Prologue: The Crack in the World

Earth-Alpha, 3:17 a.m., in a nowhere town where the streetlights flicker like they're scared of the dark. The air's thick with the kind of quiet that presses on your chest, broken only by the hum of a rusted generator in Milo's Junkyard. It's a graveyard of broken things—car fenders, cracked monitors, a carousel horse with one eye missing. Nobody comes here unless they're desperate, and tonight, someone is. A figure, all grease-stained jeans and calloused hands, kneels by the generator, cursing under their breath as they wrench at a stubborn bolt. The tool slips, slicing skin, and a bead of blood hits the metal. That's when it happens.The blood doesn't just sit there. It moves, crawling like a living thing, pooling into the generator's cracks. The hum spikes, a scream of machinery, and the air shimmers—cold, sharp, like a blade against your spine. The figure freezes, breath hitching, as the shimmer splits into threads of aetheric plasma, a liquid light that shouldn't exist. It coils around their hands, burning without heat, and for a heartbeat, they see it: a silhouette where nothing should be. Not a shadow, not a ghost, but an Echo, a thing that's less than nothing, its edges fraying like a scream caught in static. It whispers, not with sound but with knowing: "You've seen too much."The figure scrambles back, heart pounding, but the Echo lunges, its form a paradox—there and not there, a wound in reality. Instinct kicks in. They reach, not with hands but with will, and the plasma threads obey, weaving a cage of light around the Echo. It shrieks, a sound that's all wrong, like glass breaking backward, and collapses into a pinpoint, gone. The figure's hands shake, glowing faintly, the plasma sinking into their skin. They don't know it yet, but they've just used aetheric weaving, a power that costs more than it gives, each thread pulling at their life's spark.The junkyard falls silent, but the world feels different now, like a stage where the curtain's been ripped away. Beyond Earth-Alpha's cracked asphalt and flickering lights lies the Eidolon Cascade, an infinite spiral of realities, each Earth a named shard in a cosmic mosaic—Earth-Noir, where shadows birth monsters; Earth-Aether, where storms of plasma carve floating cities; Earth-Void, a fractured husk where nothingness reigns. The Cascade isn't just space—it's a living paradox, a web of universes held by aetheric plasma that pulses like a heartbeat, yet fraying under the weight of void-essence, a black, tar-like corruption seeping from rifts that hum like dying stars.These rifts are no accident. They're the work of Echoes, non-existent horrors that claw at reality to fill their emptiness. Some are flickers, barely there, with Nonexistent Physiology that defies matter. Others, like Echo-13, twist memories into crimson fractals, leaving minds bleeding. The worst, Echo Prime, is a paradox that rewrites existence itself, a force driving the Abyssal Dissolution, a cosmic unmaking that threatens to drown the Cascade in nothingness. The Aetheric Concord fights back, a secret order of anomaly hunters who wield Containment Prisms and mnestic protocols to cage these threats. Their dossiers read like nightmares, detailing entities that shouldn't be, sealed in protocols that bend reality to keep them contained.But the Cascade is more than a battlefield. It's a ladder of worlds, each stranger than the last. The Fractal Lattice holds Earth-Alpha's mundane facade, hiding currents that hum with power. The Noetic Shroud births gods from belief, their wars shaking the stars. The Aetheric Resonance makes thought real, its glowing spires haunted by aetheric wraiths, ghosts of plasma's wrath. The Chronovoid Nexus fractures time, where past and future collide in screams. The Archetypal Crucible is home to the Eidolons, guardians like Mikhail, whose blade cuts truth, or Azryth, whose Scythe of Transience carves paths through pain. Higher still, the Exarchic Veil stacks infinite stories, each reality a fiction to the next, and the Apexial Abyss merges being with nothingness, a void that sings of madness.At the Cascade's peak lies the Nullpoint, a state beyond comprehension, where a force—unnamed, unseen—wove it all. Her avatar, Izarael, walks the Crucible, her touch shaping worlds but spilling aetheric ichor, a crimson warning of her power's cost. She whispers through the junkyard's silence, her voice a thread in the figure's mind: "Find me, or be unmade."The figure stands, hands still glowing, unaware they've stepped into a war that spans infinities. They don't know the Cascade's secrets—the hax magic that lets you rewrite reality but risks your own story, the void conjuring that pulls from nothing but might erase you, or the aetheric weaving that burns your soul to wield. They don't know the Concord, the Eidolons, or the Echoes that hunger for their world. But they will. The crack in the world has opened, and there's no going back