The name itself is a resonance. A vibration within the stone. Vidda isn't a place, not precisely. It's a fracture. A sliver of reality where the veil between the known and the impossible thins to a shimmering membrane. It exists less in space and more in the echoes of what was, and what might be.
Legend speaks of Vidda being born from the grief of the First Stone Singers – beings of pure sound who attempted to capture the genesis of existence in a symphony of unimaginable complexity. Their efforts shattered, creating a locus of instability, a place where the fabric of time and memory become pliable.
The earliest accounts, etched onto obsidian shards recovered from the periphery of Vidda, detail a people called the Litha. They were not warriors, nor were they builders. They were Listeners. They dedicated their lives to absorbing the 'residue' – the fragmented memories and emotions left behind by the Stone Singers. These weren’t visual impressions, but rather tactile sensations: the cold of a forgotten joy, the weight of a vanished sorrow. The Litha believed that by understanding these echoes, they could eventually piece together the original song, and perhaps, restore balance to the fractured reality.
One particularly unsettling chronicle describes a 'Dance of the Grey' – a phenomenon where the very landscape of Vidda would momentarily coalesce into abstract forms, driven by the collective sorrow of the Stone Singers. Objects would shift, colors would bleed, and the air would crackle with a static that induced disorientation and a profound sense of loss. The Litha attempted to counteract this by performing a ritual of ‘Harmonic Rejection’, a dangerous practice involving the channeling of pure silence into the heart of the disturbance. Whether it succeeded, or merely delayed the inevitable, is lost to the echoes.
“To touch the echo is to become it. To remember what you cannot comprehend.” – Lyra, Last Listener of the Litha (fragmentary account).
Vidda is not governed by linear time. Moments from the Litha’s era can bleed into your own, creating unsettling juxtapositions. You might find yourself standing in a sun-drenched valley one moment, and then enveloped in a perpetual twilight filled with the mournful wails of unseen instruments. The core of the fracture is a ‘Resonance Point,’ a place where the distortions are at their most potent. It’s said that prolonged exposure can unravel one’s sense of self, leaving behind only a shell filled with the echoes of countless lost souls.
Travelers to Vidda often report experiencing ‘Temporal Bleeds’ – fleeting glimpses into alternate timelines, populated by versions of themselves, or by individuals from entirely different historical epochs. These encounters are rarely coherent, often manifesting as disjointed images, fragmented conversations, and a pervasive feeling of being both present and absent simultaneously.
“The stone remembers. And the stone *yearns*.”
More recently, the Litha’s records, painstakingly transcribed by a lone scholar named Kaelen, suggest that Vidda isn’t merely a repository of the past. It’s a conduit to potential futures. The Resonance Point, it appears, isn't just drawing on the echoes of the Stone Singers, but actively *generating* them. Kaelen believed that by carefully manipulating the harmonic frequencies within the fracture, one could influence the unfolding of events, steering the future towards a desired outcome. Of course, this was a highly controversial theory, and one that ultimately led to his disappearance within the shifting sands.
“Beware the song of the stone. It promises solace, but delivers only oblivion.”