There are several items of advanced multiverse technology which have survived time and test to cause problems in the future.
The Vaults of Tindalos
1. Chronovore Lenses These translucent, iridescent discs are not made of glass but of fossilized time, harvested from the collapsed remnants of extinct timelines. When placed over the eyes, they allow the wearer to see the ghosts of unrealized futures and aborted pasts, glimpsing events that never truly happened. More dangerously, they allow the wearer to feed upon Echoes, draining the essence of the past from finalised universes. The Tindalean Lords consider them dangerous aberrations, for those who use them too often lose their own temporal anchor, slipping into a half-existence where they were never truly born and can never truly die.
2. The Pale Circuit A remnant of a machine that was never built, the Pale Circuit is a broken loop of liquid metal and quantum filaments, its design shifting slightly each time it is observed. It is not a machine in the traditional sense, but a function waiting to be completed—a device that will build itself when the right conditions are met. Some scholars speculate it is an interface to a forgotten intelligence, an artefact from a timeline that was erased before it could fully manifest. Those who try to activate it report whispers of equations in a language they have never spoken, and those who succeed are often found missing from all records, as if they had never been.
3. The Hexahedral Lock An impossible object, the Hexahedral Lock is a six-dimensional mechanism encoded with the last remnants of a dead cosm’s governing laws. It was once used to seal away entire realities, binding them outside causality so they could not be accessed or remembered. Now, it is merely an inert lump of collapsing geometry, an artifact of a lost principle. If reassembled, it could imprison an entire universe, locking it beyond the reach of time. But some fear that turning the key in the wrong direction could do the opposite - unleashing something that should never have been freed.
4. The Veil Engine A ruined relic of pre-Tindalean engineering, the Veil Engine was once an anti-observation device - a mechanism capable of shifting an entire structure between levels of perceptual existence. Those within its radius would become unseeable, unknowable, untouchable, even to forces that exist outside space and time. The problem is that the Veil Engine was never meant to be turned off - the first one ever activated is still running, hidden in the folds of reality, containing something that no one has been able to look at for thousands of years. The Lords have debated whether to shut it down, but they fear that whatever is inside has been waiting, listening, and growing hungry.
5. The Red Mote A speck of burning conceptual matter, the Red Mote is neither particle nor energy - it is the last surviving imperfection in an otherwise flawless reality. It was extracted from a collapsed singularity, and it should not exist, for it carries within it the seed of paradox itself. Anyone who touches it will find their personal history rewritten, as if the universe is attempting to correct an error that should have been resolved eons ago. The Tindalean Lords keep it hidden, locked in an oubliette of stabilized time, but no cage can hold something that was never supposed to be in the first place. It is said that, every few centuries, the Red Mote moves, shifting between possible hiding places, always in search of the one mind curious enough to reach for it.
Other Items
While the Tindalean Lords hoard and guard many artifacts, some have slipped through their grasp, lost in the depths of forgotten worlds, stolen by those who do not recognize their danger, or claimed by forces even the Lords dare not confront. These technologies exist outside the great lattice of their control, and their very existence poses a threat to the balance.
1. The Hollow Choir Not an object, but a weaponized resonance, the Hollow Choir is a frequency that does not belong to this universe - a sound that, when heard, rewrites the listener’s place in causality. Those exposed to its song find themselves unmade in unpredictable ways: some lose their shadows, some become echoes of past versions of themselves, and others simply disappear from all timelines, as if they were never part of existence. The Choir was once sung by a machine, an engine buried beneath the ruins of a dead city, but the machine was destroyed - yet the Choir remains, waiting to be heard again.
2. The Blood Cipher Etched into the flesh of a dying traveller, the Blood Cipher is an autonomous script, a sequence of shifting runes that translates the informational data structure of the multiverse into living code. Whoever carries it can rearrange their own past, editing the choices that led them to their present state. But the Cipher is not static—it wants something. The more it is used, the more its bearer becomes a part of the script, until they are nothing more than a footnote in the ever-growing language of the Cipher itself. It is rumored to be hidden in the corpse of an unnamed world, buried beneath strata of forgotten civilizations.
3. The Apex Root A fragment of biomechanical intelligence, the Apex Root is an ancient seed from an ecosystem that should not exist. When placed in organic matter, it begins to rewire evolution itself, even without the use of Lament Pillars), altering creatures, landscapes, and even civilizations into something optimized—but optimized for what remains unknown. The Root was last seen germinating beneath the ruins of a drowned city, where it had begun to weave together new life from the bones of the dead. Those who approach it feel themselves changing, even before they touch it, as if something is reaching into their genetic memory, deciding what they should have been.
4. The Carapace of the Forgotten A suit of ceremonial armor, its surface engraved with names that have been erased from history. The wearer of the Carapace of the Forgotten becomes untethered from identity, their existence blurred, uncertain, unreadable. They are neither remembered nor recorded, not in documents, nor in minds, nor in the echoes of time itself. It is said that those who wear the Carapace for too long forget themselves, becoming nameless figures wandering between worlds, unable to prove they were ever real. The armor was last seen on a battlefield that no longer exists, worn by a soldier who has no name, fighting a war no one remembers.
5. The Black Spindle A threading device stolen from an unknown creator, the Black Spindle is capable of weaving new strands of existence (ontons) into the fabric of reality - but every thread requires another to be unraveled. Those who have used it to pull themselves into a better fate have found that something else was erased in their place - sometimes a forgotten stranger, sometimes a piece of themselves they can no longer recall. The Spindle’s current location is unknown, but travelers whisper of places where things have unraveled strangely, where doors lead to rooms that never existed, and where people are missing from histories they should have shaped.