Looking Deeper
Tanroa, Goddess of Time, grants to a rare few the power to travel to Mizahar's past. There they may view and learn from events that have already happened. The closer one becomes to Tanroa, the more influence they are able to exert over the past.
In order to activate the power of their mark, a Treaver must enter a body of water of some significant size. This could be a pond, large stream, river, lake or even an ocean. While the size must be larger than your average creek, any larger than that has no effect on the end result.
Before entering the body of water it is important for the Treaver to become familiar with the surrounding area. This could mean walking the banks of the river or stream for several yards on both sides or walking all the way around a pond or several yards in both directions around a lake, noting any major landmarks and taking in as much detail as possible. Picking up stones, touching trees and tracing the bark with a finger, breathing the air and tasting the water, basically becoming familiar with the immediate area is essential before activating the mark.
When the Treaver feels they are at least moderately familiar with the nearby area surrounding the body of water, they can walk and/or wade out into the center of the lake, stream, river, etc. Then, closing their eyes, they allow their thoughts to remember the various details of the area they just spent time familiarizing themselves with. As they recall these details, they will then imagine what those details may have looked like a season ago, then maybe two seasons ago followed by a year ago. Meditation is VERY important in the process as the Treaver must focus on one specific object or feature and then imagine what it may have looked like in the past starting with a short time before and progressing further back. Unlike Treavery before the Djed Storm of 512, Tanroa now only allows contact with the past since knowing the future has the potential of destroying the present even more so than knowing the past. While the future was once accessible through Treavery, the loss of the Antechamber restricts Treavers only to the past. Through knowledge of the past, Treavers can cause small changes to the present that may affect the future.
Negative marks given by Tanroa cause the cursed to become mentally lost in the past. The severity of the curse depends on the number of negative marks and begins with the individual mixing up things that they've experienced, seen or heard in the present with those things experienced in the past. With two negative marks, the individual will lose all sense of time; days slip away like seconds and seconds can feel like days. The individual will simply shutdown mentally for long periods of time. When they are aware again, days will have passed with the person remembering nothing of what transpired during that time. Three negative marks regresses the individual's mental capacity to that of a young child; any time that has passed since they were a child is forgotten. There are none known to have ever acquired 4 negative marks from Tanroa as three marks are sufficient to eliminate the individual as any sort of threat.
Eventually, the focused meditation begins to blur as Treavery takes effect. To any who would be watching in the present, the Treaver is engulfed by an orb of water that rises up from whatever body it was a part of. This orb is known to Treavers as Time’s Anchor. The Treaver cannot be seen through the water flowing and waving throughout the surface of the Anchor. On the surface of the body of water where the Anchor is located, ripples consistently yet gently emanate from outward.
The anchor surrounds the Treaver yet leaves an arm’s width between the water and the Treaver. That space is empty. Looking to the inside surface of the anchor, the Treaver sees can only make out limited details depending on how many marks they possess. However, those things that they see, slowly at first then increasing in speed, began to age in reverse. The Treaver looking into the surrounding anchor will see a full-grown tree reverse age to a sapling and then a seed. They will see a corpse of a fish washed up on a river bank return to life and slip back into the water. With only a single mark, the Treaver will only see one or two details of their surroundings reverse age. However, as one marked by Tanroa, they have a supernatural sense of time which allows them to know exactly how far into the past they are seeing things. When they have witnessed the moment where the object or feature no longer exists in the physical area where the Treaver is located (line of physical sight), they lose touch of the subject. Treavery’s power however does not stop with viewing one or two features of their surroundings in reverse.
The first-marked Treaver, while surrounded by the anchor and in the grasp of their activated gnosis, is swept up in the river of time and carried up-stream. They are basically sent back into the past. Their sense of time tells them just how far back they’ve traveled and grants them the ability to stop anywhere within the limits their mark sets upon them. For example, a first-marked Treaver can travel up to 25 years into the past, a two-marked Treaver can travel 100 years into the past while a priest(ess) can travel 500 years into the past. The Champion of Tanroa can travel up to 1,000 years into the past.
While embraced by the anchor, the Treaver can catch blurry glimpses of the surroundings outside the anchor as they travel backward in time. If they choose to stop themselves in the “river’s flow” they simply will themselves to cease travel. The water of the anchor will simply fall away leaving the Treaver in the same place they were when they activated their mark yet some time in the past. If the body of water they started in does not exist in the past, they would appear standing on whatever ground existed then. Tanroa, realizing the potential for catastrophic consequences resulting from changing the past, restricts the ability of the Treavers to alter it.
Treavery can be the core of a character who focuses their play on unraveling the mysteries of the past. Historians, explorers, archaeologists, all can benefit from Treavery. I can even see Treavery being integral to characters who bare extremely close ties to their ancestors and their family/race/city/cultural heritage. A rather fun concept that just occurred to me is that of a character who realizes that a single event sometime in the past has shaped their lives in a way that will forever condemn their bloodline to hardship, shame and devastation. In response, they seek out Tanroa for a way to right said wrong and restore their destiny. This may lead the character throughout Mizahar's past in search of that one vaguely realized event. Thread after thread they go through time, searching for that single moment to change. Throughout their time travels, Tanroa subtlety teaches them the importance of time, the past and of how significant one's actions are to the future. |
by Kai' on October 5th, 2015, 6:45 pm 
