Rift into the Chronomancer's Domain

Time was never meant to be understood.It was meant to be endured—a relentless river carrying mortals from birth to dust, indifferent to their hopes, fears, and unfinished dreams. Gods watched it flow. Prophets glimpsed fragments of it. Wizards measured it, named it, feared it.One man chose to study it.Aeldric was never a king, nor a chosen hero, nor a vessel of divine will. He was a scholar—brilliant, patient, and unbearably curious. Where others saw history as a record of what was, Aeldric saw patterns. Repetitions. Weak points. He devoted centuries—then ensured he would have centuries more—unraveling the mechanics of causality itself.He did not create time.He did not destroy it.He bent it.Through forbidden chronomantic rituals, Aeldric achieved immortality—not by halting his age, but by stepping between moments, anchoring himself to fixed points in the ever-shifting weave. He learned to rewind days, fracture seconds, and stitch together outcomes that were never meant to coexist. Entire timelines collapsed under the strain. Others bled into one another, spawning contradictions: cities that remembered wars that never happened, rulers who ruled twice, people who died and yet still walked.The world did not break all at once.It desynced.Time rifts tore open like invisible wounds—places where past and future overlapped, where cause no longer guaranteed effect. Rift bridges formed, allowing passage between parallel outcomes. And anchors emerged: people and locations unusually resistant to temporal collapse, fixed points around which reality desperately stabilized.Aeldric watches it all with scholarly detachment.He does not conquer. He positions. His followers—agents, scholars, mercenaries, and fanatics—are not gathered by faith, but by function. Each is placed with surgical precision at pressure points in the timeline, where a single action can ripple outward into catastrophic divergence. Assassinations delayed by minutes. Artifacts removed before they are discovered. Wars nudged into existence—or erased—by the absence of one person at the wrong moment.To Aeldric, this is not evil.It is research.And now, the timelines are growing thin. Rifts are widening. Anchors are destabilizing. The world stands at the edge of a temporal cascade—where too many realities try to exist at once, and none can survive.You are not chosen by prophecy.You are not immune to time.But for reasons yet unknown, your paths have crossed a fracture in the weave—and time has noticed you.The question is no longer whether the past can be changed.It is whether the future deserves to exist at all.