About this universe
Each reset tightens the cult’s hold, but Caius Vel remembers what everyone else forgets. Armed with forbidden knowledge and haunted essence, he must infiltrate the cult’s ceremony and sabotage their anchor, risking both exposure and annihilation. The city’s fate teeters on the edge of collapse with every looped hour.
Tone
Tense and claustrophobic, threaded with anxious urgency and glimmers of defiant hope.
Themes
memory vs. oblivion, sacrifice, corruption of eternity, rebellion against fate
Protagonist
Caius Vel
Caius Vel cuts a gaunt, spectral figure, his sharp features made starker by the constant violet glow. Pale, ink-stained skin and haunted eyes betray a soul both fractured and fiercely determined. Shrouded in shadow-woven robes, he moves with the wary grace of one hunted and half-ghost.
Goal: To sabotage the cult’s primary temporal anchor by replacing its ritual blood-offering with his own tainted night-haunt essence.
How it begins
Caius Vel pressed a gloved hand to the slick bricks, sliding through the sewage-choked crawlspace beneath Widow’s Arch. The air trembled, alive with the distant toll of Oakhaven’s midnight bell, always the same, always a warning. His breath fogged in the cold as he reached the iron ladder leading up toward the ritual chamber, purple light strobing through cracks overhead. His essence ached, the mark of his tether burning beneath his skin. Above, muffled chanting rose, the cult’s voices woven with anticipation and dread.
He glanced back; strands of night-haunt mist unwound from his shoulders, ready to seep through the shadows if he faltered. The stench of blood mingled with incense, leaking down between the flagstones. Caius’s heart thundered. The vial of tainted essence pressed cold against his chest. The ritual had begun. If he hesitated now, the loop would claim another cycle, and the city’s decay would deepen. Gritting his teeth, Caius started to climb, every rung scraping against time’s raw nerve.
About this world
Oakhaven-on-Glass is a city locked in perpetual darkness, caught in a relentless six-hour time loop beneath a violently pulsing violet sky. Night-haunts serve as unseen custodians, maintaining temporal anchors while cultists steer the city’s fate. Decay and memory fracture beneath the city’s surface, threatening to unravel reality.
Oakhaven-on-Glass sprawls across a stark landscape of twisted glass towers and ancient stone, their foundations lost in thick violet fog. The city never knows daylight; instead, its sky throbs with a ceaseless, bruised glow, cycling through phases of deeper purple and sudden, starless flashes. The six-hour loop defines existence, every citizen, from the masked merchants of Crossways Plaza to the withered urchins in the alleys, is unknowingly trapped in endless repetition of the same doomed span.
Beneath the surface, labyrinthine sewers and forgotten crypts pulse with corrupted magic, their walls slick with the residue of failed rituals. Power in Oakhaven is split between the secretive Chronos-Eaters, a cult obsessed with extracting immortality from the city’s recycled seconds, and the silent night-haunts, spectral figures cursed to recall every iteration. Only the cultists, masked and robed in time-touched silks, know the truth of the loop, manipulating events through blood-offerings at the city’s temporal anchors. The rest are pawns, their tragedies orchestrated and reset with clinical precision.
Life is ritualized, a dance of unknowing repetition. Merchants stock identical wares, lovers re-enact farewells, and the city’s grand bell tolls always at the same intervals. Things rot faster here, food, flesh, and memories alike. Underneath it all, a quiet rebellion stirs among those few who sense the wrongness: the glitched, the haunted, and the broken. They are hunted by the cult, whose power grows with each successful cycle. Magic is unstable, bending to the pulse of the loop and exacting a heavy toll on those who dare subvert its flow.
