Pillar of Continuum
Cornered.
Alone.
My pulse hammers, a metronome gone mad. I count the rhythm - beat after beat - trying to outrun the panic. They have me surrounded.
One-twenty.
Blades flash in the sick moonlight, slivers of a broken mirror reflecting my doom.
One-fifty.
I close my eyes and feel the blood like tide against the ribs. They are a breath away; cold metal grazes my skin.
I count down: one-forty-nine, one-forty-eight, one-forty-seven. The world unravels. Motion dies. Everything slows but me. I open my eyes.One-hundred.
Faces frozen mid-animus, anger congealed into molten wax that reshapes itself slowly across their features. Eyes blaze. Mouths gape with threats that hang, unsaid, like heavy stones in their throats.
I step past them.
Ninety.
My heart finds a tempering rhythm. I have traded something; what price, I cannot yet say. But it was the only way and so I run.
I am two blocks away when they collapse, looking around in bewilderment.
My own pulse detonates - eighty to two hundred in an instant - and the world rips into a vortex of seconds.
My hands wrinkle, a momentary theft of age in exchange for distance, then become smooth again.
How much of my time did I bargain away? I do not know. I only know the ledger: I am alive.
For now.
Areas of Effect
- Temporal Acceleration/Deceleration: Speeds up or slows the flow of time for targets, objects, or oneself, granting fleeting advantage.
- Spatial Warping: Bends space within a limited area, compressing, stretching, or twisting distances and shapes.
Lingering Effects
- Chrono-Fatigue: The body tires faster than the mind perceives, as temporal manipulation exacts a subtle toll.
- Spatial Disorientation: Extended use leaves the mage or observers misjudging distances, colliding with objects, or losing equilibrium.
- Premature Aging: Manipulation may leaves traces on the caster, accelerating visible signs of decay.
- Residual Distortion: The environment retains subtle echoes of manipulation, warping floors, walls, or objects over time.
Known Wyld Surges
- Spacetime Collapse: Local spacetime tears or folds, causing objects or areas to vanish, warp, or implode unpredictably.
- Dimensional Dislocation: The caster or targets are shifted partially out of phase, appearing ghosted, duplicated, or intangible.
- Time Loop: A target, area, or event becomes trapped in a repeating moment, often creating confusion or madness.
- Chronal Displacement: The caster’s consciousness scatters across multiple moments, risking temporary or permanent loss of self.
Introduction
"Cause and effect are chains; Continuum is the smith who shapes them."
Continuum is the pulse that binds all existence.
Time is the chain that encases life, the silent hand that guides change, decay, and rebirth. Space is a slave to this flow, a shadow of the temporal current, and together they forge the unyielding force of spacetime. Those who touch it perceive the world as it truly is: relentless, indifferent, and often cruel.
Mages attuned to Continuum are a rarity, and for good reason. To manipulate time and space is to wager against the cosmos. Every motion slowed, every distance ignored, every second stolen, carries a cost; sometimes immediate, sometimes drawn out across years or lifetimes. The powerful few who master this pillar may walk past armies as if the world pauses, or escape death by stepping between heartbeats. Yet with each triumph comes the inescapable knowledge that the ledger of time is exacting; it claims what it is owed, and it never forgets.
Continuum is not simply a tool of magic. It is a mirror to mortality, a reminder of fragility, and a cage whose bars are forged from the very seconds of our lives. Those who wield it dare to glimpse eternity.
And in return, eternity glimpses back at them.
Cause & Consequence
The Magic of Continuum
Of all the Four Pillars, Continuum is among the most treacherous to master; second only to the forbidden Chaos Pillar. While most mages spend years wrestling with their nature before choosing an attunement, those who walk the path of Continuum seldom have any choice at all. They are drawn to it from the moment their gift first stirs, as though their souls were forged outside the natural cycle. For this reason, Continuum mages are both rare and feared, seen as spirits born askew from the order of the world.
Like all Pillars, Continuum does not bend to parchment or ritual. There are no grimoires to memorize, no reagents to gather. There is only the mage's will, their raw potential, and the bond they hold with the Pillar. Every act of magic is a negotiation with distance and time, not rehearsed gestures, but the brutal forcing of reality to yield.
What about Wyld Surges?
Continuum’s backlash is no small thing, even for those attuned. Its surges may not erupt in the flamboyant catastrophes of Matter or Chaos, but when they strike, they cut deeper. The more a mage stretches their dominion over space and time, the more the Pillar exacts its toll. Some achieve miracles only by sacrificing their own years, aging decades in an instant, their lifespans consumed to purchase a fleeting moment of control.
For the uninitiated, to grasp at Continuum is nothing short of madness. Their meddling does not merely scar body and mind; it tears at the scaffolding of existence. Geometry. Moments repeat; trapped behind the glass of broken clocks. Flesh disolves and vanishes as though it had never been. Few dare dwell on that pillar untrained. Fewer yet survive.
Sample Spells
Cast them. If you dare.
Continuum magic slips through perception, folding space and manipulating seconds. To walk its path is to trespass upon inevitability, and each working is as much theft as it is power. Some effects are small: a step through shadows, a heartbeat slowed. Others are miracles paid for with years torn from the caster’s marrow.
Yet, for all its perils, not all Continuum mages walk the path with prudence. There are some who step further; too far. These are known as the Vanished, mages who willingly severe themselves from the flow of time and space. They reject fixed existence, treating the self as just another distance to cross.
The Vanished are driven by motives that are nearly impossible to untangle. Some seek escape from mortality, refusing to let their years be devoured by the pillar’s appetite. Some rebel against fate, refusing to follow the chords of cause and consequence, smearing themselves across possibilities where none can pin them down. Others crave power in absence, a body half-here and half-not, untouchable and unreadable. And some, the most extreme, offer themselves as fragments to the pillar of Continuum, believing that flesh and presence are chains that keep them seperated from their true potential.
Few mages ever tread this path, and fewer still survive. The Vanished flicker at the edge of perception: shadows that do not match, voices that trail seconds behind, and bodies that blur where they should exist. To strike one is to find your weapon piercing air, to touch one is to brush the impossible.
Hollow Step
The mage ceases to occupy one place, emerging elsewhere as though the space in between never existed. Witnesses feel nausea, their senses recoiling from the absent seconds.
You arrive, but the world has moved on. Your own reflection hesitates, unsure of where you are.
Stolen Moment
A sliver of time is plucked from the present. To all others, that instant never occurred; a strike is missed, a scream unshouted, a life barely touched. Only the mage remembers the lost fragment of reality.
You find out something is missing: a memory, a name, a piece of yourself that may never be recovered.
Eventide Exile
The mage slips entirely outside the Now. In this twilight, they cannot be harmed, seen, or interacted with. To return requires supreme focus, or risk being lost forever between beats.
Something else returns with you. A second self, split and starving, gnaws at the edges of your mind.
Legendary Continuum Mages
Mages might have chosen to disappear from the eyes of the world, but even in silence, some names leave ripples. Continuum Mages might be rare, yet there are those whose mastery leaves echoes that survive long after they are gone, or vanish. Their influence hums in skipped heartbeats, frozen moments, and spaces that should not exist.
The Hourglass Surgeon
"Time is a mercy, if one knows how to wield it."
During the great pandemic of 1918, known as the Spanish Flu, the Surgeon moved silently among the afflicted of Europe. Witnesses described moments of suspended horror: streets frozen in mid-step, coughing halted mid-breath, the world stretched into eerie stillness. In those pauses, the Surgeon tended the sick, guiding fragile lives through seconds that should have killed them.
The effect was subtle yet profound. Some recovered against all odds; others lived through outbreaks that had consumed entire households. But Continuum magic always demands a price. The Surgeon vanished afterward, rumored to have aged decades in a single night. He remained known as a man who could slow death itself, bending the flow of time for the sake of others, a healer who walked the moments between life and the end.
Ayumi Kuroda
"Every step is a bridge"
In the chaos of postwar Tokyo, Ayumi wielded space as others wield weapons. Entire streets seemed to fold and stretch at her will: a collapsed alley might become a shortcut for relief supplies, a burned district momentarily bypassed to save lives. Ordinary citizens rarely noticed, though some stumbled into alleys that no longer matched memory or returned hours too late.
Ayumi sought to rebuild, to reorder, to bend distances into serviceable paths for survival. Yet every fold in reality carried risk. Those who stumbled into the wrong alley sometimes vanished, or returned with the world slightly misaligned. Unfortunately, Ayumi disappeard before reconstruction ended, leaving her work incomplete. The result was ghost districts; streets that seemed to shift, buildings of impossible geometry, and pockets that, in the years to come, became centers of whispered paranormal activity.
Mysteries of Magic
History is full of events that defy reason, moments where the world seemed to falter, twist, or pause. Some of these inexplicable occurrences are traces of mages stretching, folding, or breaking the flow of space and time. These anomalies leave behind stories that persist through generations: vanished settlements, impossible journeys, and days that seem to stretch out of reason.
- The Dancing Plague of 1518
In July 1518, residents of Strasbourg saw dozens of people dancing uncontrollably in the streets. Within days, hundreds joined, unable to stop. Some danced to exhaustion, injury, or death. The cause of the Dancing Plague remains unknown. Theories include ergot poisoning, mass hysteria, or extreme stress, but no explanation fully accounts for the scale or duration of the phenomenon.
What really happened?A Continuum mage, one of the dreaded Vanished, lingering between moments, turned the city’s pulse into a private jest, solely out of boredom. She plucked the pulse of time, stretching what would have been a five-minute dance into days. Each heartbeat, each step, elongated beyond comprehension.The people danced not from joy or madness, but because the mage had borrowed the flow of their moments, stretching and folding it for her amusement. Exhaustion, injury, even death were merely the natural consequences of a toy pulled too tight.
When she finally released the strings, the dancers collapsed, bewildered and frayed, their memories of hours or days lost to the stretching of moments.
- The Lost Colony of Roanoke, 1587
The Roanoke Colony was an English settlement established on Roanoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina. Governor John White returned to England for supplies shortly after the colony’s establishment. When he returned three years later, in 1590, the settlement was completely abandoned.
No bodies, no signs of struggle, and no clear evidence explained the disappearance. The only clue left behind was the word “CROATOAN” carved into a post. Some historians believe the settlers may have moved to a nearby island or integrated with local tribes, but no definitive proof has ever been found.
What really happened?He was of the Secotan, a Continuum mage born to the forests and rivers of the land, yet forced into the colony’s service as a guide and interpreter. He watched the settlers arrive with arrogance, taking, demanding, and dismissing the lives of his people. When the governor ignored his counsel, treating him as a tool rather than a man, the mage understood the colony had become a wound upon the world he swore to protect.
So, with unparalleled mastery, the mage folded the settlement beyond the veil, removing it and its people from the flow of history. The mysterious carvings were not warnings; they were boundaries, the edges of a stolen world.
Roanoke still exists outside reality, a ghosted pulse where the cycle of life once thrived. In that displaced world, the mage’s vengeance remains eternal.
- Philadelphia Experiment, 1943
The USS Eldridge, a U.S. Navy destroyer escort, was reportedly part of a secret experiment to make the ship invisible to radar. Allegedly, the vessel vanished from the harbor, only to reappear hours later 300 km away. Some crew were fused with metal, others disoriented beyond reason, and a few vanished entirely. Historians dismiss the story as myth, yet the accounts persist, strange and unsettling.
What really happened?Under pressure to deliver results, an enlisted young mage - never fully attuned to any Pillar - tried to bend the laws of space to cloak the Eldridge. His hands grasped at threads they could not hold. In the end, his experiment backfired spectacularly.
The Wyld Surge erupted, concentrated entirely on the ship, twisting its structure and the flow of perception around those aboard. The ship disappeared from the harbor, reappearing hours later in an impossible alignment. Crew members were fused with steel, dislocated in both space and memory, some vanishing entirely.
The mage survived, but only barely, his mind fractured by the attempt. The world was left to remember a singular anomaly: a fleeting moment when the flow of time and space was violated, and humanity glimpsed the peril of tampering with forces it could not command.
Oh wow. Okay, this one freaks me out but also is awe-inspiring. I rather liked connecting real-world events to this, made a lot of sense and makes you wonder what else might happen.
Too low they build who build beneath the stars - Edward Young
Thank you! I am glad you enjoyed the real-world events, I really like to incorporate them in this world <3