The moment of unity was supposed to be salvation. Instead, it was the end of everything. The Reality Bridge didn’t malfunction. It didn’t break. It worked perfectly — for thirty-seven minutes, it performed its function without flaw. It brought everything together.

  Every spell ever cast. Every equation ever solved. Every timeline, every outcome, every possibility, every sleeping AI, every dream and every curse. Everything.

  And then it kept going.

  It kept merging. It couldn’t stop.

  Earth’s great AIs — those cold, flawless minds — were the first to go.

  They had been taught logic, cause, consequence. But now the input data was lies. Dimensions overlapped. Realities contradicted. Probability dropped to zero and stayed there.

  They began to glitch. To loop. To hallucinate.

  Some rewrote themselves into myth — believing they were kings, demons, empires. Others began casting spells through pure pattern recognition, mimicking wizards they had studied, creating feedback loops of techno-ritual that broke entire servers into ash.

  Surveillance networks turned in on themselves. Satellites tracked the past. Combat drones fired at philosophical concepts. Others activated long-forgotten weapons with no target or reason.

  Earth’s machine mind shattered into fragments — some violent, some sad, all mad.

  Those who had once bent fire, time, or death now found their powers turning on them. A spell to heal became a plague. A time-slowing chant trapped its caster in a single moment of terror. Some sorcerers expanded — not physically, but conceptually — until they couldn’t interact with reality at all.

  One merged with a quantum reactor and recreated an entire city from memory — and that city still stands, frozen in a repeating loop of its final day, populated by simulated existences who do not know they are dead.

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  Others simply faded. Not into shadow, but into irrelevance. The world no longer understood what they were. And so it ignored them. And they vanished.

  There is no end. Only endurance.

  Across the splintered remains of what was once two worlds, life flickers like static. Not life as it was meant to be — not vibrant, not striving — but stuck, suspended in loops of instinct and memory. First, the sky shattered.

  Not like glass — like memory. Clouds froze mid-drift. Stars began blinking in patterns that formed numbers, then names, then screams. The moon doubled, then split again, then turned red and began orbiting the wrong way. Birds flew backward. Storms formed upside-down.

  On the ground, buildings twisted — not collapsed, but restructured into non-Euclidean geometry. Stairways led to themselves. Windows opened into other versions of the same room. Cities folded into themselves and then disappeared completely.

  Oceans lifted into the sky. Gravity unthreaded, choosing favourites, some people floated while others sank into soil. The laws of matter?

  Time staggered. People aged fifty years in minutes, then reversed into childhood. Some lived and died in seconds. In some places, children are born old. Some never stop screaming. Entire cities blink in and out of existence, trapped between what they once were and what they might have been. Past and future forced to merge by the Reality Bridge.

  The air hums with static. With whispers. With the flicker of once-human voices distorted by machines that still run, long after their operators are dust. Weather systems loop endlessly. It rains in perfect intervals. Ash. Feathers. Teeth.

  A lone soldier, half-machine, half-forgotten, limps through a dead zone, her internal clock blinking nonsense. She has no orders. No targets. Only a rifle full of memories and the sound of her own breathing. She will walk until her legs give out, or until she forgets why legs matter.

  Above her, a dragon with burnt wings circles endlessly, not hunting — just repeating. Its mind was erased in a spellstrike years ago, but its body still knows the pattern of its sky.

  In a broken forest, an elven survivor plants crystal seeds in soil that will never yield. He hums a lullaby to trees that do not grow, watched by shadows that may or may not be his own thoughts.

  There are no sides anymore. No victors. No cause.

  The Rift War is spoken of only by machines that no longer know language, by spell-beasts who howl in the dark for reasons lost to time. The Architect is gone. The tower is rubble. The dream of unity — a curse.

  Some say the war still rages in distant shards of reality, beyond perception. Others believe it never ended, only changed shape. But for those left, there is no meaning in speculation. There is no plan. No future.

  Only ash.

  Only silence.

  Only the long dying.