Neon Gaze Part 1: The Somberdrenched Ruins
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The ruins pulsed.
Not with life, not with movement, but with something older. Something wrong. The stones beneath their boots hummed like the pause between thunder and a lightning strike, and the endless corridor ahead stretched forward in wireframe veins of violet and cerulean. The walls flickered as though the dungeon itself was struggling to stay real.
Xander the Dreamthief adjusted his arcane visor, watching the world redraw itself in half-toned shadows and glowing loot grids.
"Yeah, this place is cursed," he muttered.
Lazul ignored him.
The Blade-Witch strode ahead, her necrocrafted arm flexing with a phantom light, the joints of witherbone and violet sigils pulsing with a slow, unnatural rhythm. It had been too quiet since they entered the city’s catacombs—no skeletons rising from broken crypts, no traps springing from the walls.
And that meant something worse was coming.
Behind them, Orrin the Wayfarer trailed a gloved hand along the runes carved into the stone, his enchanted keytar slung across his back. When he finally spoke, his voice was low.
"I don’t like this rhythm."
"You mean the lack of one?" Xander grinned, twirling a lockpick between his fingers.
"No," Orrin said, eyes narrowing. "The wrongness of it. A silence that’s waiting to become a song."
Lazul exhaled. "Stay focused. The Godcore is ahead."
Xander muttered something under his breath but didn’t argue.
The Godcore. The prize at the center of this forgotten city, humming with power, promising secrets long buried. Wizards had warred over it. Kings had killed their own children for it. And now, it was theirs for the taking.
If they survived long enough to claim it.
The Corridor of Echoes
The deeper they went, the stranger the air became.
At first, it was subtle—the flickering glow of the rune-carved walls lingering a second too long after they moved past. But then Xander noticed something worse.
"Laz," he said, voice tight.
She turned—and saw herself.
Or rather, a ghostly afterimage, a perfect mirror of her movements, trailing a half-step behind. It faded a moment later, but the others saw it too.
"That’s not right," Orrin murmured. He placed a cautious hand on his keytar, fingers shifting across the keys. "This place is remembering us."
Lazul set her jaw. "Then we make sure it remembers our victory."
She stepped forward—and the shadows stepped too.
The corridor ahead glowed, shifting, the walls phasing between then and now. The echoes weren’t just images anymore.
They were watching.
Xander Takes a Long Look
The first scream wasn’t human.
It slithered from the ruins like a glitching melody, a voice modulated beyond recognition. Xander froze, his visor flashing warnings in glowing red.
"Uh. Guys—"
Lazul felt it before she saw it. A hum in the air, like a thousand whispering circuits, followed by the slow, deliberate scrape of stone against stone.
At the end of the corridor, something uncoiled from the hungry dark.
Lazul stepped forward—then stopped.
No—not forward. Backward.
Because Xander wasn’t moving.
The rogue stood frozen, arms mid-gesture, face locked in a half-smile. His body fractaled with pixelated light, like he’d been trapped in a loading screen. His visor flickered, his form vibrating as if his existence itself was buffering.
A shape loomed just beyond him, shifting, dripping in neon fire.
A voice slid into the air, thick with static and layered in a dozen overlapping tones.
"Turn back, little heroes."
Lazul’s grip tightened on her sword.
"Or let me add you to the collection."
The dungeon exhaled, its runes pulsing in time with her own heartbeat.
Then Xander’s form shattered into glowing shards.
