Old Prism

The shattered remains of a settlement that predates Prism City by unknown centuries. Old Prism's crystal structures have collapsed into each other, creating a maze of angled surfaces and trapped light. The ruins are disorienting and dangerous — more than one explorer has gotten lost in reflections of passages that aren't actually there. Out in the Glass Expanse, this site is part of the network of prism-fields, shard-towns, and silica plateaus that surround Prism City. Light bends here in ways the Pattern cannot quite hold — the air sometimes refracts a scene from a different hour, and the Starving Silence forms where light has shattered the same way too many times in the same place. The Knowledge Fragmentation Principle was first formalised by Expanse philosophers a generation before the Luminous Fold accepted it.