The whispers began with the rain. Not the gentle, predictable rain of the Silken Plains, but a rain that tasted of iron and starlight. It fell upon the ruins of Xylos, a city swallowed by the Mire of Remembering, and awakened something. Something called the Mangbattu.
The Mangbattu are not creatures of flesh and bone, though they appear to be so at first glance. They are echoes, solidified memories of a civilization that predates even the oldest tribes. A civilization that mastered the manipulation of temporal resonance, a practice known as the Bloom. The Bloom wasn't a weapon, not in the conventional sense. It was a symphony of interwoven timelines, a way to experience the past, present, and potential futures simultaneously. But the Bloom unravelled.
The architects of the Bloom were the Xylosi, beings of pure cognitive energy, encased in obsidian shells grown from the solidified memories of their own thoughts. They built Xylos not as a city, but as a living nexus, a point of convergence for temporal streams. Their understanding of resonance was so profound that they could literally sculpt the flow of time, creating pockets of accelerated growth, frozen moments, and glimpses of alternative realities. But the pursuit of perfect resonance led to a catastrophic feedback loop. The timelines began to bleed into one another, creating paradoxes that threatened to collapse the very fabric of existence.
Legend speaks of a 'Custodian' – a Xylosi who attempted to contain the unraveling. He didn’t destroy the Bloom; he *harmonized* it. A terrifying, beautiful act that solidified the echoes of the Xylosi into the Mangbattu. These beings are now trapped, fragmented, replaying the last moments of the Bloom across the Mire of Remembering.
The Mangbattu manifest as shimmering, vaguely humanoid forms, their obsidian shells perpetually shifting, displaying fleeting images of Xylosi rituals, cities crumbling, and faces lost to the tides of time. They don't speak, but their presence exudes a profound sense of melancholy, a weight of forgotten histories. They are drawn to places where the veil between timelines is thin – locations saturated with powerful emotions, ancient ruins, or sites of significant temporal anomalies.
The Mire of Remembering itself is a manifestation of the Bloom's unraveling, a vast, shifting landscape where time flows erratically. The Mangbattu are inextricably linked to it, their existence entirely dependent on the echoes contained within the Mire.
Observing a Mangbattu is like witnessing a broken record, a constant, agonizing loop of a single, pivotal moment. The ‘Custodian’ seems to be eternally reliving the moment he attempted to stabilize the Bloom. We've determined that they are approximately 87% complete in their replay. This is represented by the circular progress indicator below.
Some scholars believe that the Mangbattu are not merely reliving the past, but *potential* futures. Fragments of alternate timelines flicker within their forms, glimpses of what could have been, or what might still be. The danger is that prolonged exposure to a Mangbattu can subtly alter one’s perception of reality, blurring the lines between memory and possibility.
The Xylosi didn’t just manipulate time; they explored the 'what ifs.' And now, those what ifs are haunting the Mire, waiting to be rediscovered.