Pre-writing notes...

 In Earth’s pre-history, a race of aliens landed in an area that would become the continent of North America, specifically, DeVille Falls, Mass.   Theses aliens were known as the Athulho, their home world was called, Thulhos.  Their technology was sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic… to pretty much every other race that existed (obviously an advanced race would not believe that their technology was actually magic but, based on its attainability to them, it may as well have been). 
The Athulhoian’s crowning achievement was the manipulation of time. While actual time travel was considered to be (at least potentially) deadly to living organisms, they used it in more of a ‘utility’ fashion.  Much like we would use a microwave, or a cell phone.  From storage appliances that could add an identifying marker to an item and then transport it to an artificially created dimension to be retrieved later, to weapons that could wipe a target out of existence (though these had long since fallen into disuse), the Althulhoians had nearly limitless mastery over their universe.

Then, their sun began to implode.  Athulhoian scientists began frantic calculations to determine just how much time they had remaining.  Their best estimate was two-hundred and twenty two years.  Long ago, the Athulho learned the secrets of immortality.  To them it was a simple science problem.  They would have time to enough to try and save their world… their culture. 
It was proposed that abandoning Thulhos and relocating on a suitable world should be an option.  The elders of the race disagreed.  Giving up their home was no better than dying to them.  With all their advancements, they were confident that this was not an unsolvable problem. 

Two-hundred years pass.  The Athulhoian scientists, after many hundreds of failed attempts to regenerate their sun, finally had a plan.  They had designed a temporal engine.  This engine would bend time-space around their world, creating a bubble of temporal inertia that would, simply, remove them from time.  They would exist apart from the normal, material universe in a pocket dimension of their own creation.   It was hypothesized that they would be well beyond the gravitational effects of the black hole and the collapsing star.  The engine would be powered by tapping into the destructive energies of these events.  In this pocket universe, they would preserve their way of life until such time as they perfected time travel and made it safe for life forms.  At which time, they would move their entire world to a time and place of their choosing.

A young (by our standards) scientist called, Maritu, suggested that time itself was the only answer to the problem. During the past two-hundred years, he designed a small device using the temporal engine technology to create a safe zone that would protect life forms, to a limited degree, from the destructive process of being ripped from their own time.  While multiple jumps were still not safe, one BIG jump would prove sufficiently safe.   Kruthan, the oldest among the Athulhoian, discredited Maritu publically.
“The young,” he said, “never have needed to preserve their heritage. History is not to be re-written. We are as we have always been.  We are survivors, inventors and masters of our own existence.”
Maritu gathered a following of just under a hundred of is people and, though he was forbidden, began making modifications to an obsolete space ship.  This ship would be their ark. In it he placed the genetic code and material of every living thing on his planet.  For the most part this existed as data.  Genetic samples of the eldest and most brilliant members of his society were kept in the Alter Vitaours (Life Chambers) as a record of their evolution and a mark of their brilliant defeat of death.  Maritu stole these.  Security was barely an afterthought in a society as advanced as they were.  People simply didn’t steal things… there was no need.

It took Maritu and his followers ten years to complete their ship.  And on the last day he would ever see his home world, he made an announcement.

“It is foolish and arrogant for us, as a people, to believe that we can control the natural energies of the universe.  The power of this is evident; we record and study the gravitational anomalies causing the universe to expand.  These energies are remnant of the time of creation. We cannot hope to harness this.  We are transient.  We are a blink.”

Maritu’s ship left Thulhos never to return.  He felt sorrow for his people, as he was sure they were doomed.  With some trepidation, Maritu activated the temporal engine and the ship vanished from its original time and popped back nearly twenty billion years when the universe was young.  A wave of sickness took hold of Maritu.  When he recovered, he found that some of his crew didn’t make the journey.  Ten were found dead; a cause could not be determined.  They just stopped living.  Another forty could not be found and no traces of them remained.  The surviving members were changed as well.  All of them were visibly older.  No one in their society had “aged” in thousands of years.   Maritu wept at the loss of his crew: A loss that he blamed himself for.  A woman, Aridia, consoled him.

“We came with you of our own choosing.  We knew the impossible task that the elders were undertaking.  We will honor our decisions and we will rebuild our culture.”
The stars were so different from their home-time.  The navigational systems could not compute their exact location.  All they knew was they were not in their own solar system.  The universe is in a constant state of expansion and over vast spans of time the location of places change.   A chronological shift of a few thousand years would have not made that big of a difference, but a few billion… In theory, they could be on the other side of the universe. 

Maritu set out looking for a fledgling world and fledgling life.  A planet, designated K1034, was discovered.  It was still in a primordial state of development.  New life was emerging.  It was perfect.  Maritu and his scientists landed on the largest land mass and began their work.  The plan was simple.  They would introduce genetic material from the living organisms of their world and direct their evolution.  This way, they would allow this new world to develop and, ultimately, re-create their society.  Once they were certain of their success, they would enter a stasis to pass the millennia and join their new home. 

In order to monitor the progress of their experiment, they would need a way to gather data.  The only way for them to gather data, would be time travel and that wasn’t an option.  Maritu discovered a way.  Time travel was a physically disruptive experience for living beings.  For some reason, it broke down the energies that made life possible or you simply ceased to exist.  Maritu proposed that it would be possible to alter a life form in a way to where the vital life energies were not dependent on the fragile bodies that it powered. 

Maritu and his scientists developed the Infinity Matrix.  The Infinity Matrix was about the size of a marble on the outside and many times larger on the inside than the space craft that arrived here in.  Within the Infinity Matrix was a larger, more complex temporal engine.  This time the bubble of temporal inertia was concentrated on being.  Their life energies would not be consumed by the mechanics of time travel.  The Infinity Matrix was tied to a system of twenty time gates placed at key points over the globe.  These points, eventually called Ley Lines, are naturally occurring energy pathways that assist in stabilizing the chaotic process of time travel.   Through the gates time travel was possible and through the use of the Infinity Matrix, it could be done safely.  Each Infinity Matrix was tied to a specific individual as well as the gate network. The Infinity Matrix had to be implanted in the brain of the life form in order for the preservative effects could be counted on.   Maritu had one major problem.  He needed people for this.  He had to ask for volunteers.

“I cannot say with absolute certainty that this will work. The theory, to the best of our ability, is sound.  I shall take the first implant and test the gate system.  If it is successful, I would ask others to have faith enough in what we are doing to do this… to become a Warden of our future.”

And so they were known… Wardens. 

The implant was placed into Maritu’s brain.  The nature of Athulhoian medicine was very advanced.  Maritu experienced neither pain nor required recovery.   Outside of the ship, a time gate had been constructed.  Maritu prepared for his journey.  He centered himself with a meditative practice passed down through his family for many thousands of years.  Maritu stepped through the gate. 
A raging battle was taking place.  These primitive people were barely clothed and dark skinned and absolutely brutal. Maritu was unfamiliar with violence of any kind and the horror of what he saw revolted him.  The gate was behind him covered in tangled vines and odd primitive writing.  He wanted to be away from this place. He wanted to go back to his ship.  The Infinity Matrix responded to his desperate need.  The gate opened and Maritu stepped through.  He fell to his hands and knees just outside of his ship and retched. 

“The horror!  So much violence. “

The others were shaken at this.  Maritu had been gone, to them, for but a moment.  

After a time Maritu regained his self and realized two things; first, that a system of measure must be developed to accurately control jumps.  It was sheer lucky chance that he made it back to this exact time at all.  He could have spent an eternity traveling around, lost in time.  Secondly, he realized that the complex computer in the Infinity Matrix was, for some unknown reason, a part of his mind.  He knew it would be able to read his thoughts and take instructions directly from his mind.  With a coordinate system in place, time travel could become safe and predictable.

Kruthan worked diligently with his scientists preparing the planet for the historical translocation.  Their sun was dying sooner than expected, but they were ready.  Kruthan initiated the temporal engine and his world disappeared from real space.  The people of Thulhos rejoiced.  The energy from their dying sun drove the engine and the engine provided warmth.  Kruthan was hailed as a savior.  
From their pocket universe, the Athulhoian could view and study the universe.  The unique perspective of this artificial dimension granted them the ability study “normal” space in a very different way.  They witness gravitational echoes from the beginning of everything.  They learned that the universe expands and contracts like a living, breathing creature and that this “breathing” is directly related to the gravitational echoes.

People gathered to witness the imploding sun and the creation of the black hole.  They felt secure in their little universe.  The time approached and the death was quite as the sun faded to black.  But something was not right.  Tremors could be felt throughout the planet, though no natural quake activity was detected.  The temporal engine was failing.  The protective bubble of static time was beginning to collapse.  A miscalculation or some minute, overlooked variable caused the engine to consume too much energy.  The planet died instantly, but the temporal bubble remained in place and its gravitational factor went to infinity. The event horizon of this anomaly expanded to encompass the Athulhoian’s galaxy.  Inside the unnaturally fed black hole a portal opened (Einstein-Rosen Bridge) to the parallel of this universe in which a similar event had taken place…  The two universes began to merge catastrophically under the pull of unimaginable (even though I just imagined it) gravitational forces. The ever expanding universes began to collapse onto this point and time itself began to stop.  This effect was not localized to just the two universes…  In the mirror universe a bridge was opened to another universe.  In this new universe a new bridge was opened to yet another universe… and so on into infinity.

 

 The Wardens carried out their plan.  They began introducing their genetic material into the fledgling life forms that abounded on this planet.  Aridia named the planet Urth, which in their language it meant “rebirth”. 

The Wardens collected their data for many hundreds of years.  Societies inevitably developed in the resulting sentient races.  In every instance, the people would destroy themselves through intolerance and war.  Each failed attempt was a new learning experience for the Wardens.  They would go back to the primal beginning and start a new series of experiments. 

On one data collecting mission, a Warden named Yuqul, in the advanced stealth suit worn on such missions, witnesses a group of people performing some sort of ritualized ceremony on an alter at the foot of the gate.  During this, Yuqul, witnesses something that would change his life forever.  The elder members of this group were consuming the blood of another.  Before his eyes, the elder grew visibly younger; years fell away from him.  Yuqul realized that they had acquired the trait that made the Athulhoian immortal.  But the gene was flawed and allowed these people to grow old.  His biological scanner showed that the oldest of the group was approaching 200 years.  His scans indicated that he was nearing death before the ritual.  Yuqul scanned the victim and discovered that this one had lived for nearly 800 years and did not appear to have aged even a day beyond his prime.  The lesser fruthar (undying) had discovered that the consumption of these more advanced versions’ genetic material could extend their lives.  While they did not know the reason (hence the rituals), they knew there was something special about certain people and taking that something would help them live forever. 
Yuqul recorded his findings and returned through the gate.   He and Maritu reviewed the data.  Maritu was disgusted at the graphic description of the ritual, but he was encouraged that their efforts were paying off.  The genetic makeup of the indigenous sentient beings was showing progress. 

“I believe, at this juncture, that we can travel to a point a few years beyond this event and collect samples of this species.  Perhaps we are closer than we could have known.”

“Perhaps,” Yuqul suggested, “We could set up a new facility in this time period and continue our experiments from there.”

Outrage spread among the Athulhoian. 

“Such a course would require us to experiment on sentient life!  We cannot! We will not!” Maritu yelled.  “What would cause you to suggest such a thing?”

“These ‘people’ are barely sentient and hardly more intelligent than many of the lesser life forms here.  By moving to this point, we can ensure the quality of the genetic code and speed up our timetable significantly.”  Yuqul said.  “We are leaving the re-building of our society to chance!”

“All of our efforts are wasted when this life form is allowed to develop on its own…  They inevitably destroy themselves.  We have seen it thousands of times.”  Yuqul continued.

“Our direct hand in this would destroy the essence of these lives.  They would have nothing that we did not give them.  They would be hollow, with no history of their own.”

“Forgive me, Maritu, but we are building our society, are we not?  When we came here we changed the course of this planets future.  Do not delude yourself to this fact.  Our purpose is selfish and has always been, but if we do not take action, then we should have never left Thulhos.”
Yuqul swayed few of his fellow Athulhoians.  The thought of experimenting on thinking beings was revolting to them.  A few, however, agreed that their time would be better spent if they could remove as much chance as possible from the equation.  Violence nearly erupted amongst them. 

Then the universe died.

The gravitational echo that occurred at the end of time was devastating.  From the point where time ended to the beginning of time, it reverberated the scream of its death.  The echo traveled through space and time many thousands of years before reaching Urth. The echo was much weakened by this time. The time gates the Wardens built served as a focus. The gates gathered the waning energies of the echo and activated.  Any living thing in the vicinity of a gate (roughly a mile), without the benefit of an Infinity Matrix, were instantly destroyed. Some cultures throughout time visited the gates through some religious ceremony, others had built their civilization around them (Mayans), and still others visited them out of some historical curiosity.  These people ceased to be.  Those with the Infinity Matrix implants were scattered; instantaneously transported to random times throughout the planets history.  The Wardens had no way of finding each other, no way of returning.  They were lost to time.  The nature of the Warden's implant created a temporal inertia around them.  What this meant was that a Warden existed in one time only.  They could not travel to the future or the past and meet themselves.  With the network of gates disrupted, their coordinate system was incomplete.  Time travel became fundamentally unusable. 

 

The spacecraft left to the mechanisms of eons, moved with the changing planet. Mountains would rise and fall; valleys would open and close.  Eventually, the ship came to rest beneath a non-descript lake on the north end of a little Massachusetts town of DeVille Falls.  The original gate followed the Ley Line’s movements with the terrain and now (two years, two days and two hours ahead of our present) resides in a cave near the peak of Collsi Point, just to the west of DeVille Falls in the Taconic Mountains.
The remaining gates moved and shifted with the evolving planet but remained along the Ley Lines (naturally occurring energy pathways) they were set on.  Some gates were destroyed either through natural means or through the zealous religious fear of man.  Only twenty of the original network remains. 

 

As if the end of the universe and the destructive ripple it hurled backwards toward creation wasn’t enough, other anomalies abounded.  Tunnels through time and space crisscrossed the multi-verse, like cracks in a cosmic egg.  These tunnels connected not only multiple times, but multiple parallel universes as well.  These alternate dimensions, in most instances, were strange beyond anything imagined in the (locally) known universe.  Demons, monsters, incorporeal beings—the stuff of legend—emerged from these portals.  Some creatures were so alien to our universe that they could not exist in this dimension.  The author, H P Lovecraft, witnessed the arrival of such beings.  Amorphous and tentacled monstrosities emerged from a shimmering doorway in the wooded foothills near DeVille Falls.  These nightmare monsters had a short-lived existence in this dimension, but the effect on Lovecraft lasted a lifetime.  Lovecraft, who had planned on living in DeVille Falls to pursue a career in writing, relocated to Providence, Rhode Island.  His writings and research reflected the sanity shaking effect this contact made on him. (One could surmise that Gary Larson experienced a similar incident involving pan-dimensional farm animals.)

As for the fruthar (Undying), they themselves became legendary in their own right.  Vampires, ghouls and the like exist in every culture.  The legends bear a striking similarity to each other.  Groups of Undying are generally drawn together by some unconscious genetic or psychic need to be with their own.

 

Kruthan realized his plan was failing.  Reading form the dying star indicated that the energy drawn from the event horizon was growing exponentially and would soon grow beyond their ability to control.  Using Maritu’s design, he built an escape ship using the temporal engine to travel through time.  It was just large enough for himself.  His plan was similar to Maritu’s but, instead of building a race, he planned to subjugate one. Long before the catastrophic event that destroyed his world and, subsequently, all of time, he put his contingencies in place.  A moment before the collapse, Kruthan activated his time machine.   He hurtled twenty billion years into the past.  His ship was drawn, unknown to him, toward the vast network of time gates on Urth.  The effects of the jump on Kruthan’s body were horrific.  Large areas of skin had just disappeared, leaving exposed muscle and sinew.  His back was twisted as if a portion of it had vanished and then reappeared slightly off.  His ship plummeted toward Urth as he screamed and writhed in pain.   He crashed landed in an area that would become Tibet.
Kruthan’s injuries were great; His immortality kept him alive and in immense, maddening pain.  His only relief was to enter into a stasis pod and sleep for an eternity. 
Five hundred years later, his horrible sleeping form was discovered by ancient Tibetan’s and taken to their nearby village.  The people were very superstitious and feared the horribly disfigured man.  The elders decided that the presence of this oddity was a test of some type. 
They opened the pod.  Kruthan awoke in tremendous pain.  His screams of anguish were frightening to hear.   He was taken by the elders of the village and various healing draughts were applied and Kruthan’s suffering was eased somewhat and regained some semblance of coherency.  The monks from a nearby temple were summoned.  They wrapped his body in thick cloth bandages saturated with healing and regenerative herbs.  His body was, fundamentally, human… or rather, their bodies were fundamentally Athulhoian, and the primitive medicines did their job.  The monks taught Kruthan meditative techniques that helped him managed the pain even further.  Kruthan was highly intelligent and picked on the language very quickly.  The dialect was familiar to him, though he could not remember exactly why.

“My pain is still great, but you have helped me more than I would have thought possible.”  Kruthan said, bowing.

“You are hardy and have survived against great odds to even be alive.  I have reached the end of my knowledge to help you, but I believe there to be a way.”

“Please, Dhali, tell me.  I will try anything.”

“The answers you seek come from enlightenment.  You will journey to the top of this very mountain.  There you will find a cave.  In this cave you will find the sacred alter.  You must reside in this cave for fifty years in deep meditation. At the end of this time, you will receive enlightenment.”
Kruthan was skeptical, but other primitive techniques were effective to alleviate his suffering.  Being immortal with time on his side, he decided to give it a try. 
Kruthan made the journey to the top of the mountain.  Once there, he found the cave and the sacred alter.  To his surprise, he recognized it immediately as Athulhoian technology.   He began working to discover the purpose of this device.  He determined that the device was used for time travel.  After weeks of work, he could not operate the gate.