City of Curses: "When The Last Aeons Fall."

This Crux post continues on the ideas I started with unicorns.  Time travel.  Like planar travel, it allows Crux to sort be a Crossroads even for moving from one era to another.

This post is about a connected timeline of Crux set ten-thousand years in the future.  Very long into the future, when Crux has long since been gone.  I plan to use this in my upcoming home Crux game, in that I have always wanted to use time travel in a tabletop RPG session.  IDK why.

I blame Doctor Who personally.

Journeys
#Crux itself is a crossroads.  Not just a nexus point for the Maru Sea and the Deep Sea, the continents

of Necruxa and Ainesia, the City of Curses is home to a cadre of gates and doors.  Some of these doors or gates are connections to neighboring planes and realities.  Orphos and Crux connect to them through space.  Faerie, the Aether and other places can be reached through Crux.

There are neighboring satellite communities in each of these planes that connect with Crux.  In Faerie there is hob-town, the Aether has the Fission.

Other doors or gates do not tie Crux to other points in space or the realities between worlds.  The most dangerous paths are those that bridge Crux to other points in time.  These tend to be one-way.  The Prince forbids knowingly taking these paths, having provided for the Timewalkers Guild to seal them away for one reason or another.  Most of the time, if one is lost through a door that crosses through time, one can't often find a way back.

Not without taking dire consequences.

Age of the Last Aeons
My hands were cold.  Fields surrounded me.  The grass wasn't alive.  Translucent.

Ghosts.  The plants had become ghosts.  I couldn't see any sign of any buildings.  Just a spit of land, covered in ectoplasmic plants.

The sky had gone black.  No stars.  No clouds.  Just a singlular, hanging dark purple depth above.  I looked for anything of what Crux had been.  Nothing.  Even the hills had been ground to dirt.

I tried to find the edge of the sleeping straits.  Instead I gazed down at where the oceans should've been.  I gazed into a dark abyss.  No ocean.  Just rocks hanging, bobbing in the darkest reaches of the night.

Animal life had gone.  Nothing human or ursyklon remained.

The Age of the Last Aeons is the most depressing of Crux's connected chronal junctures.  What remains of Crux is barren, hanging in a dark abyss with no stars or sun.  It isn't pitch black- the ambient glow of millions of manifested ghost plants illuminate the scattered fields.

Nothing remains here of what Crux had been.  No human, no tengu, no ursyklon can be found.  Not even their bones.  Few or no living creatures can be found here.

Speculation is that the Age of Last Aeons exists so far in Crux's history that we can't comprehend.  Timewalkers insist that it must happen relatively soon.  On their scale, that is within the next twenty thousand years.

Most then try to understand what happened.  Prospective future archaeologists are prevented from visiting it by Timewalkers.  Others try to see through prophecy and divination.  No one has a single answer, only that the Age of Last Aeons seems tied to some dark threat that evades most attempts to comprehend it.

Village of Mourning
The Skullmount is gone.  The sleeping straits has drained, becoming nothing but empty space.  No buildings remain.

But there is a settlement.  The village of Mourning can be found in the age of last aeons.

Ancient androids tend to gardens of ghostly animals and plants.  They whisper forgotten memories about those they once knew.  They've outlived all others.

The other denizens of Mourning at the millions of ghosts.  Insane from thousands of years trapped.  Almost none of these ghosts can be calmed.  Most rambly.  Mourning suffers from bouts of ghoststorms from time to time.  Androids tend to the Ghosts, doing their best to try and keep them from spiraling too much out of control.

Leid
There is one other entity.  Only Androids seem to be able to be ignored by it.  Each time a human or another non-Android travels to the Age of Last Aeons, it attracts Leid.

Woe to those caught by Leid.

The Age of Last Aeons is a grave.  Leid is the ghost that haunts that grave.  Leid is the Ghost of Crux.  The city's entire cursed existence, dead and trapped.  A ghost of the place, still wanting to be that place.

Leid is ravenous for anyone alive from Crux.  A ghost of a city creeps upon it victims.  Streets appear from nowhere.  Moments scattered across thousands of years are relived, but incomprehensibly.  Signs are written in gibberish.  People are appear, but their faces are wrong.  Things are just wrong.

Inevitably Leid swallows whole the energy of whoever it catches in its psychic maw.  Leid sobs.  Leid tries to remember what it once was.  Then Leid fades a bit more, the last echo of the City of Curses.

Leid, Crux's Ghost

Aspects Ghost; Used To Be The Center Of The World; Fades Into Darkness

Approaches Sneaky Superb (+5), All others rated at Great (+4)

Skills Ghost Great (+4), City Good (+3), Memory Fair (+2)

Stunts

Size of a City: Leid is huge, so big that it occupies an area as big Crux was.  It can manifest streets or buildings as it wants.

Taste Of What Was Lost: Leid automatically senses whenever something alive touched by Crux comes close to it.  

Ghost City: Leid cannot be touched by a living soul, not unless they use magic of some kind.

Unseen: Leid always uses Sneaky for rolling for initiative.  Leid gains a +2 on Sneaky to creep and trap living victims.

Consume Minds: Leid inflicts mental stress instead of physical stress.