The Hollow Prism Part 1: Run From the Past
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"You can run, but the past is already catching up."
Trailing Hyperlight
The Midnight Flats stretched endlessly ahead, smooth as obsidian, reflecting the neon-lit fracture in the sky. Behind them, the Somberdrenched Ruins flickered, pulsing like a dying arcade screen—blipping in and out of existence.
And something dark was crawling out of it.
“Faster!” Lazul wrenched the throttle.
The air-elemental engine beneath her roared, the bound storm wailing in its enchanted sigil-cage. The bike—a Tempest Razor—responded instantly, a violet arc of wind and lightning streaking behind it. Behind her, a trailing hyperlight mist left a smooth line in the darkness.
Orrin and Xander kept pace, their elemental-powered bikes weaving between cracks in reality as time glitched and desynced around them.
The sky split open.
Above them, a colossal neon sigil burned into the upper ionosphere—a prismatic eye, hollow at the center.
The symbol of Lord Nyxalith, the Hollow Prism.
The moment it appeared, the desert around the trio warped. Shapes flickered in and out of reality—twisted echoes of the Midnight Flats from centuries past or future—who could tell?
In some versions, it was a jungle. In others, a frozen wasteland. And in some…
A battlefield.
The trio raced time itself, engines howling like electric tornadoes.
"That’s wild!" Xander shouted over the wind. "Nobody said anything about a cosmic lich!"
"That's why I always say, we get PAID UP FRONT!" Orrin called back, his enchanted keytar strapped to his back, thrumming with unstable resonance.
A sudden BOOM split the air behind them.
Lazul risked a glance back—what!? She looks just like… Her past self was right behind her.
For half a second, she locked eyes with herself from ten seconds ago, still pulling the Godcore from its pedestal.
Then, like a frame in a lagging animation, retro-Lazul froze. Twitched. Fractured.
The glitch swallowed her, and the past collapsed.
“We need to get to Astralis before we get rewritten,” Orrin said, clenching his bike’s throttle, taking all it could give.
"Or worse," Xander muttered, visor flashing with new glyphs he didn’t recognize.
Then the air itself spoke.
"You have stolen from nothing."
Ad Astralis
The floating city of Astralis came into view—a shining metropolis suspended above where crackling ley lines crossed, its towers shimmering with runes, its streets cobbled from the weave itself.
But the moment they crossed into its arcane barriers, the city froze.
Not literally—but in the way a predator does when it’s waiting for you to make your next mistake.
The sky locked into place—clouds no longer moved. The air suddenly felt thick and musty, like a hot lightning storm with no rain.
NPCs—the city’s people—flickered, repeating motions.
A merchant lifted a hand, offering a silver coin—then reset. Lifted it again.
A street performer landed a tricky acrobatic maneuver—then glitched backward, performing the same motion.
The city was in a loop.
Lazul skidded her bike to a stop, boots hitting the cobblestones. "What in the hells?"
Orrin dismounted, hand already on his keytar. He plucked a note—and no sound came out…
Silence.
Xander lifted his visor, rubbed his naked eyes, and then scanned the streets. "Something’s controlling the time-flow here?"
As if on cue, a robed figure emerged from the temple at the city's center.
The High Arcanist of Astralis, a half-elven woman with an open third eye, pouring wispy yellow-white light from it, crackling with stored spells and forgotten wisdom.
She saw them—and she looked afraid.
"You stole the Godcore."
"Yeah, about that—" Xander started, but she cut him off.
"The Godcore was not hidden to protect it from you. It was hidden to protect you from him."
Lazul felt her necrocrafted arm twitch.
And then—
Xander blinked.
And vanished.
Poof. Gone.
A single afterimage flickered where he had been standing, a neon wireframe model of his own body, locked in a glitch-loop.
The Arcanist’s third eye burned.
"It’s too late," she whispered.
Above them, the prismatic sigil of Lord Nyxalith shifted, its hollow center twisting into a new shape…
A door.
And from that door…
A figure stepped through.
Not entirely there.
Not entirely anywhere.
A skeletal figure in a shattered cloak, his face fractured between a hundred versions of itself—all flickering, all wrong.
And when he spoke, it wasn’t just to them.
It was to everywhere.
"You cannot steal from what does not exist."
