Rules.

  They are the patterns woven into the fabric of every world.

  The hush before a sacred ritual.

  The line drawn in sand to divide right from wrong.

  The laws that govern the stars, the tides, and the heartbeat of men.

  They tell us when to speak. When to kneel.

  What to be, and what not to dream.

  Some rules are carved by gods.

  Others are whispered by ancestors, passed like heirlooms.

  Many are born of fear—

  that without them, we would become monsters.

  But rules are not truth.

  They are consensus.

  They bind society with invisible thread,

  but they bind the soul just the same.

  They keep doors locked.

  They build fences around the imagination.

  They plant the word “impossible” into the mouths of children.

  And to a man like Thorne…

  They are a challenge.

  For Thorne, rules were never the foundations of order.

  They were cages draped in etiquette.

  He did not believe rules kept the world spinning.

  He believed they slowed it down.

  To him, every restriction was an insult.

  A condescending hand on the shoulder saying,

  “Not you. Not yet. Not like that.”

  And Thorne never asked for permission.

  If there were chains, he shattered them.

  If there was a ceiling, he leapt through it.

  If there were gods watching, he dared them to blink.

  He did not disobey because he sought chaos—

  but because he sought selfhood.

  Raw, unapologetic, and unbent.

  So if there was a rule etched into the sky—

  that mortals should not touch the firmament—

  Thorne would only smile,

  and thrust his spear straight through heaven.

  Not for prophecy.

  Not for vengeance.

  Not for glory sung by trembling bards or etched into stone.

  But simply because he desired.

  Desire, unshackled by doctrine.

  Impulse, untouched by fear.

  He did not wait for stars to align or for a sign to descend from the divine.

  He was the sign.

  He was the misalignment that moved mountains.

  He was the crack in the foundation that made the tower topple.

  Thorne did not believe in waiting his turn.

  He did not believe in "earning" a path already walked by lesser men.

  He did not believe that destiny must be deserved.

  He only believed this:

  If the sky was unreachable—then reach harder.

  If the gods denied him, then scream louder.

  If the rules forbade him from rising, then break them.

  He was not here to fit.

  He was not made to obey.

  His birthright was disobedience,

  and his anthem was the sound of chains being torn apart.

  To rise.

  To rush.

  To run headlong into what others call “impossible.”

  That was his prayer.

  That was his rebellion.

  He would thrust through the heaven,

  not to prove them wrong—

  but to prove that he was right to want more.

  The air was silent. No more voices. No more rules.

  Only chaos, shaped by will.

  The Gentleman Hexer raised his cane—not with flair, but with finality. A circle of silence formed around him, and then it grew, expanding outward in perfect, surreal stillness. The very walls of the colosseum flickered, melted, and then reformed into something else entirely.

  A world not of stone and sand, but of endless dusk.

  A reality marble—his dominion.

  Card sigils, gilded and black, bloomed like flowers of fate around him and Thorne. They spiraled upward into the void, forming an unseen constellation of power, orbiting with dreadful precision.

  And then—

  The stars wept.

  A hundred black holes snapped into being, distortions in space-time, ravenous mouths devouring light, sound, logic itself. Planets—impossible in scale, conjured from nothing—hurtled through the marble sky like divine hammers, each one a titan’s wrath made manifest.

  They screamed toward Thorne, blotting out existence in their wake.

  But he was already gone.

  Not teleported. Not shielded.

  Running.

  Lightning cracked behind him—no, not behind. Beneath.

  For he had already outpaced it.

  He surged across the battlefield, faster than nature intended, faster than reason allowed. The black holes groaned, their edges warping reality, but they could not touch him.

  Faster.

  He outran the scream of atoms.

  Faster.

  He broke past the moment the eye could comprehend.

  Faster.

  He shattered the veil of light itself.

  Time fractured around him, the marble world splitting into frames he no longer belonged to. He danced through celestial devastation like a ghost untouched by divine fury. The planetary conjurations missed—just barely. Every one.

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  His spear hummed like a star dying.

  But no words passed between them.

  This was not a battle of ideas anymore.

  It was movement.

  Intention.

  Existence against erasure.

  And Thorne—Thorne was still running.

  He did not glide through air or tear across land. He didn’t sprint. No. He tore through time, feet never quite touching ground, momentum burning through dimensions. There was no friction anymore, no resistance. He had surpassed that long ago. The world blurred, not because his motion bent it, but because reality itself struggled to keep up.

  He was not a man running.

  He was a defiance given form.

  Each step shattered something sacred. The rule of space. The order of time. The elegance of speed.

  It all broke under his heel, like thin ice beneath a storm.

  Faster than light? No. That phrase was too tame, too afraid.

  He was running before the light knew it needed to flee.

  He arrived before the echo had a voice.

  He saw the swing of a sword before the arm decided to move.

  He did not bend rules. He did not sidestep them.

  He rendered them irrelevant.

  For what law could hold dominion over something that refused to slow?

  What force could restrain a soul that denied stillness so completely?

  He was not evading the black holes.

  He was simply never there when they arrived.

  And in this motion—this impossible, divine act of velocity—there was meaning.

  He could not be caged. He could not be explained.

  He was not fast because he had to be.

  He was fast because he chose to be.

  And that was the difference.

  In this universe full of rules, full of bindings and boundaries, Thorne carved a path that no one could predict.

  A blur too brilliant to contain.

  A will too stubborn to bind.

  He was not a rebellion.

  He was the reminder that rules are not truths.

  Just very persistent suggestions.

  And he did not take suggestions.

  He ran, and the world ran out of ways to understand him.

  Black holes—colossal, ancient anchors of reality—loomed like gods cast in shadow. Born from collapsed stars and time-worn death, they pulled light itself into silence. No mortal, no star could escape their grasp. They were the end of motion. The full stop at the end of all things.

  And Thorne?

  He didn’t slow.

  He didn’t kneel to their gravity, nor pause at their edges with awe or fear. He didn’t marvel, didn’t question, didn’t care. He simply ran faster.

  They came in numbers—gaping voids summoned by the Gentleman Hexer’s will. Mouths without form. Wounds in space. Each one a warning.

  And Thorne laughed.

  He thrust through them, one after another, as though they were nothing more than curtains on a stage. The crushing force meant to tear atoms apart barely brushed his skin. The laws meant to halt existence failed to touch him.

  No calculations.

  No equations.

  No respect.

  In the world he came from, people studied black holes with reverence. Entire lifetimes spent trying to understand them. Simulations, theories, debates across centuries. How could they form? What could survive their pull? Could time itself be bent or broken inside their depths?

  Thorne didn’t care.

  He didn’t need to understand a rule to break it.

  He didn’t need to comprehend a god to run past it.

  And he certainly didn’t need permission to tear through a thing no mind could fathom.

  Why waste time asking how?

  He wanted to go forward.

  So he did.

  There was beauty in that madness. Not recklessness, but purity.

  A soul unburdened by the weight of needing to know.

  So he ran—through force, through gravity, through doom itself.

  He ran, and the black holes split open like paper.

  He ran, and for a moment, not even the universe could catch him.

  Because when faced with something that none could escape,

  he chose not to escape—he chose to charge straight through.

  And he loved it.

  Oh gods, he loved it.

  Thorne laughed—not out loud, but deep in that molten place between heartbeats, where memory and momentum collided.

  He remembered the observatory where he grew up, perched on the hill where the wind never stopped howling. His father, always hunched over a telescope or muttering equations into the night. An astronomer through and through, a man who believed the cosmos was a cathedral of rules—elegant, ancient, absolute. Each planet a prayer. Each law a hymn.

  "Everything obeys gravity," his father once said. "Even light has to kneel."

  And then there was his mother—soft hands and sharp eyes—sitting at her grand piano with posture perfect and metronome ticking like a judge. To her, music was mathematics made emotional. Every note belonged. Every crescendo timed. She taught him how to play, how to count, how to hold beauty in balance.

  She taught him discipline.

  She taught him control.

  She taught him rules.

  And now, somewhere in a far-off reality, if they could see him, see their only son outrun the light and thrust through a black hole like it were mist—

  They would absolutely freak out.

  His father would scream about the Event Horizon, probably throw chalk at a blackboard that no longer applied. His mother might clutch her pearls and scold him for the tempo of his footfalls not matching any rhythm she’d taught.

  But Thorne would grin, just like now.

  Because they had raised a boy who listened—but not one who obeyed.

  They taught him the stars and the keys, gave him the scales of both sky and sonata. But they never realized he’d use that knowledge not to conform…

  …but to shatter.

  To take the music and riff.

  To take the stars and run past them.

  In that instant, with the black holes breaking like waves beneath his stride, Thorne knew exactly who he was.

  Not an echo of his father’s awe.

  Not a repetition of his mother’s order.

  But something new. Something louder.

  Something that dared to disobey.

  And then—

  In the time it took for a thought to begin forming, Thorne was already there.

  Not a blur. Not a streak.

  A force.

  A will made flesh.

  Reality itself struggled to keep up. The Gentleman Hexer, still mid-cast, surrounded by a cosmos of conjured horrors—black holes spinning like eyes, solar flares lashing out with divine malice—was struck before the moment could exist. Not even his fate-altering cards, which once danced like whispers between cause and effect, could predict it.

  Because Thorne had stepped outside of prediction.

  He had stepped outside of time.

  In several microseconds, so fast it couldn’t be measured, not truly, Thorne arrived in front of the Gentleman Hexer with his lance drawn back—not as a weapon, but as an exclamation.

  And struck.

  The impact didn’t boom. It didn’t quake. It simply was—the sound of a rule being rewritten.

  The Gentleman Hexer’s eyes widened for the briefest heartbeat before his body, consciousness, and crafted dimension collapsed into stillness.

  The marble reality he'd constructed—his perfect, cursed, elegant little world—shivered.

  Cracked.

  And shattered.

  The infinite cards fluttered down like burning leaves. The black holes fizzled into dust and silence. The colosseum returned, real and roaring, air snapping back into place as if it had held its breath for far too long.

  And at the center of it all stood Thorne, steam rising from his shoulders, lightning still licking at his fingertips, breath slow and calm—like he hadn’t just defied the very bones of existence.

  The crowd didn’t scream.

  They were too stunned to remember how.