It stood there, impossibly still amidst the chaos.
A door—nothing more, nothing less—standing alone in the heart of the battlefield. No wall to anchor it, no frame to justify its existence. Just a door. Rooted to the earth, as though it stretched and burrowed deep, deep down into eternity, linking worlds that should have been impossible to meet otherwise...
I almost didn't see it at first. The war raged on, a cacophony of screams and steel, of crumbling structures and bodies trampled beneath the tide of battle. Djannet was burning. The Virtue Keepers and the Sinners had torn into each other like starving beasts, their endless struggle reaching its inevitable, bloody crescendo.
I should have been focused on that.
I had fought for this moment. Killed for it. Stood on the precipice of victory, my enemies kneeling, my allies raising their weapons in a final cry of defiance. And yet—
I was looking at a door.
It should not have been there.
The longer I stared, the more distant the battle became. The roar of war softened into a murmur, like the fading echoes of a long-forgotten dream. The heat of flames no longer scalded my skin. Even the ground beneath me felt... unsteady. As if the world itself hesitated, waiting for me to decide.
And Leila—
She was there. Somewhere near. Far away, yet somehow close enough to reach. I can almost see her face streaked with beads of tears, her eyes searching for mine through the thousands and thousands of bodies and cries. We had made it. Together. After everything—after Djannet had torn us apart, after we had bled and fought and lost more than I dared to count—she was here.
I should have gone to her.
But I didn't.
Because the door was calling to me.
I don't remember stepping forward, only that my hand was suddenly on the handle. It was cold—colder than anything I had felt in Djannet, like something untouched by time, by war, by the hands of men.
I turned it.
The door swung open.
Woosh, the war vanished.
The cries, the smoke, the ruins of a world that had consumed me whole—gone. As if they had never existed. As if they had been nothing more than a fading echo, slipping between my fingers like grains of sand.
Before me lay something else entirely.
Something beyond Djannet.
Something waiting.
And just like that, I was pulled through.