Time Streams

Time as a concept was only introduced into Tael when Tempus entered the world.

Description

Every life on Tael has a basic grasp of the concept of time, which helps them understand that time is passing and what that actually means. However additionally to that, every life is also connected to stream of time, constantly flowing like a river. These streams were once dorment, until Tempus landed on the world and awakened them all, and every single one started flowing towards his impact site.

A stream is basically a fated path that the life will eventually take, with all its twists and turns, ups and downs, the fate of the life is already written in its stream. While the exact details are hard to make out, some people might be able to tell when someone is about to face great events, for better or for worse.

These streams are deep underground and are physically represented by anything that could flow, depending on the local area the stream is currently flowing through. Most often than not, they are simply small rivers of water, but also take the form of magma streams in the Ashen Steppes or vines in the former Jungle of Ohmal, which are now streams of sand. One thing all streams have in common is their destination, the Seat of Time located within the deepest caverns of Tempus Peak, where they are all overseen by Tempus and Solaire to ensure a continous flow.

Due to the streams usually being very deep underground, they are not affecting the lifes on the surface, however in the desert, where they slowly emerge to flow into the Peak, they can pull the time around them along, which can cause life to suddenly feel like time being accelerated. To combat these effects in desert, Tempus is actively keeping an aura around the Peak, that slows down the percieved time again, which while helpful and sometimes even too strong farther away from the peak, can only do so much when eventually more and more streams converge.

The desert however is not the only place where streams converge, technically. There are occassionally some points in the world where the streams randomly flow up high enough to influence the area, even when only very slightly, and there are also spots where this happens with many streams at once, which causes time to become extra unstable, far outside the reach of Tempus aura, and therefore usually contained by special means, like a natural looking, but unreachable making, landform, or even manmade structures like temples.

A stream can potentially manipulated or analyzed, if people or creatures were to dig deep enough, which could cause the fate of a life to change. However without someone attuned to the powers of time, it is impossible to tell who the stream belongs to.