A fragmented account of a creature woven from twilight and the echoes of forgotten geometries. It is not a history, but a collection of resonances, impressions, and the lingering scent of displaced time.
The first sighting occurred within the Obsidian Mire. Not a physical being, precisely, but a distortion—a fracturing of the air itself. It pulsed with a lavender light, and the very ground beneath shifted with an unsettling rhythm. Witnesses reported a sensation of being pulled backwards, not in space, but in *time*. The air tasted of static and bruised plums. It was accompanied by a low, humming vibration, like a tuning fork struck with impossible force. The feeling persisted long after the shimmer vanished, a phantom pressure behind the eyes. The local folklore, previously centered around will-o'-the-wisps, began to incorporate whispers of the “Shimmering One.”
“It wasn’t *looking* at us, you understand? It was… listening.”
Subsequent observations revealed that the Shimmering One wasn’t isolated. It was part of a vast, interconnected network—a "resonance net" as some theorized—spanning across localized temporal anomalies. These anomalies, initially dismissed as geological oddities, began to exhibit patterns of behavior, responding to stimuli—primarily emotional states. Intense feelings of grief, joy, or profound curiosity seemed to amplify the Shimmering One's presence, causing the distortions to intensify and spread. The network appeared to be feeding on these emotions, like a strange, sentient fungus.
“It… it *remembered* things. Not its own memories, I don’t think, but echoes of the past. The screams of long-dead civilizations, the laughter of children who never grew old… all filtered through the Shimmering One.”
These colors represent the dominant manifestations of the Shimmering One’s influence – the hues of its temporal distortions. Each shade reflects a specific facet of its reality.
The most unsettling aspect of the Shimmering One’s existence was its apparent lack of agency. It seemed to *react* to the world, but never initiated action. It was as if it were trapped within a loop, endlessly observing, endlessly echoing. Some theorized that it was a consequence of its connection to the temporal network – a reflection of the infinite possibilities of time itself. It was a mirror, but a mirror that shattered and reformed with every glance.
“It wasn’t *gone* when it disappeared. It was simply… elsewhere. Existing simultaneously in a thousand different moments, a thousand different versions of itself.”