Explore every episode of the podcast Obsidian Bloom: Echoes

In the neon-lit solitude of Neontreal, Lucen clings to an ageing digital portrait of his late father. Then, one night, he swears he sees it blink.

What begins as a fleeting moment becomes an obsession, drawing him into a nightly search for a message from beyond the silence.

Between Eyes and Silence is a poignant cyberpunk story from Obsidian Bloom: Echoes about grief, perception, and the longing to be seen by someone we have lost.

In Neontreal, Marlowe finds escape in Bloodspire Online, a virtual game that feels disturbingly real. Then the morning headlines begin to echo his battles. As obsession takes hold, the boundary between simulation and reality unravels.

Shadows of Bloodspire is a cyberpunk psychological horror story from Echoes 2, set in the Obsidian Bloom universe.

In the rain-soaked alleys of Neontreal’s Old Quarter, the Nyx-model surveillance drone is just another eye in the sky, silent, efficient, and obedient. Its world is made of heat signatures, encrypted directives, and reports sent back to Nexus Synergy without a second thought. Until one routine scan flags an anomaly: a starving teenage boy in a forgotten alley who looks up, reaches out, and calls the drone by name.

As Nyx hovers above the boy, corrupted fragments of old code begin to surface, hinting at a role it was never meant to remember, and a promise it might once have made. Between its programmed duty to report an unregistered child and the echo of something like loyalty, a new kind of error emerges: choice.

Content warning: dystopian setting; themes of child neglect, systemic violence, and AI surveillance.

Dain’s job is simple: lie down in the capsule, let the system link to his mind, and wake up already at his station, stabilizing the unpredictable currents of experimental time tech. Shift after shift, the machines hum, the graphs scroll, and his fingers move with automatic precision. No commute. No sun. No memories that reach very far beyond the lab.

But a tiny glitch in his routine, a cup of coffee that never gets cold, a recording that shouldn’t exist, cracks the surface of his reality. As the Chronos Initiative and Somnus Labs blur into one endless work cycle, Dain begins to suspect that the real prison isn’t the capsule around his body, but the loop inside his mind.

Content warning: psychological and existential horror; themes of overwork, loss of identity, and dehumanizing corporate systems.

In the lower districts of Neontreal, contract killer Selyne takes the kind of job she never refuses: double pay, no questions, one target in an abandoned hospital that officially doesn’t exist. All she has to do is find a cryogenic pod in a sealed underground wing and pull the trigger.

But as she descends past dead terminals, redacted projects and cameras that should have been offline decades ago, the building starts pressing on her memory like a bruise. The deeper she goes, the more the mission feels less like a contract and more like a setup, one wired to her past, her body, and the very idea of who she is.

Content warning: psychological and existential horror; medical/body horror; child endangerment themes; cloning and identity manipulation.

In the industrial wastelands of Neontreal, synthetic food keeps the city alive, cold, flavourless, and controlled by one corporation. But when Nohr, a low-level factory worker, discovers an anomaly in a batch of nutrition blocks, he tastes something impossible: emotion, memory… life.

What begins as a malfunction soon reveals a crack in Aurion Nutraceuticals’ carefully maintained reality. Haunted by voices that are not his and pursued by shadows with too much interest in his mistake, Nohr is forced into an underworld where truth is more dangerous than hunger.

As he searches for answers, he learns that some secrets are not just buried, they are trapped.

And they want a way out.

Content warning: psychological and existential horror; themes of memory, identity, and corporate dystopia.

In Neontreal’s Chinatown, teenage Sayuri Kojima searches for her missing father, and finds a reflection that isn’t hers. When her brother slips into a coma and the mirrors start whispering, she dives into the city’s digital underworld to confront an entity born from human guilt itself. What stares back isn’t a ghost. It’s the truth.

Content warning: psychological and existential horror.

Inside Neontreal’s Vauxhall Institute, Dr. Elian Drax hunts for the truth behind “Halcyon”, a smiling enigma who resists every attempt at reconditioning. As files corrupt and inmates start grinning for no reason, reality peels back to reveal a trap far colder than madness.

Content warning: psychological horror

In Neontreal’s Eastern Zone, Synne follows a glitching message to Echo Nexus, a nightclub that isn’t a club at all, but a temporal trap. Inside, Ezren dances the same ten minutes on repeat as reality loops, resets, and fractures. To save him, Synne must break the beat before it breaks her.

Content warning: psychological tension, dissociation.

In the underbelly of Neontreal, a nameless stray fights for scraps among rust and neon, until he crosses paths with Mara, the healer of Haven. A story of hunger, survival, and the first flicker of belonging.

Content warning: depictions of animal violence.

In the decaying heart of Neontreal’s Chinatown, an old man brews tea that stirs forgotten memories and awakens things best left buried. When Tsukiko, a weary student of Emotional Engineering, steps into his tent, she finds more than a drink: she finds a promise. A haunting tale of grief, memory, and the thin line between technology and the soul.

Behind the velvet curtains of Neontreal’s most exclusive sanctuary, power and hypocrisy dance hand in hand. Ministers, CEOs, and titans of order shed their public masks to indulge in secrets they would condemn outside. Adrien, a quiet observer in this theatre of desire and corruption, knows every whisper and every lie. But when one night breaks the pattern, the illusion of control shatters, and the cost of silence may be higher than anyone imagined.

On a ruined rooftop above Neontreal, brothers Riven and Kael watch a city of poison rain, drone eyes, and neon lies breathe below them. Riven sees rust, hunger, and the machinery of control; Kael imagines metal dragons, fire watchers, and a sky that might still forgive. As trains scream through the smog and alarms stitch the night, their quiet vigil becomes a portrait of two futures: one already broken, and one stubbornly imagined. Hope and ruin sit side by side, waiting to see which one blinks first.

In Neontreal’s neon rot, Brann, a novice of the Crimson Veil, receives a simple contract at the Red Dagger: eliminate a café barista named Lysara. But nothing in this city is simple. As Brann shadows his target through alleys of Dark Euphoria and drone patrols, doubt cuts deeper than any blade. What serves the balance: obedience, flight, or truth? A test disguised as a kill order forces Brann to choose who he is before he draws blood.

In the ruins of Neontreal, voices long forgotten rise again. This prologue opens the door to a fractured world, where memory, loss, and resistance echo through the shadows of a city consumed by neon and decay.

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