DEMO (prologue - chapter one / 31st of August 2025) || see disclaimers, TWs & more below!
Time does not wait for anyone, even for the one that controls it.
After the bloody aftermath of Draeken's rebellion against Delphora, you're left an orphan. Your mother lies dead beneath a pile of bodies, crushed under the boots of the Time Watchers, and your older brother, Mylo, is nowhere to be found. Bruised and scared, you're taken in by Marek, your mother's friend, together with a few other strays he managed to catch hiding in the shadows of the night.
As Marek tends to your wounds and wipes away your tears, the Council of the Eternals, forever holed up in their lavish upper city, is falling apart. They are in complete mayhem and disarray as, unbeknownst to you, one of the five time shards that keep the heart of the city, the Clocktower, working in tune with time's balance has been stolen.
Oddly enough, that lost shard looks suspiciously similar to the strange shiny stone your mother gave you and your brother right before the doomed uprising. With it gone, the flow of time grows slippery and erratic, as the Clocktower starts to decay without its missing piece.
Life in the undercity of Draeken, also known as The Depths, is brutal enough. But when an ill-fated encounter leaves you forever altered, with your blood itself changed, you’ll soon realize that time is strange, and the thin fabric of reality a fickle thing. Even more so when it’s something you can no longer just witness ... but may be forced to control.
༒︎ Fully customisable MC including: pronouns, gender, physical appearance, personality, sexuality etc.
༒︎ Choose 1 out of 5 occupations for your MC: underground pit fighter, street artist, black market medic, inventor, or dingy bar singer.
༒︎ Romance 1 out of 4 love interests, all of which are gender-selectable. Engage in hookups with other side characters.
༒︎ Find your brother, or let him find you.
༒︎ Go through an unimaginable physiology-changing experiment and manage to keep your sanity, or become completely unrecognizable to those closest to you.
༒︎ Betray the people you care about or protect them at all costs.
༒︎ Explore the dual state-cities of Delphora and Draeken on a steampunk/cyberpunk background.
༒︎ Become the hero everyone wants you to be, a new world order dictator, or God :D
Maddox / Maxine (M/F) - Rough around the edges and with a body built for combat, M's very demeanour and appearance reflects years of hard living together with you in Draeken. Taken in by Marek after the failed uprising, M had grown overbearingly protective of you on the very first night of sharing a bed with each other as kids. Now, all grown up, M fights in Marek's underground fighting pit to earn their keep, but with every bloodied knuckle, their anger at the scraps their people are handed by Delphora’s elite grows. M is ready to make a change. Are you?
— Possible (romance) routes: Best Friends to Lovers / Best Friends to FWB to Lovers / Best Friends to Lovers to Enemies / Best Friends to Enemies
Riven / Raven (M/F) - A street-smart wildcard loyal only to the highest bidder, R lives by a simple rule: survive and have a good time while doing it. So they smuggle goods and sell information to whoever pays the most. R is not above double-crossing anyone, and they don’t pretend to be. Always charming, confident, and looking at you like they want to take your pants off any second, you’ll have to find out if R is worthy of your trust, or if they’re truly incapable of not betraying those they care about.
— Possible (romance) routes: FWB to Lovers / FWB to Friends / Lovers to Enemies / FWB to Enemies
Seraphim / Seraphina Vaughn (M/F) - The strangest person you have met down in The Depths, and that’s saying something. S is sweet, about as intimidating as a puppy, with a wide and bright smile and … clothes with golden silky linings that make them stand out in ways they’re trying to hide. They’re a people pleaser at heart, but S’s thinly veiled ambition and naivety about the streets of Draeken makes you wonder about their intentions. They seem to be attached to you from the moment you meet. Can you figure out the catch, or will your trust come back to bite you?
— Possible (romance) routes : Friends to Lovers / Lovers to Enemies / Friends to Enemies
Cassian / Calypso Kazimier (M/F) - C’s deep sense of superiority and disdain for The Depths is reflected clearly on their sharp and cold face, their commanding presence demanding respect and authority with every move. As the most influential member of the Order of the Eternals, C makes it their very purpose to ensure that no one can challenge their rule, and that any threat to their control is dealt with swiftly and without mercy. What happens when that threat might be you? C is untouchable, they will make sure to squash you with their own hands. Unless …
— Possible (romance) routes : Corruption Arc / Enemies to Lovers / Enemies to Lovers to Enemies
DISCLAIMER: An IF based on & inspired by the show "Arcane". Time Fall is a drama interactive fiction story with steampunk & cyberpunk elements, set in the dual state-cities of Delphora and Draeken, also known as The Spire and The Depths. It's meant to follow complicated relationships, complicated choices, and complicated consequences. It is written with an 18+ audience in mind due to heavy themes and topics such as death, use of drugs and alcohol, swearing, violence, (optional & skippable) explicit sexual content etc. || this is a project in early progress, meaning that there are things that might be subject to change later on.
LINKS: ︎cog forum (needs to be reopened) ༒︎ ROs physical descriptions + hookups ༒︎
Playing around with an idea of what my MC in @timefall-if's game could look like. I feel like the hair color and angel fang piercings won't ever change but once we get to know the MC better in the story I'll have a better idea on what I want to do.
We're all cheering for you and this IF, I've read your other work and your writing is fantastic from the atmosphere to the flow to the characterization! It's definitely one of the best imo ദ്ദി(˵ •̀ ᴗ - ˵ ) ✧
THANK YOU SO MUCH this is a lovely thing to say!!!!!!!! on that note, my new IF Time Fall is out at @timefall-if ^_^ please check it out if you're interested in anything steampunk/cyberpunk/Arcane/complicated relationships, choices, and consequences/DRAAAMAAAAA
CHAPTER ONE (part 1 + part 2) are now up and ready to read and play!
thank you so much for your excitement for this update, and for your patience when it came to the bugs and errors ^^ i'm definitely not a coder, but i'm trying my best for this story! i'm so relieved to finally have this chapter out for everyone to read. HUGE GIGANTIC ENORMOUS THANK YOU to @neondreams-if for helping me so much with the coding! he's spent so much time not only looking over the code, but also fixing it and making it run smoothly. i'm so thankful for your help and i'm so happy to see such kind and helpful people in the IF community ^^
also shoutout to my boyfriend @childrenofcain-if for always being my biggest supporter and for always being excited about my work ^3^
and lastly, thank you to everyone who either dmed me or sent in asks about the bugs and errors you encountered, as well as kind words of encouragement! you've all been so thorough, thank you ^^
──────────────────────
in this update, you will ...
see Delphora (the upper city / The Spire) from Mylo's POV in the aftermath of the failed rebellion.
witness Mylo's deal with an unexpected but familiar figure.
meet M and decide on the state of your relationship as children!
choose MC's future occupation (pit fighter, street artist, dingy bar singer, inventor, or black market medic).
meet MC's future demise! or, better yet, let her meet MC!
PS : the stats page is not yet complete. if you click on it, it will probably get stuck in a never-ending loading loop 💔 you'll be able to check stats in the next chapter update!
PPS : in the game intro as well as in my pinned post it says that the chapter was updated on 31st of august, even though today is the 2nd of september. that's because that's when i originally uploaded the first chapter one file! just in case anyone was wondering.
HOLY SHIT YOUR BOYFRIEND IS WRITING BALLAD OF THE YOUNG GODS?????
YUP YUP!!! if you haven't already, check out @childrenofcain-if for a crazy good and well written dark academia IF that already has a few chapters released ^^ i know almost everything there is to know about the future books as well, so TRUST ME when i say it's all so yummy and exciting and so creative!!!!!
i'm not saying that just because it's my boyfriend writing it, but everything is sooo well thought out, and his deep understanding of his own characters genuinely shines through the writing. ugh i love my tortured artist so much ☹️🫶🏻
This is not an attack on you but srsly what is wrong with having crushes on authors? It's all online any way and it's not like I'm going to steal your bf through Tumblr or Discord. You and him should take it as a compliment that he's so talented and physically hot to attract readers in that way. It is simply not that deep ❤️
how would you even know that my boyfriend's "physically hot" and why would you tell me this? "it's not that deep" this is literally my BOYFRIEND. i've never gotten upset on here because i've never had any reason to, but this is pissing me off. have crushes on whoever you want but if it's on my actual literal real life boyfriend then neither of us wants to hear about it.
