Location: Gateway Site → Demon Realm → Temple of Light
Date/Time: Void Day 3 → 1 Emberrise, 9939 AZI
Realm: Mid Realm → Demon Realm → High Realm
The gateway opened at dawn.
Not with a sound — with a silence. The kind of silence that happens when the world holds its breath, when the air itself becomes aware that something fundamental is changing. Brannick placed his massive hands on the activation matrix and pushed, and the arch of metal and crystal flared with light that was neither warm nor cold but something else entirely — the light of a door opening between things that were never meant to be connected.
The silence lasted three heartbeats.
Then the gateway resolved. The arch filled with — not light, not darkness. A threshold. A space between spaces that shimmered like heat haze over desert stone, and through it, visible as though through water, the demon realm.
