Inktober IX: Swing

After five minutes had passed without a word or signal, I started to grow worried and left the skiff, headed after Winsch. As I peeked around the cave's entrance, I found a man sitting there, bathed in the dimming orange glow of a fallen torch. His hair was greyed and tangled in knots, and he sat kneeling and crying. I called out to him, only to meet the face of an old man contorted in ages upon ages of tragedy and relentless pain. When he shakily whispered my name, eyes wetting with tears, I was sure I had found Winsch. But to this day, I have no idea what had truly happened to him in those brief moments.
-Damien Roe, Cartographer

The Pendulum is the name given to a rock formation straddling an area deep within the Ethereal Plane and a small cave passage on a tiny island in the Tourgier Sea. It is comprised of a central slice of an unknown material in a granite framework that swings between both sides at a constant rate of 0.493 oscillations per second. Any objects within some range of the Pendulum have been noted to age rapidly and possess latent traces of magic within their basic makeup.

Construction

Though its frame seems to be carved out of the naturally-occurring granite in the islet's cave, the actual material makeup of the "pendulum" is still unknown. Some believe it to be magnetic, given its oscillations between sides of the frame, but nobody has ever gotten close enough to obtain a definitive sample. The few known qualities of it are a jet black hue that glows a blinding white in the Ethereal Plane, but is able to take on the quantity of any or all colors when transitioning between them.

Abilities

Objects, including sentient beings, placed within range of the Pendulum will exhibit oddities after exposure, despite the common lack of visual phenomena occurring. Many of them will display rapid aging, with flowers or vines turning to a fine powder after being touched. This has lead to some speculation that some unknown process is happening while the Pendulum is swinging, and that its interruption will result in the aging. However, given that most subjects that have lived after exposure to the Pendulum were only exposed for several minutes at most, it would be deemed unsafe to test the theory for any longer periods of time.
Surviving subjects have reported seeing the Pendulum and being unable to look away as it swung, observing a similar sight to any observer outside its effective range. However, these few reports detail that with each full swing, the area around them would shift into one full of a sickening green light and much fog. The Pendulum had shifted colors almost entirely, with the black centerpiece now a gleaming white. Once it had fully swung again, they found themselves back in the cave, though still unable to look away. This process repeated itself until the subject was disturbed and retrieved, with no discrepancies between the observed and actual number of swings.

Social Impact

Because the Pendulum is inside an underground cavern of a small island in a wide and unpopulated sea, very few people know of it and its true powers. Those who do have often gone to great lengths for themselves and others to avoid it, including warning of monsters in the area, erasing it from maps, to even trying to sink the island altogether. Few tales exist of the Pendulum, and the ones that are told often feature it in different locations of the Tourgier Sea. This could be in an attempt to keep its true location hidden or, perhaps, could be a sign that multiple Pendulums exist.