Compass: Prologue

Welcome to a world ruled by the flow of time. People's bodies Seemed to age according to the day-by-day calendar established by their ancestors, yet the passage of time in each day depended on the seemingly mystical stream that time created in the world. For centuries, the land was filled with two ruling clans: one of nomads who traveled from place to place, always seeking where time flowed the slowest to extend their lifespans and experience as much as possible, the other of settlers who laid claim to their land, believing their homes to be the ultimate expression of their lives, rather than their experiences. Over the generations, these clans lived in peace among each other. The nomads would pass through the lands of the settlers, trading for supplies and bewildering the civilized people with the tales of their journeys. Some of the settlers became nomads, and some of the nomads joined the settlers, for whatever reasons they had.

The flow of time was never consistent in any given place. One calendar day, time could inch along, each hour dragging on into a week's worth of experiences. The next calendar day could last mere seconds. The settlers did not mind the risk. After all, some days would be shorter and some longer. The nomads on the other hand used lookouts and scouts to survey the lands, recording the patterns of time's quickening and slowing in different regions. After several generations, this became even easier with technology developed by the settlers to record tremendous amounts of data within small devices.

Within the nomadic clan, several tribes emerged as this technology spread and began to become a vast network across the world. Each tribe was charged with mapping out the streams of time in different areas, at which point in history they began to reach the edges of their world. At which time they had realized that the Great Sea, towards which every individual time stream seemed to flow. The civilized settlers began to prepare an expedition to the center of their world to find what was in the middle of the sea. The nomads on the other hand began to wonder what the result of the clashing streams would mean. As the streams met, would time itself come to a halt, or would time flow so quickly that a man would age and die within a matter of minutes? Most of the regional tribes were too scared to find out what the answer was. These tribes severed their connections with the civilizations.

One tribe, however, believed that if a settlement was established at the center of their world, that with further technological development, they could learn to control the flow of time in the whole world, or possibly even cease the flow altogether and achieve immortality. The entire tribe, known collectively as Chrouxias, gathered the settlers brave enough to set out to sea in search of this truth. The generation died off, and the expedition was never heard from again. Five centuries later, the people of the world seemed to forget they ever set off to discover what lied at that nexus of streams.