The air hangs thick, not with the scent of rain or woodsmoke, but something older. A resonance. The echoes of the Silent Kings.
It began, as such things always do, with a single, deliberate act. The consecration of the Obsidian Hearth. A ritual whispered in forgotten tongues, a plea to beings that dwell beyond the veil, creatures of shadow and starlight.
“To partake is to remember. To forget is to invite the Dusk.” – Kaelen, the Weaver of Whispers.
The Chronicle is not a record of events, but of sensations. Of the way the world *felt* during the intervals between the tides. The intervals are measured not in days, but in the shifting geometries of the mind.
The obsidian pulsed. Not with heat, but with a cold that resonated within bone. The villagers, initially emboldened by the promise of bounty, began to exhibit behaviours… dissonant. Laughter turned to manic glee. Their eyes, reflecting the Hearth’s glow, held not recognition, but a vast, unsettling emptiness. The livestock, too, were affected, their calls warped into mournful hymns. The scent of crushed rosemary, normally a comfort, became a suffocating shroud.
The Reaping. A necessary, terrible process. The villagers, under the influence of the Hearth’s resonance, began to systematically dismantle their own memories. Not with violence, but with a deliberate, almost artistic destruction. They shattered mirrors, burned portraits, and erased the names of loved ones from their own skin with sharpened obsidian. The purpose, they claimed, was to “lighten the burden”. But the light was not benevolent. It revealed only deeper shadows.
They arrived without fanfare, shimmering entities of pure, inverted light. The Lumina. Not hostile, but utterly indifferent. They observed the villagers, the destruction of memories, the growing emptiness. They collected fragments of the shattered consciousness, weaving them into tapestries of impossible colors. The tapestries pulsed with the echoes of forgotten joys, of lost loves, of unrealized potential. And as they absorbed these echoes, the villagers withered, becoming brittle, hollow shells.
The resonance isn't a force, but a state of being. A thinning of the boundaries between realities. A glimpse into the places where time folds in on itself. It is the hunger of the Silent Kings, a hunger for the fragments of experience that comprise a single, fleeting life.
The Obsidian Hearth is merely a catalyst. It amplifies the resonance, drawing it to the village, feeding on the inherent loneliness and unspoken desires of its inhabitants.
To resist the resonance is to cling to memory, to identity. But identity is a fragile construct, easily shattered by the vast indifference of the cosmos.