Chapter 2 - Ash and Runes

The world ended quietly.

Not with fire.
Not with thunder.
But with ash drifting through a dead sky like gray snow.

It fell in soft, endless sheets, dusting the broken towers, clogging shattered streets, coating the dead where they lay. Once, this city had been called Valaris—the Beacon of the Eastern Reach. Its streets had glowed with rune-lit paths. Its markets had sung with a dozen languages. Now it was nothing but ribs of stone and twisted metal rising from a smear of ruin.

Haplo stood at the city’s edge, unmoving, as the ash settled on his cloak and into his dark hair. His boots were sunk halfway into pulverized brick. His breath fogged faintly in the cold, poisoned air.

Behind his eyes, the runes stirred.

Thin, angular glyphs carved into his left forearm began to glow beneath scarred skin, lines of blue-white light pulsing slowly, patiently—like a predator waking from sleep. They hummed in rhythm with his heartbeat. The power was always there, waiting. Always hungry.

He lifted his hand.

A whispered syllable escaped his lips in the Old Tongue—soft, nearly lost beneath the wind. The rubble before him shuddered. Stones trembled, then rose as if lifted by invisible hands. Bent beams of steel peeled away from one another with a scream of tortured metal.

Beneath the wreckage, a pocket of darkness opened.

And something inside moved.

Haplo narrowed his eyes and adjusted the rune-flow with careful precision, sweat already forming at his brow. Too much force would crush whatever lay beneath. Too little would leave it buried.

A cough echoed out of the hollow.

Weak. Human.

He pulled the last of the stone aside and dropped to one knee.

A child stared up at him through dust-caked lashes. A girl, nine—maybe ten. Blood streaked her temple. One arm was twisted at an unnatural angle. Her breathing rattled like broken glass.

For a moment, Haplo forgot the war.

He pressed his glowing hand to the ground and redirected power inward instead of outward. Another whisper—slower this time. Gentler. The runes shifted hue, cooling from violent blue to pale silver as healing sigils threaded through the floor.

The girl gasped as warmth flooded into her fractured body. Bones knitted. Blood clotted. Her breathing steadied.

Her eyes widened as she focused on him.

“Are… are you a god?” she whispered.

Haplo’s throat tightened.

“No,” he said softly. “Just… someone who’s still standing.”

He lifted her gently and wrapped her in his cloak. When he rose, his legs trembled—not from the effort of lifting a child, but from the weight of how many he had failed to lift before her.

Behind him, the city groaned.

A distant tower finally surrendered to gravity, collapsing in a roar of stone and fire. The sound rolled across the ruins like the growl of some dying beast. The ash fell thicker.

The girl clung to him.

“What happened?” she asked.

Haplo did not answer.

Because the truth was too large for a child’s heart.

Because the truth was that reality itself was unraveling.

Because the truth was that his brother had opened the Death Gate.

---

They had once studied runes together.

Two boys hunched over glowing tablets in the great libraries of the Arcanum Concord, arguing late into the night over symmetry, energy flow, and the ancient laws that bound magic to consequence.

Haplo had believed in balance.

His brother had believed in breaking it.

Even then, the signs had been there.

“You bend too easily to the limits they teach you,” his brother had once said, eyes bright with defiant fire. “Magic isn’t meant to be safe, Haplo. It’s meant to be infinite.”

“And infinity devours itself,” Haplo had replied.

They had both been right.

And both had been wrong.

Now that same brilliance powered siege engines fueled by forbidden sigils—runes cut not into stone or steel, but into the bone of the world itself. Engines that tore cities apart by unmaking the rules that held matter together.

Engines that had reduced Valaris to ash.

A shadow passed through the drifting ruin.

Haplo turned.

A figure approached through the falling gray—silent, deliberate. A familiar presence moved through the devastation like a living blade.

Destiny.

Her name was not a promise. It was a warning.

She wore a long, dark battle-coat reinforced with layered sigil-thread, its hem torn and burned. A white-crystal longsword was strapped across her back, its core pulsing faintly with internal starlight. Her hair was tied back in a warrior’s knot, streaked with ash and blood that was not her own.

Her eyes met his.

“You found survivors,” she said.

“One,” Haplo replied.

Destiny knelt and examined the girl quickly, her expression tightening at the wounds that had already faded. She nodded once. “Good.”

Haplo shifted the child slightly higher in his arms. “You felt it.”

Destiny’s jaw clenched. “Another breach. East of here. This one was… different.”

“How different?”

“Stronger. Cleaner.” She looked out toward the wasteland. “The Gate is learning.”

The words sat between them like a loaded weapon.

“That’s not possible,” Haplo said.

“It wasn’t supposed to be possible for the sky to split open either,” she replied quietly.

Haplo had no answer for that.

Together, they watched the horizon warp faintly—like heat rising from invisible fire. Far beyond the ruins of Valaris, reality shuddered in slow, silent pulses. Each one was another place dying as borders between worlds thinned and failed.

Another step toward total collapse.

“The Gate is stabilizing,” Destiny said.

Haplo closed his eyes.

Stabilization meant permanence.

It meant the breach between realities was no longer an injury.

It was becoming an organ.

---

They delivered the child to a fortified survivor enclave carved into the skeleton of a fallen aqueduct. Rune-barriers glowed dimly along the broken arches, strained thin by constant assault from the warped creatures that now prowled the dead lands between worlds.

When the girl was gone, taken into trembling arms and whispered prayers, Haplo finally let his exhaustion surface.

His runes dimmed.

His knees threatened to give.

Destiny caught him by the elbow.

“You’re burning too fast again,” she said.

“They needed me now.”

“They needed you alive tomorrow too.”

He managed a tired half-smile. “Still lecturing me through the apocalypse?”

“Someone has to.”

They moved to the outer edge of the enclave, overlooking the shattered plains where once-fertile lands had folded into fractured geometry and alien skies. Massive rifts hovered in the air like frozen lightning strikes, glowing veins of impossible color threading across the horizon.

Creatures moved in the distance—shapes that did not belong to any one world. Some crawled. Some drifted. Some simply existed in ways that hurt the mind to witness.

All of them had followed the Gate.

“Your brother was seen again,” Destiny said at last.

Haplo went still.

“Where.”

“North Rift. Directly inside the convergence zone.”

“That’s suicide.”

Destiny turned to him. “Not for him.”

The words struck deeper than any blade.

Haplo’s voice came out rough. “How many did he take through the Gate this time?”

Her silence was answer enough.

He exhaled slowly, steam fogging the cold air. “It’s accelerating.”

“Yes.”

“Then this isn’t a war anymore,” he said. “It’s a countdown.”

---

That night, Haplo dreamed of fire.

He always dreamed of fire now.

In the dream, the Arcanum Concord still stood. White towers pierced a golden sky. Wind chimes sang in crystal gardens. Students laughed as they crossed bridges of light. The world still believed in tomorrow.

Then the sky split.

A black wound tore open above the highest spire, leaking emerald lightning and screaming shadow. The Death Gate unfolded like a colossal iris, its rings rotating in slow, impossible geometry. Each movement rewrote the laws of existence around it.

And standing beneath it—

His brother.

Unbroken.

Unchanged.

Smiling.

“You should have come with me,” his brother said as the Gate consumed the city.

Haplo woke with a hoarse gasp, fingers digging into stone.

The enclave was quiet. Too quiet.

Then the sirens began.

---

The alarm was not sound—it was a vibration that passed through bone and rune alike. The barrier flared brighter, straining as pressure built against it from the outside.

Destiny was already moving.

They reached the wall just as the first wave hit.

Creatures poured from a collapsing rift less than a mile from the enclave—warped amalgams of flesh, armor, and raw dimensional energy. Some flew on shredded wings. Others moved on too many limbs. All of them howled with voices stolen from a dozen dying worlds.

Haplo raised his arm.

The runes ignited.

Power surged outward like a rising sun.

With a single sweeping gesture, he carved a burning sigil into the air. The symbol detonated in a cascade of controlled annihilation. The leading ranks of the swarm simply ceased to exist, erased into curling plumes of light.

But the breach kept widening.

More poured through.

Too many.

Destiny drew her blade.

The crystal sang as it left the sheath.

They met the swarm together at the barrier’s edge.

Steel and sorcery.

Light and blood.

For every creature that fell, two more took its place.

The barrier screamed.

Then—

The sky tore open again.

Not above them.

Behind them.

Inside the enclave.

A localized Gate-child rupture—small, unstable, and catastrophic.

Haplo felt it before he saw it.

A twisting pressure in his chest.

Reality collapsing inward.

A scream folded by silence.

He turned just as the rupture consumed half the inner shelter in a single implosive flash. Stone, people, runes—gone. Not destroyed.

Unmade.

“Amp it shut!” Destiny shouted.

“I can’t—it's feeding on itself!”

Then Haplo felt something else.

A presence.

Cold.

Familiar.

The rupture stabilized—not closing, but focusing.

And through that shimmering wound in the air—

A hand reached out.

The enclave fell silent.

Every rune flickered.

Every living thing felt the same impossible weight settle over them.

Then his brother stepped through.

---

He looked exactly as Haplo remembered him.

Dark hair tied back. Calm eyes. The faint scar at his temple from a childhood accident neither of them spoke about anymore. He wore black and silver armor etched with runes so complex they hurt to look at.

The Death Gate’s geometry pulsed faintly behind his pupils.

“Haplo,” his brother said warmly. “You’re still alive. I was hoping.”

Destiny shifted her stance, blade raised. “You will not take another world,” she said.

He glanced at her mildly. “You don’t get a vote.”

Then he looked back at Haplo.

“You could have ruled beside me,” he said. “Instead, you play healer in graveyards.”

Haplo felt the runes screaming beneath his skin.

“Close the Gate,” he demanded.

His brother smiled.

“No.”

The rupture surged.

Reality buckled.

Destiny lunged.

Haplo followed.

And the Death Gate turned again.