Time Is Always With You – Episode #11: Astral City – Quest for the Time Oracle

More about Time Is Always With You – Episode #11: Astral City – Quest for the Time Oracle

He walks into Astral City like a man stepping into a living cathedral of light. Neon ribbing traces the skyline in impossible geometries; skybridges stitch together towers that keep the hour with tiny mechanical swarms; advertisements bargain for memories, futures, and obsolete gods.

The hum of Astral City is a language of its own, equal parts bargain and benediction, and it pulls at the Pilgrim, wringing him for currency he does not yet know he has to spend.

He does not look up at the towers. He looks down, scanning faces, faces that are not faces by the standards of any single world: a fossilized diplomat from a planet that remembers its oceans as myths, a vaporous vendor sewing laughter into wrist-tractors, a child with three hands trading a single, perfect sunrise for two hours of translated speech.

Translators cluster like bees around anyone who carries a question; they wear their jobs openly and loudly, their devices clicking with borrowed tongues.

Time here moved like a patient thing, stretched thin and elastic under the influence of the Supreme Time Lord. Moments lingered; a single breath could contain an hour. It was a city that hoarded seconds and sold them back in glittering slices.

But the Pilgrim had no appetite for wonder. He threaded through the crowd with the economy of someone who had crossed eras to reach a single door. He needed directions—precise, unadorned—to the entrance of the Eternal City, the hidden heart where the Supreme Time Lord kept his court.

Rumor said the path led to the Time Oracle, an ominous presence whose answers had left seekers unsatisfied for millennia. People came away with truths that tasted like riddles; some left enlightened, most left unsettled.

The Pilgrim felt that old, familiar anxiety prick at the edges of his resolve, but doubt was a luxury he could not afford.

He stepped deeper into Astral City, each footfall a small, deliberate defiance against the city’s slow, seductive gravity.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Feel free to use the "Try" button, but please credit me - ©Chris M - as the original author of this prompt.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
©Chris M 2026 - All rights reserved.