The last thing he remembered from his old life was the sky burning.

Tyrancilcus had been born into a world of predators, storms, and fire — a young T. rex raised beneath volcanic ash and the constant tremor of shifting earth. Strength was survival. Cunning was law. Mercy was a myth whispered by species that didn’t last long.

He was hatched the smallest of his brood, a runt whose siblings had tried to trample him before he even learned to roar. But he learned quickly — how to dodge, how to bite back, how to dig claws into the world until it recognized him. By the time he reached adulthood, the other rexes knew his name and avoided speaking it loudly.

They called him Tyrancilcus, after the old legends — the tyrant-spawned survivor.

Even then, he had more swagger than sense.

But all of it changed the night the star fell.

It ripped across the heavens like a sword dragged by a furious god, turning night into fire. Forests ignited. Mountains shook. Every creature fled — except one.

Tyrancilcus stood beneath the flaming sky, daring it to strike him.

It nearly did.

The shockwave hit harder than any rival. It swallowed the land, hurling him into darkness so cold and deep it felt like drowning in time itself. He clawed at nothing, roared into the void, and then—

He awoke somewhere else.

The sky was blue. The air too light. The ground flat and strangely soft, crisscrossed with metallic tracks and the smell of hot iron. And towering above him was something impossibly alien: a glowing rift hanging in the air like a wound cut open by fate itself.

He staggered, instincts screaming. Then a figure emerged from the shimmer — a sorcerer wrapped in blue flame.

No. Not a sorcerer.

A genie.

“Welcome to the future, teeth-for-brains,” the figure said with a grin. “You’re very, very late to your own extinction.”

Tyrancilcus roared and lunged, but the genie flicked a hand, freezing him mid-air.

“Calm down,” the genie said. “I’m Gideon. And I just saved your life.”

When Tyrancilcus finally regained control of his limbs, he realized the genie wasn’t lying. The rift behind them was collapsing, sealing itself shut with violent arcs of energy. Had Tyrancilcus been a heartbeat slower, he would have been erased.

Gideon circled him with an appraising look. “You’re not supposed to be here. You should have died with your world.”

Tyrancilcus snapped at him. “I don’t die because someone says I should.”

Gideon’s grin widened. “Good. You’re going to need that attitude.”

For a time, the genie became the only guide Tyrancilcus had — explaining the new worlds, keeping him out of trouble, and occasionally causing more trouble than he solved. He conjured clothes for the rex (“You can’t walk around naked in most dimensions!”), giving him the jacket, the scarf, and the toothpick he would one day become known for.

“Why dress me like this?” Tyrancilcus demanded the first time he saw his reflection in a shop window.

Gideon winked. “Every hero needs a look.”

Hero.

The word felt wrong… but flattering.

Yet the more Tyrancilcus learned about this new multiverse, the darker it seemed. Cracks in reality. Rogue magic. Ancient creatures trapped between worlds. Some wanted to rule. Others wanted to consume. And Tyrancilcus — for reasons he didn’t yet understand — kept ending up in their way.

He discovered something else, too: power wasn’t the same everywhere. In some realms, his strength was unmatched. In others, his body flickered between forms, becoming pixelated, stylized, or altered by the very fabric of the universe he stepped into.

One realm in particular — a glitching digital expanse later known as Pixel Park — embraced his pixel-form as if it had been waiting for him.

Gideon said it was fate.

Tyrancilcus said fate could bite him.

But even he couldn’t ignore the truth: something had chosen him. Something that dragged him across time and left him standing in a fractured multiverse full of threats too big for anyone else to face.

The day he chose his path was quiet.

Just him and Gideon overlooking a rift in the clouds — one of thousands forming like fractures in the universe’s skull.

“You don’t owe these worlds anything,” Gideon said softly. “You could disappear. Live out your days in a timeline where the hard things can’t find you.”

Tyrancilcus cracked his neck.

“I’m not hiding,” he said. “Not from the sky. Not from the past. Not from anything.”

Gideon nodded. “Then what will you do?”

Tyrancilcus slid a toothpick between his teeth, tugged his jacket tight, and stepped toward the unknown horizon.

“Simple,” he said.
“I’m going to pick a direction… and see who needs saving.”

And with that, the legend of Tyrancilcus Rex — rogue, wanderer, protector, troublemaker — truly began.