The Patryn sky was made of glass and fire.
It had always been that way.
Crimson auroras flowed across crystalline clouds like living veins. Stars burned brighter here than in any other realm—hotter, closer, as if the universe had leaned in to watch the Patryn struggle, build, and endure. Their cities were carved from black stone and living crystal, towers etched with runes so ancient they shaped gravity by their meaning alone.
This was the world that had forged Haplo.
This was the world his brother would destroy.
The first tremor came at dusk.
It was subtle enough at first that the street-runemasters mistook it for a leyline shift. The ground hummed beneath bare feet and sigil-carved stone alike. Resonance patterns blurred at the edges of perception. The great Anchor Spires atop the Citadel of Binding pulsed once—twice—then fell out of rhythm.
Haplo felt it through his bones.
He was halfway across the upper bridges when the second tremor hit.
This one cracked stone.
The sky flared an impossible green.
And somewhere deep beneath the world, something vast began to turn.
Destiny reached for his hand.
“Haplo… what is that?”
His runes ignited without command.
Fear answered faster than thought.
The Twin Who Would Be God
At the heart of the Citadel, beneath twelve layers of rune-locked sanctums that had never been breached in Patryn history, Haplo’s twin brother stood alone.
The ancient chamber was spherical, its walls carved with the Original Confinement Arrays—runes older than language, older than the idea of worlds being separate. At the center of the chamber hovered a ring of rotating darkness, thin at first, barely more than a ripple in the air.
The first tooth of the Death Gate.
His brother raised both hands.
Runes ignited across his skin—dozens, then hundreds, then thousands—spreading like a living map of annihilation. The Sovereign Override flared at his chest, burning gold and black simultaneously.
“Begin,” he whispered.
Reality obeyed.
The ring expanded.
The chamber screamed.
Stone warped inward as gravitational vectors reversed. The Confinement Arrays detonated one by one as the gate’s inversion field devoured their meaning faster than they could assert it.
Across the Patryn world, every anchor-tower faltered.
The sky fractured.
Haplo staggered as the first distant buildings collapsed upward—ripped from their foundations and dragged screaming into the heavens.
“This isn’t a breach,” he whispered.
Destiny’s eyes were wide with terror. “Then what is it?”
Haplo looked up as the clouds began spiraling inward.
“This is a harvest.”
The Death Gate Opens Fully
The Gate did not rip open like a wound.
It unfolded.
Layer by layer, ring by ring, each rotation wider than the last. The sky peeled back like skin from an impossible skeleton of rotating geometry miles across. Rings of void and emerald equation-light ground against each other, each rotation rewriting gravity, time, and identity in widening pulses.
The Patryn world screamed.
Mountains rose from their beds and were torn apart midair. Oceans lifted in spiraling columns that twisted into vapor before they could fall. Entire districts of crystal cities were shredded into floating debris fields that spun helplessly toward the Gate’s heart.
Patryn screamed from every street.
Libraries of living runes collapsed into static madness.
The sky was no longer above.
It was everywhere.
And at the center of it all—
Haplo’s twin stood suspended in the eye of the storm.
Godlike.
Untouched.
The Patryn Are Taken
The Death Gate did not destroy the Patryn world first.
It pulled them through it alive.
Families were ripped from streets in screaming arcs of light. Warriors were torn from battlements mid-stand. Children vanished from their parents’ arms in flashes of distortion. Whole districts folded, inverted, and were dragged bodily into the Gate’s rotating core.
Haplo and Destiny ran.
The bridge beneath them shuddered violently as gravity surged sideways. Buildings ripped free and slammed into each other at impossible angles.
“Where do we go?” Destiny screamed.
“There is no away anymore!” Haplo shouted back.
He flung a stabilization matrix beneath their feet, forcing a pocket of alignment in the middle of the chaos. The ground locked beneath them as wind screamed past at hurricane speed, pulling everything not anchored toward the Gate.
Above them, a colossal ring completed another rotation.
And the pull doubled.
Patryn defenders activated counter-sigils from every tower. Beams of raw runic force slammed into the Gate’s outer rings.
They did nothing.
Power bent around the rings like light around a black hole.
“Why isn’t it slowing?!” Destiny cried.
Haplo realized the truth in a sickening instant.
“It’s not feeding on power,” he said. “It’s feeding on worlds.”
The Twin’s Declaration
A voice rolled across the sky.
Not shouted.
Not amplified.
Simply present everywhere at once.
“My people,” his brother said, calm as ever. “You taught me containment. Limitation. Walls. You taught me to build cages for infinity.”
The Gate rotated behind him.
“I have chosen transcendence instead.”
Across the sky, the Gate’s inner core ignited with spiraling white-gold light as trillions of lives became energy.
“You will not die,” he continued. “Death is a border. I am removing borders.”
Haplo screamed into the storm. “You’re unmaking us!”
His brother’s gaze found him through impossible distance.
“No,” he said softly. “I am making us permanent.”
When the World Lets Go
The Patryn world began to tear apart at its core.
The first continental rupture split the great central landmass in two. Magma and crystalline mantle erupted into the sky—then bent sideways and spiraled into the Gate like incandescent ribbon.
The Anchor Spires—last defense of world stability—collapsed together.
Reality lost its grip.
The ground beneath Haplo disintegrated into floating fragments.
He caught Destiny as she slipped.
The pull seized them.
They were lifted screaming into the sky, spinning through debris and shards of their dying world.
Destiny clawed at Haplo’s arm. “Don’t let go!”
“I won’t!”
He wrapped both arms around her as the wind tore at them with the force of a collapsing universe. His runes flared beyond safe limits, burning white-hot through his nerves as he tried to anchor them to something that no longer existed.
Every symbol he etched into the air collapsed instantly.
There was nothing left to bind.
They were ripped free.
The Patryn Exile
The Gate swallowed the Patryn world in stages.
First the cities.
Then the continents.
Then the sky itself.
Last of all, the very concept of Patryn—its independent laws of time, gravity, and magic—was peeled away and fed into the rotating singularity.
The entire race was dragged screaming into transit between realities.
Not dead.
Not alive.
Unfinished.
A billion voices compressed into shared displacement.
Haplo felt it as pressure on his soul—millions of overlapping identities, memories, and deaths crashing through dimensional transfer like an ocean through a needle.
Destiny sobbed against his chest.
“I can’t feel the world anymore,” she cried.
“There is no world,” Haplo whispered.
Only the pull.
The Grasp at the Edge of Nonexistence
They spun through warped light and impossible color.
Time ceased to behave.
Moments stretched into eternities.
Eternities collapsed into instants.
Through it all, Haplo and Destiny clung to each other as the only constant left in an existence being erased.
The dimensional pressure intensified.
Their bodies began to separate at the molecular level.
Destiny screamed as her form blurred, half-phased, her hand slipping from solid to spectral.
“Haplo, I’m losing you!”
He forced every remaining ounce of power into a single act of defiance.
Not a spell.
A promise.
He carved a Closed Identity Matrix directly into reality around Destiny’s soul—an untested, suicidal act that bound her existence to his across dimensional shear.
The backlash ripped through him.
Blood burst from his eyes.
But her form stabilized.
They did not separate.
The Twin Watches Them Fall
At the center of the Gate, his brother observed their descent through collapsing space.
For a moment—just a moment—something like conflict flickered across his face.
Then the Gate completed its full primary rotation.
The Patryn race vanished from their native universe.
The Gate sealed behind them.
The sky healed.
And a world ceased to have ever existed.
Impact in the World Beyond
They emerged in fire.
The new world rejected them violently.
Haplo and Destiny slammed into black volcanic stone as the displaced Patryn diaspora rained from the sky in streaks of burning light across every horizon.
A billion exiles crashed into a world that did not know them.
A world that would soon regret it.
Haplo lay gasping, lungs burning with alien air.
Destiny lay beside him, shaking, alive.
They looked around at a sky that was not theirs.
At stars drawn in foreign patterns.
At a horizon filled with falling Patryn like meteors.
The exile had begun.
The Vow at the End of a World
Haplo pulled Destiny into his arms as shock finally caught up with him.
“They’re all gone,” she whispered.
“No,” Haplo said.
“They’re all here.”
He looked up at the alien sky.
At the rain of his people.
At the scar in space where the Gate had closed.
And he swore an oath that would echo through worlds.
“I will tear that Gate down,” he said. “Rune by rune. World by world. Brother by brother.”
Destiny tightened her grip on him.
“And I will stand with you at the end of it,” she said.
Above them, unseen by any exile, the Death Gate turned again.
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