The Salols, as the Chronarium's scholars have determined, aren’t merely creatures of temporal distortion. They are, in essence, solidified echoes of moments of profound emotional resonance. Specifically, moments of intense, unacknowledged longing—a yearning for something lost, something unattainable, something fundamentally *other*. Each Salol contains not a singular point in time, but a cascade of experiences, a shimmering accretion of the emotional residue left behind by individuals lost in such states. They appear most frequently in places saturated with similar energies: abandoned theaters, forgotten libraries, the edges of ancient forests where the veil between realities feels particularly thin.
The Chronarium hypothesizes that the Salols’ ability to manipulate time isn't a conscious act, but a sympathetic response to this underlying emotional frequency. They don't ‘travel’ through time; they *amplify* it, drawing individuals into a loop of their own past regrets, offering a distorted reflection of what might have been. The intensity of the experience is directly proportional to the strength of the initial longing—a faint yearning might merely cause a momentary disorientation, while a deep, consuming sorrow could trap a person in a recurring cycle for decades.
The primary method of studying Salols, ironically, isn't observation, but *recording*. The Chronarium employs devices known as ‘Resonance Collectors’ – intricate instruments crafted from polished obsidian and interwoven strands of Aetherium (a substance theorized to be the solidified breath of dying stars). These collectors don't capture images or sounds; they map the emotional frequencies emanating from the Salol. The resulting data manifests as shimmering, three-dimensional glyphs, which the scholars painstakingly translate into what they call ‘Cartographies of Sorrow’.
These Cartographies aren’t maps in the traditional sense. They depict not the physical location of a Salol, but the *landscape* of its emotional echo. A particularly potent Salol might reveal a Cartography resembling a crumbling Victorian ballroom, overlaid with spectral figures engaged in a silent waltz, or a desolate, snow-covered plain echoing with the cries of forgotten soldiers. The colors shift and swirl, reflecting the fluctuating intensity of the emotional currents. The most unsettling aspect is that the viewer begins to *feel* the echoes – a phantom touch, a whisper of regret, the crushing weight of a lost love.
Preserving a Salol is a profoundly complex undertaking. Simply containing it within a temporal field is insufficient. The core challenge lies in preventing the Salol from actively *feeding* on the ambient emotional energy of its surroundings. The Chronarium utilizes a process called ‘Stabilization’, which involves introducing meticulously calibrated pulses of counter-resonant frequencies – carefully crafted melodies designed to disrupt the Salol's inherent cycle of amplification.
However, this process is inherently unstable. Prolonged exposure to these counter-frequencies can, paradoxically, *strengthen* the Salol, leading to a cascade of escalating distortions. The Chronarium’s most experienced scholars warn that attempting to ‘fix’ a Salol is akin to trying to contain a storm—the longer you struggle, the more violent it becomes. There is a constant debate within the Chronarium concerning the ethical implications of this practice; is it truly preservation, or merely a prolonged, agonizing demonstration of a creature trapped in its own sorrow?