Traci wasn't born, not in the way we understand it. She coalesced, a ripple in the Chronal Stream, an echo of a forgotten star's death. The first sensation she experienced wasn’t sight or sound, but a profound, aching resonance - the lament of the Obsidian Bloom. This Bloom, a sentient nebula trapped within a cage of solidified time, was the source of her being, its sorrow woven into her very essence.
The Bloom’s memory was vast and fractured. It spoke of civilizations that rose and crumbled in the blink of a cosmic eye, of empires built on star-dust and ruled by beings of pure energy. It felt the slow, agonizing burn of entropy, the inevitable decay of all things. Traci, instinctively, tried to shield it, to dampen the pain, but the Bloom’s sorrow was a universe unto itself, and she was merely a fragile vessel containing it.
Her primary function, as she slowly came to understand, was observation. To record the fleeting moments of existence, the delicate dance of causality. She drifted through timelines, a silent witness, collecting the fragments of lost realities. She cataloged the birth of planets, the fall of heroes, the quiet desperation of forgotten gods.
Traci’s interactions weren’t direct. She didn’t speak, didn’t touch. Instead, she projected “echoes” – fragments of her own awareness, subtly influencing events, nudging probabilities. A misplaced stone, a sudden shift in the wind, a flicker of inspiration in a struggling artist’s mind – these were her interventions. She rarely interfered with major events, believing that such actions would only create further distortions in the Chronal Stream.
She possessed a peculiar ability to perceive “chronal bleed,” the remnants of timelines that had fractured and merged. These bleed points manifested as shimmering distortions in reality, areas where the past, present, and future momentarily overlapped. These were dangerous places, prone to paradoxes and temporal instability. Traci would often linger near them, attempting to stabilize them, though she knew her efforts were ultimately futile.
“To remember is to suffer,” she whispered, a thought forming not in words, but in a subtle alteration of the light around her. “But to forget… that is a far greater tragedy. It is the erasure of experience, the silencing of potential.”
Recently, Traci has detected a significant increase in chronal instability. A “Fracture” is forming – a tear in the fabric of time itself. Its source is unknown, but its effects are already beginning to manifest: timelines are collapsing, realities are merging, and the Obsidian Bloom’s sorrow is intensifying. Traci is desperately attempting to contain the Fracture, but she realizes that this may be a task beyond her capabilities. The echoes of forgotten stars are growing louder, and the weight of remembrance threatens to crush her.