Ishen "The Clockbreaker"
Ishen "The Clockbreaker"
"Fate is a chain. Chains exist to be broken."– Ishen, final recorded words
Overview
Ishen was a young inventor born during the early years of the Calamity. Raised in a crumbling city and fascinated by the patterns behind magic and time, he became infamous for building a device that could bend reality in small but terrifying ways. His name is now a curse, a legend, and, in some circles, a prophecy.Who He Was
Ishen grew up in the shadow of the Calamity as the only child of a metalsmith and a former scribe. By the age of ten, he was dismantling various objects to understand how they worked—streetlamps, charms, locks, and even clocks. He developed a theory called Temporal Harmonics: the idea that time functions like a massive gear system and that the Calamity signified it had jammed. Ishen didn’t aspire to be a hero; he wanted to uncover what had gone wrong—and how to reset the system. However, his work was met with resistance. People are uncomfortable when told that the gods might just be poorly built machinery.What Went Wrong
His great invention, the Chronolathe, looked like a tangled sculpture of rotating brass rings, suspended crystals, and silver tuning forks. It could undo small moments of time: a wound reversed, a door unopened, a scream caught mid-air and reabsorbed. But each time it ran, reality glitched. Clocks disagreed. People dreamed in languages no one spoke. One woman walked into her kitchen and met herself. The Church arrested him and declared the machine heresy. His notes were destroyed. But Ishen escaped. Days later, his entire workshop collapsed into a perfect black glass sphere, no larger than a grape. It still ticks.Legacy
“The worst part of knowing the future is watching everyone else ignore it.” “I don’t want to live forever. I just want to live in a version of the world that makes sense.”
Children
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