The Prophecy Lost official info page is up on the project website!!
It's fairly basic; there's a lot I'm still not sure about with this story (including the medium in which I want to tell it)... but I am glad to be picking it up again. Another thing on my rotating shelf of artistic "to-do's," but a welcome one :)
Go check out the page if you have the time! It'd mean the world to me <3
In an attempt to produce more art (and eventually get quicker at making things that are both neater and more comprehensive), I'm setting a general goal for myself to Make and Share more concept art and TALK ABOUT IT!
I used to do that ALL THE TIME and it was what made me love my stories so much and have so much fun sharing them. I want to feel like that again. So, I'm going to channel my pre-college self and MAKE STUFF THAT ISN'T POLISHED (and also isn't JUST messy sketches).
Now:
🎉🎉🎉 RE-INTRODUCING: PROPHECY LOST!! 🎉🎉🎉
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Now, a very small number of people who have been following my since late 2019 MIGHT remember what Prophecy Lost was, and what is has become since. Back in 2019, I was fed up with the half-dozen stories that predated Broken Dimensions so I started something else set in a new world with new gods and new Magic.
The main story involved a revival of ancient deities and a journey to relocate the lost goddess of prophecy before all the emerging Seers died due to their powers being unchanneled and deathly chaotic
It became my first attempt at a comic series. I planned the whole thing out (there were at LEAST 7 pages in my sketchbook dedicated to the written outline (I didn't figure out what thumbnails were for until like a year later btw))...
...and then I never finished it 😅😅
Shortly after I started working on this original version of Prophecy Lost, February 2020 happened and I created Broken Dimensions. Then COVID happened, and I had time to work on both simultaneously. Eventually PL fell off and was incorporated into the lore of BrDim, but I didn't do much with it until late 2021, when I revived a side-character by the name of Nathan Shasear.
...yes, this Nathan Shasear:
AKA the guy "THE FALL" is about. He started out as this random eternal grad student OG Hekata had roped into reviving magic because he was outcast enough for Hekata to use. At the time, he was a relatively minor character ho just happened to be on bantering levels of acquaintance with the God of Magic.
In 2021 I revived him and he became something else... which I'm sure is fairly obvious at this point considering how much I talk about Nathan Shasear, the Mastermind and how little I mention Nathan Shasear, First High Mage aka Hekata's bitch scribe.
BUT THIS POST ISN'T ABOUT HIM!
I'm REVIVING PROPHECY LOST after nearly 4 years of disuse and relegation to the back-burner/world lore.
The base of the story is still the same: the Era 3 Revival happens (go read the timeline for some more perspective on that) and in all the chaos of the portals opening and the gods returning, someone finally realizes Ialu, goddess of Prophecy, has been unaccounted for since she returned to Earth to keep an eye on the mortals. Maikoa, the god who kickstarted all this, sets out to find her.
Meanwhile, the humans and Svarenic races are all scrambling to fix things after the North Svarenheil civil war spilled out into Overworld. In the chaos, our actual main character, Nyra Cyrinell, ends up with a Svarenic refugee as her roommate. Sky (no last name offered) is just trying to stay out of all the chaos, and is quite happy to chill with Nyra, her original roommate, and Nyra's nearby sister and tweenage nephews.
Until - inciting incident! - Nyra has her first vision while exploring her old office with her nephews and Sky. Shenanigans ensue involving a raid and Maikoa and Co. stepping in to corral some Svarenic nationalists, and Nyra is revealed to be a Seer, someone gifted with prophetic magic.
Why didn't she find out before? Nyra is 27 and a whole veterinarian, how has she never had a vision before (read: seizure, because the visions aren't quite stable without Ialu around)?
Because magic basically didn't exist in the Overworld for 2000+ years. The gods started to wipe it from the world and then the humans, prejudiced as they were at the time, finished the job. No magic, no Seers (or at least, no Seer who lived very long).
Maikoa deduces that Nyra's visions and their instability are so because Ialu isn't around. She's the first Seer they've encountered thus far, and so they entreat her to join them on their quest to find Ialu. Nyra, who is currently jobless due to the whole "dimensional incursion" incident and Will Literally Die if Ialu isn't returned to rights, agrees.
Sky comes with, because why not. The twins stay home. Maikoa takes their current right-hand-woman from their Clean-up Crew that's been rounding up the cultists and nationalists, and takes them all to their current base of operations:
The cramped, 2-bedroom apartment of Nathan Shasear, Hekata's to-be High Mage, and perpetual grad student.
Nathan does not want four more people in his apartment. He lives there, Hekata might as well have made the place his damn temple, there are minor mages and magical birds and otherworldly shades coming in and out all the time, and there's?? A giant bat-woman-thing?? Who keeps showing up and refuses to leave him alone?? (This is irrelevant to the comic because she never shows up, but this is the representative to the inhumanis races, specifically the one Vampire leader)...
The point is: he doesn't want more people in his damn appartment, MAIKOA.
Maikoa does not care.
Eventually, they convince him to help check out their next several theoretical locations for Ialu, all located in the local forest and mountains.
This goes poorly. Cultists are revealed to be taking up residence in the hills (despite the very considerable effort being put up by the locals), and after several close calls and another vision or two, they're not any closer to finding Ialu.
I haven't figure out the middle bit here, but eventually they do find her and the cultists/nationalists who've been following them this whole time try to take control of her in her docile half-asleep state. Fighting ensues! Maikoa fights a powerful demigod! Nyra hallucinates a future where the balance of the universe is put in jeopardy by a man with red eyes and four horns! Sky makes bad decisions! Nathan gets thrown off a building!
Then, Ialu wakes up and everything stops.
The rest is spoilers >:)
There are some obvious things you can extrapolate:
Nathan doesn't die. Obviously.
Nyra doesn't die and in fact becomes Ialu's first Prophet in over 2000 years. (Are we seeing the trend? Nathan and Hekata, Nyra and Ialu, Maikoa and their "Clean-up Crew" of loyal fiends friends? Yes? Good.)
Magic continues to develop exponentially from here
Also: Hekata is sort of present but he's a background character in this. Maikoa kisses him when they arrive at the apartment, Nathan gripes at him occasionally, and that's about it. He's busy reconstructing the magical web of Earth by hand, so he's kind of got his hands full and won't be of any use tracking Ialu. Hence why he isn't on the sheet.
And... yeah! That's about where I'm at with the story. I have other things that take precedence over PL in my list of projects and don't have time to make this into another graphic novel or anything (cough, The Lycanthra Syndicate, cough cough, Fractal Alliances), so I won't be doing much with it for now...
but I might continue to make concept art for it and flesh out proper refs for the gang. That was one goal I set for myself this year, so hopefully I'll get around to that 😅
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If you read through this whole big introduction, THANK YOU and I love you. You're the best.
I'll be reblogging this shortly with some more general info on the gang, but that's it for now! Hope y'all had fun.
This is a preview for later, but man I just fuckin’ love pre-everything Nate. He’s exhausted. He can do (comparatively) minor magic.
He’s got cuts and bruises all over from botched teleportations and old blood rituals and accidentally-enlarged mosquitos, and tripping over roots while running from unknown horrors.
He’s gay in the equivalent of post-nuclear war, post-nuclear winter America in an alternate timeline (which is to say: homophobia is in again).
He’s from and lives in Appalachia and it is Somehow Worse than it used to be (re: in “our” time). Actual monsters in weed-covered caves. Demons in the hollers. Corrupt magic pouring out of hidden springs and taking over old ruins. He hides his accent (hell, he still has an accent).
Not only does he actually have a Master’s degree and is in school for his PhD in regional and world history, but he’s also Hekata’s ONLY FUCKING MAGE so he’s like, grad student x2 + PhD.
He lives on coffee.
Honestly, him meeting Nyra, who literally helps run a vet clinic and was out in charge of coordinating all therapy animal visits, was probably the best thing to ever happen to him at this point in his life.
