The Legend of the Chronostones
The Legend of the Chronostones is a tale told by the The Putrians. It details the origin of K'Niff, the enemy of time itself.
Summary
"Long ago, before time could measure such things, there stood a great tower, Batios Tower, bursting from the sea like a great stone spike, scraping the clouds. Within this tower, lived the wizard Esorin, the temporal mage and high scholar of The Clever Folk.
Esorin was a powerful wizard, but even he could not save the life of his lover when her time came. Esorin became obsessed with the concept of time-travel, wishing to develop an artefact that would allow him to revisit the past and rekindle his lost love. In his desperation, he trained apprentices to search for any artefact, relic or spell that could possible get him closer to his goal. He investigated whispers of time-loops and rumours of ships lost in chronal waves. He scoured The Putric Isles for The Five Keys to Time. He hunted the great Gallibeast, who was said to send its foes into the far future. All were fruitless, but Esorin never gave up on his dream. He was haunted by the face of his lover, picturing her every day and every night, her soft voice growing grating and piercing as his failures became more and more numerous.
Decades passed, and Esorin could not escape what he had spent years trying to master, Time. He grew frail and old, but he was not deterred. He spent the last of his energy creating the The Chronostones, small, but powerful stones marked by a single rune; his people's symbol for Time. To his surprise, he activated the stone and was sent hurtling back many years, arriving in the exact same place, a few days after Esorin had lost his lover.
The Old Esorin gave the stone to his younger self, wishing to avoid years of pointless toil and disappointing failures, before the Old Esorin died in peace and happiness. However, Old Esorin failed to take into account the paradox. If Old Esorin simply gave his younger self the Chronostone, then he would not need to create it, so it would not need to be created, so it would not exist, meaning he would not be able to travel back in time and give it to his younger self. This impossibility caused Time itself to intervene, isolating the Bastios Tower in a parallel realm. Embittered by his salvation being ripped from his grasp and faced with the prospect of spending the rest of eternity in isolation without his love, Esorin vowed revenge on Time itself, and dedicated himself to returning to his own time. Over the years, his hate, passion and rage infected one of the Chronostone, poisoning it against its original purpose.
It became a relic of Anti-Time, causing rapid aging in the world around it. The power of the stone grew and grew, and soon allowed Esorin to decay the walls between realms and he set out traversing the multi-verse. He spent what felt like years searching for the correct time-line, his mind further corrupting and burning as the weight of years and years warped his sense of existence. The Chronostone kept feeding from his thoughts, feedbacking into the Once-Wizard.
When Esorin finally found his world, he was no longer the man he once was. Billions and Billions of years existing in the space between realms had turned him into something more. He no longer felt the love that had once fuelled him, he no longer bore the mind that allowed him to command time itself. He discarded his old name as a snake sheds its skin, and dubbed himself K'Niff, a word he had discovered in the Void who's meaning is unknowable to mortal minds. He can become one with the Chronostones; the relics were now an aspect of him, and he was an aspect of Anti-Time. He waged war against the forces of Time, annihilating sections of history and the future, twisting the time-lines in order to weaponize it against the people and physics that had betrayed him. Eventually, a great hero managed to seal K'niff away in the realm Time cast Esorin to, leaving only the Chronostone in the mortal realm. The Hero looked upon the stone, its rune now corrupted into something new. The Hero hid the Chronostone away, knowing that one day K'Niff would find his way back to this world and tear Time apart. The hero knew that he needed to be ready, and it is said that the hero passed down this knowledge from generation to generation, knowing the one day, their descendant would be needed to seal away Anti-Time once and for all."
Historical Basis
It is unknown to the modern-day scholar how much of the Legend of the Chronostones is true. There are records of a wizard by the name of Esorin stored in the Clever Folk's writings, but no connection between him and Temporal Magic have been established in the evidence. However, the Chronostones have cropped up throughout history, causing destabilisation events before mysteriously disappearing once again.
In Literature
The Legend has been published in The Great Apocrypha, alongside many of the other formative legends of The Beacons & Travesties.
In Art
There are two paintings stored in Flamel depicting the events of this story. The first, and most popular, is entitled "K'Niff and the War On Reason", which depicts a huge spider with legs made of flowing sand laying waste to an ancient city. The second is "The Tragedy of Time" which depicts Esorin weeping over his lover's deathbed.
Date of First Recording
7355
Date of Setting
7355
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