About this universe
As the countdown to the next reset ticks away, Olamide Ogunleye races to implant a forbidden memory into the mind of a yet-untouched traveler. Shadowed by enforcers and haunted by fractured timelines, she must risk everything to smuggle hope out of the cycle, even if it costs her the last shreds of herself.
Tone
Relentless and claustrophobic, with flickers of desperate hope and bitter irony.
Themes
memory vs. oblivion, sacrifice, subversion of fate, truth as rebellion
Protagonist
Olamide Ogunleye
Olamide stands tall, her half-orc frame solid beneath a patched duster, eyes clouded with memories both hers and stolen. Scars trace her jaw and forearms, relics of ritual and resistance. Her presence is heavy with regret, but her stare is sharp and unyielding, always searching for a crack in fate.
Goal: To successfully implant a sentient memory of the world's original state into a traveler before the loop resets.
How it begins
Olamide Ogunleye pries open a corroded time-capsule beneath a dune of sifting gray silt, her broad hands careful despite the tremble in her fingers. The static in the air buzzes louder than usual, warnings of the impending reset. She mutters a fractured incantation, sifting through memory-engraved glass fragments, searching for the one that glows with sentience. Above, the obsidian spires pulse with blue light as time’s weave tightens. Footsteps crunch in the silt behind her, a gloved hand lands on her shoulder.
"You know what you’re risking,"
hisses Mavik, the Chronos-Sage sentry. Olamide doesn’t flinch. She clutches the pulsing fragment and slips it into her coat, staring into the dark as the citadel bells begin their count toward unraveling. The ozone stings her nostrils. Somewhere, a new traveler is arriving. There is no more time for doubt.
About this world
Vexil-on-Silt is a city perpetually caught in a seventeen-hour time loop, resetting with a shuddering unravel back to the Great Sundering. Its obsidian spires rise from unstable, shifting sands, and the air perpetually vibrates with temporal static. Citizens live with the grim certainty that all is destined to be erased and begun again.
Vexil-on-Silt sprawls across a barren delta of perpetual dusk, its ground a mosaic of ash-gray silt and ancient bones. Obsidian towers, slick and silent, pierce the sky, seemingly immune to the shifting foundations beneath them. Structures are built close together and braced against tremors that herald the loop’s end. The city’s skyline is jagged against a sky riddled with pale lightning, while the lower streets are suffused with a metallic ozone tang and faint blue glow from time-worn lanterns.
Society is divided between the Chronos-Sages, keepers of the time loop’s rituals, and the memory smugglers, scavengers who search for scraps of lost timelines. Civilians live by a relentless ticking; each person tracks their own expiration, marking bodies and doorframes with tally marks for each loop survived. There are no true governments, only shifting alliances of power among Sages, memory-brokers, and desperate rebels hoping to break the cycle.
History here is fragmented. The Great Sundering is the lone fixed point, a cosmic wound no one truly remembers but all relive. Each loop, relationships and secrets are scrambled, but some outcasts, like former oracle Olamide, cling to forbidden truths. Magic is temporal, built on rituals that manipulate memory, time, and the mind; every spell exacts a toll, risking memory loss or even annihilation. Daily life is a dance around inevitability, with all joys and betrayals rendered hollow by the looming reset. Yet hope simmers in secret corners, where whispers of an end to the loops persist.
