The chamber was a living tomb inside the Mountain of Bones, in Qy'thalor.
Sweating black stone, air thick with sulfur and blood. The summoning circle occupied the entire floor, runes carved with obsidian blades and filled with the blood of seven virgins. The lines pulsed like open arteries, emitting a sickly glow, the color of a wound that never heals.
In the center, Kzathor Velnix trembled.
Not from fear. From pure hatred.
His black robes clung to his thin body like dead skin. His sunken eyes burned with thirty years of spit and laughter from the masters of the High Tower. "The Weak One." "The Mistake." "Son of a sparkless whore." He cleaned their vomit from the marble floors while dreaming of this moment.
He raised his hands. Fingers cut in dozens of places. Blood dripped, dripped, feeding the runes.
The air changed first.
A deep, subaudible hum made his teeth vibrate. The runes rose from the floor, floating in a slow spiral, invisible blades spinning. The smell of burned ozone invaded everything. Kzathor smiled, cracked lips bleeding.
The chant began.
The words were not from any living language. They were sounds that tore the throat, consonants of broken glass and ground bones. Each syllable made the ground tremble. The runes accelerated. The wind — impossible in a closed room — rose in fury, whipping his long, dirty hair against his face. Ancient dust swirled in black columns. The torches on the walls went out one by one, sucked in by something that hated the light.
"Come!" he shouted, voice hoarse. "I call you by your true name! By the seven broken seals! By the blood that never dried!"
The runes exploded in white light. The power entered him like a red-hot iron driven into his spine. Kzathor saw, for one glorious instant, the army he had summoned: shadows with teeth of stars, demons of smoke and steel, infinite, ready to raze the kingdoms that had humiliated him.
Then the world cracked.
One rune — the seventh, the anchor — snapped like dry bone. A line of black light escaped, thin as a hair. Kzathor blinked.
"No..."
Another rune. Then another. The entire circle convulsed. The wind turned into a hurricane. Pieces of stone flew, cutting his face. He tried to stop the chant, but the words came out on their own, ripped from his throat by a greater force. His body arched backward. Blood gushed from his nose, his ears, his eyes.
The white light turned black.
Not darkness. Absence. A hole in the fabric of reality.
Kzathor felt his stomach turn as if the floor had disappeared. He fell to his knees. The walls rippled like a reflection in boiling water. From the hole came sounds that should never have existed there: distant sirens, metal screeching, mechanical voices shouting numbers, the roar of colossal engines, the hum of billions of souls who never believed in gods.
He saw, inside his own mind, the other side: towers of glass and neon that tore a purple sky, flying machines spitting fire, streets crowded with people with metal eyes and shiny skin. An entire planet — called Earth by its inhabitants — was being ripped from its axis and dragged through nothing.
The impact was silent.
Just a sigh from the universe.
When the light returned, the chamber had become a smoking crater one kilometer in diameter. Kzathor Velnix lay alive, but empty, eyes open to the new sky above Qy'thalor.
A sky that was not blue.
It was purple, cut by veins of neon.
Earth, the cyberpunk planet of an advanced humanity, had been teleported to the same solar system as Qy'thalor — an unknown galaxy, absurdly distant from the Milky Way, where no star was familiar.
The chaos lasted years.
At first, the Terrans thought it was the end of the world.
But then came the discovery.
Terran space exploration missions, sent to map the other planets of the new solar system, found life. Intelligent life. Real magic. Qy'thalor.
Diplomacy tried first.
Ambassadors. Treaties. Promises of peace between the two worlds.
The mages of Qy'thalor, fascinated by technology, opened the first stable portals linking the planets. Trade began. Knowledge flowed.
Then came greed.
From both sides.
Corporations wanted mana as the new oil. Kings and magical towers wanted the secrets of implants and ships. Chaos. Accusations. Betrayal.
The War of the Two Worlds lasted fifty bloody years.
When it ended, the planets were exhausted, but transformed.
One hundred years after the end of the war, almost nothing remained of the original characteristics.
Technology pulsed in the gothic towers of Qy'thalor. Magic ran through the circuits of Earth's megacities. Architectures mixed: skyscrapers of steel and glass covered in enchanted ivy that glowed with runes; black stone castles with surveillance drones perched on the battlements. People from one planet lived on the other as something normal. Qy'thalor citizens with chromed eyes sold spells on neon streets. Terran executives wore wizard cloaks in board meetings.
The exchange was real.
Technomancy. Quantified mana. Interstellar portals opened by code and blood.
But Kzathor Velnix's mistake had never been fixed.
Only postponed.
One hundred and fifty years after the summoning, the residual magic of the ritual — still alive, still hungry — reacted.
Demonic portals began to appear en masse. Open wounds. True demons invaded both worlds at the same time.
For the first time in two hundred years, the two planets truly united.
Not out of greed. Out of survival.
Now, two hundred years after the mistake, the world is simply called The Rift.
Two planets. One distant galaxy. A fragile peace stitched together with circuits and runes.
Magic and technology no longer know where one ends and the other begins.
But somewhere, in the depths of the Rift, something is still smiling.
The mistake continues to grow. And the worst is yet to come.