonance Lenses’ to amplify the faintest traces of emotion, visualizing them as shimmering patterns in the air. And then there was the ‘Void Harp,’ said to be strung with the silence itself, capable of drawing out the most deeply buried regrets.
“The silence is not empty, child. It is pregnant with the ghosts of what was, and the possibilities of what could be. One must simply learn to listen.” - Linguinis
Linguinis' charts weren't geographical in the traditional sense. They existed within him, within the vast, echoing chambers of his mind. Each chart represented a specific 'loss' – not just of lives, but of ideas, of potential, of entire realities that had fractured and faded. The charts themselves appeared as intricate, three-dimensional structures, constantly shifting and reforming. Some resembled vast coral reefs, others looked like frozen nebulae, and still others resembled the skeletal remains of colossal, forgotten cities. He documented these with meticulous detail, assigning each fragment a color, a texture, and a subjective weight.