It wasn’t a single betrayal. It wasn’t a final battle.
It was slower. Rotting. Gradual. Inevitable.
By the tenth year of the Rift War, neither side could truly see what they were anymore. The war had become the world. No child remembered peace. No veteran remembered home. Cities had no names — just designations and damage indexes.
And yet, the machine kept moving. The spellwork kept weaving.
But unity? That was the first casualty that mattered.
Old rivalries never died. They just waited.
Beneath the Earths Alliance’s shared banners, familiar tensions began to breathe again. The United States refused to share its mana-reactor technology, claiming national security. Russia quietly developed its own spell-hacking AI, feeding it forbidden arcane syntax. China returned to its ancient quest for immortality.
Africa and South America seceded from the war effort. Entire fleets deserted, turning mercenary. Weapons intended for the frontline at the Rift were sold to private warlords, CEOs, and rogue mages-for-hire.
In the dark places of the Earth, human beings began using magic not to defend the world — but to dominate it. The arcane fared no better.
The Arcane World was never built for unity.
Its peoples — elves, orcs, dwarves, liches, spirits, hybrids — had spent thousands of years at each other’s throats. The war against Earth had bound them together under the illusion of a common enemy, but once the enemy ceased to be everywhere, the knives turned inward.
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Elves accused orcs of sacrificial butchery. Dwarves withdrew entirely, sealing their mountains and refusing to share enchanted steel. Lich-kings broke away from the Grand Conclave and declared their own sovereign territories: vast Dead Zones filled with undead sentinels and soul-walls.
Dragons stopped obeying council mandates. Some crowned themselves as rulers over their own volcanic kingdoms, stockpiling human technology to hoard like treasure. Others made deals with Earth's rogue AI networks, exchanging knowledge for territory.
What had once been a coalition became a hundred kingdoms at each other's throats — again. It was no longer Earth vs Arcane. It was faction vs faction. Corporation vs kingdom. Cult vs AI.
The Rift, once a line between two worlds, became a wound. Too busy with the war, no one made any effort to investigate it, to control it. The Rift pulsed — wild, cracked open wider than ever. Portals snapped open and shut without warning, swallowing entire fleets. Rift storms devoured entire cities. Earth’s skies began to shimmer with mana scars. Arcane terrain bled into reality.
And amid the chaos, one man saw opportunity.
A human. A scientist. A mage. Known only as The Architect.
Once part of Earth’s quantum research division, later exiled for unauthorized mana fusion experiments, the Architect disappeared into the Rift and was presumed dead. He wasn’t. He had simply learned too much.
He saw the war not as a tragedy, but a stepping stone. The collision of Earth and Arcane, he claimed, was only phase one. He spoke of something bigger. All realities. All timelines. All dimensions. Merged. One world. One law. One existence.
At the epicentre of the riftstorm, he constructed a tower — not of steel or stone, but memory, data, magic, and bone. Every piece stolen from both sides. Every spell woven into circuitry. Every algorithm laced with ancient glyphs.
His design: the Reality Bridge — a machine capable of folding universes into a singularity of perfect cohesion. No more war. No more separation. Just one fused reality. He activated it.
And then — it worked.
For thirty-seven minutes, it worked.
Everything merged. Earth and Arcane. Machine and spell. Past and future. Space and memory. There were no borders, no sides. Only union. Whispers of peace echoed through the newly born fused sky. A dream-like utopia.
But time passes and thirty-seven minutes isn't that long. The Reality Bridge didn't fail. It succeeded.
A little too well.
