lore
In the heart of the Scar Zone — the 40-square-kilometer wound in Worcester, Massachusetts where time has broken — there is a market that transcends centuries. The Scar Zone Bazaar is a multi-era trading post where merchants from the 18th, 20th, and 23rd centuries conduct business side by side, where the currency
lore
In 1588, the Venetian Republic was the undisputed center of European commerce, optics, and precision metalwork. It was also the birthplace of the device that would shatter causality forever: the Frozen Light Singularity. Built by Alvise Eschendorf in a clandestine workshop on the Giudecca Canal, this crystalline-brass apparatus is the
lore
Kai Eschendorf appears to be a 28-year-old man. He is not. He has lived 437 years. This is not an exaggeration or a poetic flourish — it is the cold, literal truth of his existence, and the central paradox at the heart of The Stolen Stream. In a universe governed by
physics
In the universe of The Stolen Stream, time travel is not a clean teleportation — it is a debt owed to the universe in flesh and bone. The 10:1 temporal toll is the irreducible biological cost of moving through the temporal stream, encoded not in physics textbooks but in the
lore
The Scar Zone is not a place where time has stopped — it is a place where time has broken. Centered on the Worcester, Massachusetts corridor, this roughly 40-square-kilometer region is the most visible consequence of unrestrained temporal capitalism in The Stolen Stream universe. Here, the laws of causality have been
lore
A comprehensive reference for the terminology of The Stolen Stream — a hard sci-fi time travel universe where time is a commodity, a weapon, and a debt. This glossary defines the core concepts of temporal sci-fi lore, from the devices that bend causality to the geography of broken timelines. --- A–