Chronovault
Introduction
“The world we know is an error. We are building he Chronovault to finally correct it."
The Chronovault is an answer to a question that lingers in every rational mind that survived the Cataclysm.
"What if?"
What if the world hadn't ended?
What if the end could have been avoided?
Beyond their public manifesto of unity, the Children of the Armageddon are far more than a coalition. At their core lies a radical truth: they do not seek to rebuild or restore. Their inner circle does not prepare for the future; they deny it.
The Chronovault is an ambitious, sacred blasphemy.
A heretical hope.
An engine of temporal defiance forged from the shattered Aether Paths and the dying breath of failed timelines. It does not look forward. It reaches backward, with talons of ritual and wire, toward the moment before the first wound split the world.
The world as it stands is an abomination of chances that should never have converged. The Chronovault is a blade meant to sever that breach before it opens.
If it works, this world will die quietly fade away, never having existed.
And if it fails?
Then let it fail completely.
Let the world die properly this time: its spine aligned, its purpose intact.
Purpose of the Chronovault
There are those who seek meaning in ruin. Others seek redemption.
The Children of the Armageddon seek neither - at least not at their core.
To the world at large, the Children preach unity, healing, and the sealing of the Veil. They speak of balance, of restoring the natural order and of a future where mortals, mages and Immortals can coexist.
But beneath the manifesto lies a different gospel, kept behind closed rites and iron oaths.
To the innermost architects of the Chronovault, the Cataclysm was not a tragedy.
It was a miscalculation.
Not fate, not prophecy, but an error.
And so, the idea of the Chronovault was born.
It is not a vault in the sense of shelter, nor merely a machine. It is an incision into the fabric of reality, aimed with surgical accuracy at the moment when the world first veered from its rightful path. Its purpose is to reach that instant - the wound before the scar - and to unmake the choice that birthed the end.
This is the heresy at the Vault’s heart:
That there exists a better world, suspended like a dream that could have been, and that the only barrier to reaching it is the persistence of this one.
If it must die to be forgotten, so be it.
Bones of the Impossible
The Chronovault is a monumental construct; a fusion of magic, machinery, and ritual that stretches across the ruins beneath Salem. It spans roughly the size of a small cathedral, its vast polyhedral frame looming like a dormant titan beneath the scarred earth.
At its core lies the Heart; a crystalline lattice forged from Veilglass. This fragile yet radiant construction is the anchor and conduit for fractured time. It rests exactly where the Salem Ritual shattered the world, connected to the bleeding crossroads of converging Aether Paths. Here, mages attuned to the Continuum Pillar tap into the Heart’s essence, channeling raw temporal magic through its body. Their ritual connection awakens the Heart, causing it to pulse with a slow, uneven heartbeat; the fractured rhythm of a world gasping for air.
Encasing the Heart is the Core, a vast dome of metal and wire crafted by mortal engineers and mages attuned to the Pillar of Matter. The dome is a marvel of engineering. An intricate work of tubes and conduits run beneath its surface, carrying the Vault’s lifeblood: vampire blood awakened and infused with matter magic. This blood fuels the machine’s immense power, acting as a cursed catalyst bridging mortal craft and Veil forces.
Surrounding the Core is a polyhedral lead shell: a massive geometric cage forged from thick lead plates. This shell is both a prison and a focusing lens, containing the chaotic magic within and preventing dangerous leaks that could tear further rents in the Veil. Lead's magic-dampening properties make it uniquely suited to hold the Vault’s volatile energies in check.
The entire construct occupies a sprawling labyrinth of subterranean halls and ritual chambers beneath Salem. Its size is both necessity and menace. Large enough to contain and control the massive temporal energies it manipulates, yet so vast that it threatens to become a tomb for those who work within it.
The Salem Nexus
Salem is no ordinary ruin. It is a nexus point, a bleeding scar where fractured Aether Paths once converged. These crossroads once bridged realms: material, spectral, and all that lies between. But the Cataclysm tore them asunder, turning Salem into a place where time, space, and reality unravel.
To dwell in Salem is to live on the edge of madness and oblivion. The fractured ley lines pulse erratically. The ground shifts beneath one’s feet, time folding and slipping - seconds dilate into minutes, moments echo endlessly, or vanish altogether. Shadows do not follow light here; they slither with lives of their own.
For the Children of the Armageddon and those who labor on the Chronovault, Salem is both sanctuary and prison. Its very instability is the key to their work as without the nexus’s raw energy, the Vault could not hope to reach backward through time. Yet every moment spent here risks tearing the thin line that holds the world together even more.
Whispers from the Threshold
No official map marks the Vault. No declaration confirms its construction. To most, it is only a myth; one more ghost story whispered across dying campfires, buried beneath layers of ash and fear. Salem itself has become a name few dare to speak, a place twisted by the Cataclysm, where even the Veil forgets how to hold.
And yet, something pulses beneath its ruined heart.
They say the Vault is real. Not a dream, not a blueprint, but a beating, hidden engine built in silence. Its existence is denied, but too many anomalies surround Salem to be coincidence. Some claim they’ve seen the air fold strangely near its ruins, heard echoes of voices no longer born in this century.
Some say the Vault has already been used. That a volunteer - willing, desperate, brave - was cast backward. Whether they failed to arrive, failed to change anything, or were lost to the void between times, none can say. Given the broken state of the world though, many believe the attempt failed.
Others go even further: that this very world and its ruins is not the world that was, but a consequence of interference caused by the Chronovailt. That the Cataclysm may not have been the fault of mages or Immortals, but the echo of a failed attempt to prevent the possibiity of it. A future rewritten so poorly that it broke.
If that’s true, then the Vault is not a solution.
It is the problem.
Disagreements
Within the inner circle of the Children of the Armageddon, the great divide is not over whether to use the Chronovault, but how far back to reach. Some believe that the moment of The Salem Ritual is the pivotal point, the fracture to be healed. Let the ritual unfold as it should have. Complete the spell. Lock the Immortals into death. Perhaps, this time, the world won’t break.
Others disagree - fiercely so. Some Immortals within the circle argue that to complete the ritual would be to erase their entire kind. They were not the cause of the Cataclysm, they say, only victims of its aftermath. Instead, they propose traveling further bac and unmake the mages' final plan before it was ever cast, and let the future unfold as it should, instead of risking a worse one born of arrogance and sacrifice.
And yet… there are Immortals who stand ready to vanish. They have lived too long, devoured too much, seen the cost of their hunger. These few believe the ritual must be completed. That their end is the price for balance.
There is no consensus.
Only a question:
What if they choose wrong?
The Weight of the Unhappened
What is history, if not a cage of consequences?
What becomes of the present, when the past is no longer fixed?
Whether the Chronovault is a door or a weapon depends on who dares to use it. To some, it offers a final chance to right what once went wrong. To others, it is a heresy against the linear nature of time. And to many, it is nothing but a ghost, a fever-dream of broken minds who cannot accept the ruin of the world as permanent.
The Vault may never open.
Or it may have already done so.
Maybe the result is the world you see.
So take a moment, and wonder:
This seems like it is going to be a bad idea...
Explore Etrea | WorldEmber 2025
...or was it already a bad idea? Yeah, messing up with time never ends well!