Unexpectedly, motion was what woke Sunny.
Not the violent, tumbling descent of a fall. Not the suffocating drag of water closing over his head. Instead, this movement was steady. Each step carried a vibration through whatever surface he was lying on, an impact followed by the scrape of stone.
For several long seconds, he didn't open his eyes.
'If this is another damn dream, I'm going to lose it.'
He inhaled.
Dust… metallic… water…
He recognized these scents.
His eyes cracked open. The furs of many colors filled his vision.
It took him a minute to gather his thoughts. When he did, he let out a weak, breathless chuckle that hurt far more than it should have—a true testament to his injuries.
"Still here, huh…"
His voice was rough. His throat felt dry.
He shifted slightly and immediately regretted it. Agony flared up his right arm, merciless. He turned his head carefully instead, taking in his surroundings to truly make sure he had made it.
He was sprawled across Silvershade Harrow's back. His Echo, in fact, had not perished in the battle.
It was walking. Not flying.
The Echo's stride radiated determination. Moving across the ruined roads of the Dark City, its remaining wing tucked close while the other dragged uselessly at its side. Even from where he lay, Sunny could see the damage clear as day. The silver feathers were shredded and clumped together with darkened blood, their once pristine sheen ruined. The membrane beneath had been torn open in a jagged line.
The source of the damage was clear. Something had carved through it mid-flight.
His gaze rose further.
A black crack split the mask that hid Silvershade's true appearance. It forked downward like frozen lightning, stark against the pale surface.
Sunny stared at it for a long time.
'We got lucky.'
The thought was quite unwelcome.
Luck had nothing to do with what happened in the sky.
He tried to replay it in his mind. A storm cloud that hadn't existed until it did. Crimson lightning flashing within. A silver shape streaking past so fast his eyes hadn't tracked it, his mind hadn't processed it.
One wing, burning red. A presence so overwhelming that even the Lord of the Dead seemed insignificant by comparison.
What was he thinking at the time? Oh right. It was Corrupted.
Though… something was odd about the creature. Something wasn't right with it. It wasn't just some simple Corrupted abomination.
The proof? Well, why hadn't it finished him?
The strike hadn't even been meant for him. It had passed by, grazing Silvershade, rupturing his left arm through sheer proximity. If the creature had wished to kill him, it would have required less effort than swatting a fly.
Instead, it had turned away. It shifted south and vanished.
Sunny frowned while burying his head into the fur.
'Is that bastard saying a glorious—noble cockroach like me wasn't worth the trouble?!'
Sunny was almost angry at the fact that it didn't kill him. He wasn't sure whether to feel insulted or relieved.
For now, he settled for grateful.
He let his head rest fully against Silvershade's back, listening to the steady rhythm of its steps. Each one carried them farther from the lake—and more importantly, farther from that sky.
"…You did good," he muttered quietly. "Seriously."
The Echo did not respond—but its pace did not slow.
After a while, Sunny forced himself to think of something else. Something he actually had control over.
The Iron Key.
He lifted his hand carefully and drew it out. He'd already made an observation—it wasn't a Memory.
The metal felt cold against his fingers, deceptively ordinary for something that had nearly gotten him killed twice now.
There was only one last 'light.'
Beneath the Cathedral.
Guarded by… that bastard. The Black Knight.
Sunny grimaced.
He imagined facing that towering figure again in his current condition and almost laughed. His chances were practically zero, even at full strength.
But he had come this far. He wanted to see it through.
Before he quite realized it, the scenery around them began to change. The broken outskirts gave way to familiar ruins. Silvershade stepped into the plaza of the Dark City once more.
Sunny lifted his head slightly and scanned the area.
It's… empty? His shadow sense wasn't picking up on anything.
…Where were all the Nightmare Creatures?
They had swarmed this place relentlessly before.
'Where did they all go?'
A strange unease settled over him.
Almost absently, he glanced upward—
And froze.
The strings of divinity still stretched across the sky, luminous as ever.
However, they were no longer pure gold. Threads of shadow wound through them now. And silver as well.
The strands converged unmistakably toward the Cathedral.
Sunny slowly raised the Iron Key and observed how the nearest threads shifted.
It was imperceptible—but undeniable. The winds themselves seemed to acknowledge the key's presence.
His heart skipped a beat. He realized it then.
'…Did picking up the key change the strings?'
The moment he had claimed it… something fundamental had shifted.
Silvershade continued forward.
Then, without warning, a bright light flared at the distant horizon.
Sunny hissed and squeezed his eyes shut, overwhelmed by the sudden brilliance after so long beneath the starless night sky.
For a moment, he thought it was another attack.
…Then he felt warmth touch his face.
Slowly, he opened his eyes and sat up.
Silvershade stopped as well, lifting its masked face toward the light.
Far in the distance, beyond the ruins, something was burning bright once more.
Sunny exhaled in disbelief.
"I… I can't believe I'm saying this, but… I missed the sun."
The Nameless Sun shone once more.
Dawn had returned.
And the Crimson Terror… had recovered.
—
"It's been a while."
Sunny was standing before the cathedral's grand gates. The Silvershade Harrow was right behind him. Really, his only defense if one considered that Saint was still recovering.
Though… as Sunny walked into the Cathedral, the changes were there for all to see.
The strands of divinity that flew across the skies were so very potent in the interior that…
'It's beautiful…'
Each and every strand—golden, silver, and shadow—was marvelous. They were all converging upon one spot. Somewhere beneath the grand hall—opposite from where he was standing.
And more than that… the Darkness—
Sunny couldn't believe his eyes.
The Black Knight which usually guarded the entirety of the Cathedral's grounds with vicious duty was… cowering.
It was in a corner, cowering in fear. Or well, not quite. It still held its stature, sword in hand and ready to defend.
But the Darkness itself was being ripped apart. Truly, it was an impossible thing to simply rip apart the darkness, but before his eyes, it was happening.
The Knight was forced to the far wall of the Cathedral. Whenever it tried to approach Sunny, the strands would thrash out and push it back.
Sunny would love nothing more than to walk over and take the chance to kill the big bastard, but he didn't want to test if those strands would protect him as well.
'Besides,' he thought with a grim smile, 'knowing my luck, they'd probably decide to roast me along with him.'
So he walked on. If the Black Knight could not approach him due to the source of all this light, then he wouldn't waste the chance.
He had never been here before, kept away by the living darkness and the Black Knight. But now that the devil was cornered, Sunny was finally going to see what was hidden inside.
He moved through the chambers and passageways once occupied by the cathedral's clergy, scanning his surroundings but finding nothing noteworthy. Most of the place lay in shambles, reduced to rubble and decay, with only a handful of ordinary objects left undisturbed.
One would think there was nothing here—however…
Sunny suddenly stopped in front of a certain wall and tilted his head.
The wall appeared completely ordinary, with no visible markings or irregularities. Yet beyond its surface, he sensed a dense concentration of shadows pooled together.
A hidden passage.
'Huh. A secret passage in a creepy ancient cathedral. How… interesting!'
After searching for a while, he found a hidden lever and pressed it.
Or at least he tried. The ancient mechanism had rusted through and disintegrated over the thousands of years of neglect, of course.
'Of course it did. Why would anything ever be easy?'
With a quiet sigh, Sunny summoned the Midnight Shard and leaned in to inspect the hollow section of the wall. Finding the faint seam where the stone segments met, he slid the tachi into the narrow gap. Then, with little ceremony, he braced himself and used the unyielding blade as a pry bar, forcing the mechanism to move under the full weight of his inhuman strength.
With a terrible scraping sound, a part of the wall slid away. The air rushed past Sunny, entering the dark mouth of a narrow corridor.
Behind it, a set of stone stairs led down.
Deep down underground.
'...Of course it goes down. It's always down. Never up. Never "hey, here's a nice sunny balcony with a view." Always down into the creepy murderous basement. Damnation!'
With a resentful grimace, Sunny flourished the Midnight Shard to shake off the dust that clung to it, put it on his shoulder, and entered the secret passage.
The hidden passage led Sunny underground, twisting and turning through the mass of stone. Despite the fact that he had been cautiously walking forward for a few minutes now, Sunny felt that he was still beneath the cathedral. In fact, by his estimation, he was approaching its center.
The strands of divinity were stronger here. He could feel them pulling at him, guiding him forward with an insistence that was almost physical.
'Great. So not only am I walking into certain doom, but fate itself is dragging me there by the collar. Wonderful.'
And indeed, right beneath the spot where the statue of the goddess should have been, the narrow passage opened into a larger room. In it, a deep well leading even further down was situated, with a winding staircase spiraling down into the darkness.
Sunny frowned.
'What is it with this place and creepy dark wells?'
Going further down was going to place him dangerously close to the catacombs. He knew all too well what kind of danger that would pose—the last time Sunny had ventured into the maze of ancient tunnels below the city, he barely escaped alive.
'Then again, I've barely escaped alive from pretty much everywhere on this cursed shore. At least I'm consistent. Effie would be proud…'
After hesitating for a while, he stepped onto the staircase and began descending. Deep, ancient shadows surrounded Sunny, giving him a little comfort.
At least he was among his own kind.
The strands of divinity grew brighter as he descended, weaving through the darkness like luminous threads. Golden, silver, and shadow—all pulling him deeper.
'Right. Because nothing says "good idea" like following mysterious glowing strings into an ancient underground chamber. I'm sure this will end well.'
But even as he thought it, he knew he wasn't going to turn back.
His intuition—that damned, insistent intuition that had kept him alive through hell and back—was screaming at him that this mattered. That whatever was down here was important.
'Or it's screaming at me to run. Hard to tell sometimes.'
After a minute or so of walking down the stairwell, Sunny entered a large chamber that seemed to be carved into the bedrock, as opposed to being constructed by human hand.
And there, on the other side of it, a large door forged from black steel stood.
Illuminated by two burning torches.
Sunny stopped.
The torches burned with colorless flames. Pale. Ghostly. There was no heat that came with them.
Come to think of it, the torches looked very strange. They seemed to be producing light, but it was cold and lifeless. And the shadows they cast…
The shadows cast by the ghostly flames were the most disturbing. Because of the movements of the fire, they were supposed to be dancing on the floor. But instead, the shadows were absolutely motionless. It was as though the light of the torches had trapped and paralyzed them somehow.
'That's… not natural.'
Sunny stood in thought for a moment before telling his shadow to keep its distance.
It did not argue. If anything, it seemed grateful.
With a few overly dramatic steps, the shadow retreated and melted into the dense darkness pooling at the chamber's entrance. There it lingered, half-hidden, casting the occasional uneasy glance toward the strange, motionless shadows that clung to the walls.
'Even my shadow is afraid. By the Spell… why isn't anything just simple?'
Sunny advanced toward the black door with measured steps, bringing the Midnight Shard up in a guarded angle, his body already braced for whatever might emerge.
…But nothing attacked him.
The only thing that happened was a sudden chill that ran through Sunny's body when he entered the circle of light cast by the two ghostly torches. It sank into his bones, cold and invasive, like the touch of something ancient and aware.
'These torches are… they're definitely some sort of protective charm. I'm almost sure that their power can harm even shadows.'
The question he had to ask himself, though, was this—were the torches meant to keep something from entering the space that hid behind the black door…
Or were they meant to keep something in?
'Well… there's only one way to find out. And knowing my luck, it's definitely the second one.'
To an outside observer, Sunny's actions would have looked like pure madness. In truth, there was nothing reckless about them. He had not descended into the depths out of simple curiosity, nor had dreams of hidden riches lured him here.
'Though let's be honest, treasure would be great! I deserve a reward after all my hardships!'
What led him here and pushed him to study the black door was his intuition.
By now, Sunny had to admit that his intuition was more than a mere manifestation of his subconscious. It had turned out to be correct one too many times.
Especially ever since he had consumed the drop of ichor.
Since that moment, the presence of the divine had become something he could not ignore. It brushed against his awareness and, on rare occasions, guided his steps without his consent—first toward the cathedral, and earlier toward the secret buried inside the Lord of the Dead. There was a pattern there, whether he liked it or not.
And Sunny felt that he was about to find out how and why.
But it was not all his intuition was capable of. There were other aspects to it, too.
In his opinion, the sensation had little to do with the dim ember of divinity he carried. It felt far more like the influence of [Fated]. Since the ichor had remade his body, that Attribute had grown keener, allowing him, on rare occasions, to notice the faint disturbances traveling through the strands of destiny—strands that, disturbingly, seemed to be coiled around him.
'Like a noose. A very persistent, very annoying noose that keeps dragging me into horrible situations.'
The transformation of his eyes, paired with his unwanted intimacy with those invisible threads, granted Sunny a faint sensitivity to fate and moments of revelation—an echo of Cassie's gift, though diminished to the point of being almost negligible.
It was enough to guide him to this door and make him want to open it, nevertheless.
As Sunny approached the towering black monolith, he studied its seamless surface and understood that there were very few things that could break it open.
The metal it was forged from looked familiar—sickeningly so. Dark, lusterless, impossibly dense. The same alloy that composed the Black Knight's armor.
'Great. So this door is made of the same stuff as the bastard who nearly killed me. That's comforting.'
There was, however, a small keyhole hidden on its dark surface.
Reaching for the thread at his throat, Sunny drew out the small metal key resting against his chest and closed his fingers around it.
The key glowed faintly with golden light. Warm. Almost alive.
'Here goes nothing. Or everything. Probably everything. Why am I talking to myself? Am I lonely?'
After a brief pause, he guided the key toward the lock and slid it in with deliberate care.
It seated without resistance. The moment the metal met its counterpart, the dim radiance of divinity clinging to it swelled, then throbbed softly—once, twice—as if acknowledging a presence beyond the door.
Sunny sighed, then readied himself and turned the key.
Something disengaged within the black metal. The door moved in utter silence. On the other side, pale, corpse-like flames shuddered, bending to a current that felt like a passing presence.
Every strand of divinity—golden, silver, and shadow—vanished without a trace.
'That's… probably bad.'
Sunny felt his blood run cold.
Behind the door, a small room was carved into the rock.
And in it, a corpse in a dark mantle was chained to the floor inside a circle.
Sunny couldn't tell if the corpse belonged to a man or a woman, because there was a strange mask covering its face.
The mask was made out of black lacquered wood and carved to resemble the face of a ferocious demon. Its teeth were bared, with four fangs protruding from its mouth. The mask was crowned with three twisted horns.
Inside the black chasms of its eyes, there was nothing but utter darkness.
No.
Not darkness.
Light. Overwhelming, brilliant, blinding light. And shadow. Both at once, writhing together in those hollow sockets.
The corpse itself was covered in golden cracks. Deep fractures ran along its limbs, its torso, and neck. There wasn't an inch of it that wasn't broken.
The moment Sunny laid eyes on it, his entire being recoiled.
His breath caught. His pulse hammered in his ears. Every instinct screamed at him to run.
But he couldn't move.
'What… what is this?'
And all at once, multiple things occurred.
The overwhelming divinity that had flooded the Forgotten Shore vanished in an instant. All across the land and sea, Nightmare Creatures suddenly lost their hunger for the blessed light. The Lord of the Dead forgot why it had surfaced. Each of the Disasters froze in place, utterly confused.
And before Sunny…
The Spell began to speak.
[Attribute 'Regressor' has begun to open its eyes.]
The fog that had clouded Sunny's memories—from the time of his First Nightmare to this very moment—was ripped away all at once.
He recalled everything.
Everything.
And he also recalled why the Attribute was so important.
He remembered now. He remembered what the appraisal of his First Nightmare had mentioned.
It had mentioned that he turned back this world.
— The Night of the Winter Solstice.
The dormitory was quiet.
The kind of quiet that pressed in from every side—the sterile hush of a building full of people who were all pretending to be asleep, none of them quite managing it. Sunny was no exception. He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, and thought about the fact that he was now, technically, seventeen years old.
'Happy birthday to me,' he thought flatly.
Only a kind, blonde girl was aware of it. Aside from that, nobody knew. Nobody here had any reason to know.
He didn't particularly care about that.
He rolled onto his side.
Then back.
Then, with the dignity of a man who had exhausted every other option, he stared at the ceiling again.
The room was warm and the mattress was soft. These were, objectively, good things. He'd told himself that at least a dozen times this week. You have a bed and walls. This is good, so stop thinking of that time.
Naturally, he did not.
His mind kept circling back to the same thing it had been circling back to since he left that black mountain with a hole in his chest and a god's shadow sewn into his soul.
The appraisal. That is what had been keeping all his attention.
He'd recalled it a hundred times now. Maybe more. He knew the Spell's words by heart—which was saying something, because there had been a period in his life where the only things he'd committed to memory were which escape routes were still viable and which merchants lied about their prices.
He recalled it once more.
In his mind, he imagined the cold silver runes in the dark.
[Aspirant. Your trial is over.]
[A nameless slave ascended the Black Mountain. Both heroes and monsters fell by his hand. Unbroken, he entered the ruined temple of a long-forgotten god and spilled his blood on the sacred altar. The gods were dead, and yet they listened.]
[You have defeated a dormant beast: Mountain King's Larva.]
[You have defeated three dormant humans, names unknown.]
[You have defeated an awakened human: Auro of the Nine.]
[You have defeated an awakened tyrant: Mountain King.]
[You have received the Shadow God's blessing.]
[You have achieved the impossible.]
[You have returned to the beginning.]
[You have faced your conclusion — and refused it.]
[In refusing it, you refused the world.]
[Final appraisal: Glorious. Your treachery truly knows no bounds.]
Sunny remembered those last three lines, clear as day.
Then he muttered them out loud a third time.
'…What.'
He had been, up until this precise moment, somewhat pleased with himself. He had defeated a tyrant. A tyrant. As a slave with no weapons. With nothing but dust on his shoulders, the rotten Aspect of a temple slave, and the deeply unreasonable conviction that he was going to spite his way out of anything the Nightmare Spell threw at him.
That was supposed to be the whole story.
However…
'You have returned to the beginning.'
Sunny didn't move for a long time.
The shadow at his side sat equally still. It was, he had recently discovered, more independent than most. An invaluable helper, in the Spell's words. Currently it seemed to be doing the same thing he was—just thinking very hard about absolutely nothing while staring at a fixed point.
He opened his runes and looked down. In his perception, the runes fully materialized, familiar now in the way that an injury becomes familiar—you still felt it every time.
Memories: [Silver Bell], [Puppeteer's Shroud].
Echoes: —
Attributes: [Fated], [Mark of Divinity], [Child of Shadows], [Regressor].
He stopped.
[Regressor].
He read it again.
There was no description to behold. Just the name itself, sitting there, with a completely unknown origin.
He tried to examine it—and got nothing. He tried to understand it—and got nothing. He tried to at least sense whether it was something good, bad, or merely deeply inexplicable—the Spell's third and most common category.
Nothing.
He lay there in the dark for another few minutes.
The word kept nagging at his mind—sleep wasn't going to come any time soon.
Regressor.
He recalled the appraisal yet again.
You have returned to the beginning.
You have faced your conclusion — and refused it.
In refusing it, you refused the world.
Sunny had grown up in the outskirts. He was not, by any metric, an educated person. Teacher Julius was already subjecting him to things he suspected were light forms of psychological torture disguised as curriculum. He had never, in the whole course of his seventeen years of being cold and underfed and largely unimpressed by everything, entertained anything resembling abstract thought about the nature of time.
And yet.
'...Returned to the beginning,' he thought, very slowly.
'Faced a conclusion.'
He was at the beginning. That part was obvious enough—first Nightmare, first day at the Academy, metaphorically speaking, he was standing at the start of everything.
But if the beginning was a place you returned to—
If a conclusion was a thing you could face and then refuse—
The thought was outlandish. Absurd. The kind of thing someone said right before people started slowly backing away from them, staring at them like a madman.
It settled in his chest anyway, quiet and patient as a held breath.
'Am I…'
He didn't finish it. Not even in his own head.
He looked at the [Regressor] Attribute one more time, blank and unhelpful as ever, and then dismissed the runes entirely.
The room went dark.
Sunny rolled onto his side.
He did not, for a very long time, sleep.
— Night of Promise
"I'm sorry."
Sunny raised his eyebrows.
"Sorry? What are you sorry for?"
The blind girl lowered her eyes.
"For being so useless."
Sunny frowned and looked away. A second or two later, he said in his usual careless tone:
"You're far from useless."
Cassie softly chuckled.
"Aren't I? If I want to walk, I need to be leashed to you or Neph. If I want to eat, I need to wait for one of you to feed me. That's my life now. I can't do even the simplest of things without your help… let alone be of use to either of you in return."
Slowly, her voice turned raw with emotion. This was the first time Sunny had seen her mask of resolve slip, revealing the desperate, angry, frightened face beneath.
He was silent for a long time. Longer than usual. Like he was choosing his words from a set he had already considered before.
Then he said:
"Hey, have I ever told you about my First Nightmare?"
The blind girl shook her head. Sunny half-closed his eyes.
"My First Nightmare was as bad as it gets. To tell you the truth, the situation was pretty hopeless. I was a slave destined to die of cold or mistreatment. Chained, bleeding, defenseless. What's worse, my Aspect turned out to be completely useless. I mean, literally. If I remember correctly, the phrase the Spell chose to describe it was 'a useless wretch with no skills or abilities worth a mention.'"
Cassie turned her head slightly, visibly drawn in.
"Then… how did you survive? Did things change for the better?"
Sunny smiled.
"Gods no. In fact, they quickly turned worse. Much, much worse. But, what would you know? In a strange twist of fate, my useless Aspect turned out to be the only thing that could guide me through that mess alive. In that regard, I was incredibly lucky."
He shifted a little and glanced at the delicate girl, noticing a thoughtful frown on her face.
"But here is a thing about luck. People usually speak about it as though luck is something that just happens to you. It isn't — luck is fifty percent circumstance and fifty percent your own ability to grasp it. Something you have to make happen yourself. I fought with everything I had to survive. That's one of the two reasons I'm still here."
Saying that, Sunny remembered the cold, dark mountain and shivered. Then, pushing the memories away, he continued.
"The second reason is the Spell itself. I won't go as far as to call it reasonable, but it is fair… in its own, perverted way. The Spell takes with one hand and gives with the other. It was like this with my First Nightmare, and it is the same with you."
Cassie's frown deepened.
Sunny chose his next words carefully. More carefully than he usually bothered with anything.
"Your Flaw is the most debilitating one I have ever seen or heard of. You are right — without help from someone like Neph, it would have been a certain death sentence. And people like her… well, I'm not even sure that someone else like that exists. But…"
The blind girl gritted her teeth.
"But what?"
"But that also means that the other side of the Flaw, your power, is equally as extraordinary. You just haven't found the way to grasp it yet. When you do… believe me, you'll remember this conversation and feel very embarrassed about how naive and foolish you were."
Cassie's expression shifted to one of doubt and confusion.
"Do you really think so?" she whispered.
There was a hint of desperate desire in her voice. The question almost made him laugh, for an obvious reason.
"Trust me. I'm the most honest person in the world. Two worlds, in fact."
…Sunny would love nothing more than to be less honest, but, sadly, he was physically incapable of it. She didn't have to know that.
Cassie was silent for a long time, lost in thought. Sunny almost assumed their conversation was over, but then she suddenly said in a low, raspy voice:
"I had more visions than I told you guys about."
He blinked, staring at her with surprise and a bit of apprehension. Her sudden statement threw him off entirely. Why would she keep something like this secret? And why tell him now?
"More… visions? Why haven't you told us?"
A fleeting, tired smile appeared on Cassie's face. She lowered her head and remained silent for a while. Then, closing her eyes, she said:
"You probably don't know. How could you know? But knowledge… knowledge can be really heavy. It can be as heavy as the heaviest thing in the world."
Then a sad smile appeared on her face.
"I am afraid that by telling you, I will actually cause the things I saw to come true."
Sunny tensed up, alarmed by the implication. If she was afraid of the visions coming true, their content must have been pretty bad.
If something terrible was destined to befall them, he had to know in advance. That way, he could make preparations. As long as he was prepared, many things would become much less dire. However… what if his preparations became the very reason for that terrible thing to happen, making Cassie's vision a self-fulfilling prophecy?
This was the danger of knowing the future.
'Damn it, my head hurts. I hate this crap!'
Sunny struggled for a long time, trying to decide whether to pressure Cassie into revealing her visions. Either outcome was going to leave him uneasy. In the end, unable to make a decision, he simply remained silent.
Cassie didn't say anything either.
After some time passed, she finally spoke.
"Can you… can you just promise me one thing?"
Sunny frowned.
"That depends on what it is."
The blind girl hesitated.
"Can you promise that you'll take care of Neph? No matter wha—"
"Yes, even if it cost me my life."
Sunny had cut her off before she could finish. Then, he went silence.
Sunny froze.
Cassie's unseeing eyes went wide.
'...What.'
The words were already out. He hadn't thought about them. Hadn't felt the familiar sting of his Flaw, hadn't braced against it — the answer had simply come, automatic, and now it was sitting in the air between them with nowhere to go.
'Sunless.' The voice in the back of his skull sounded genuinely horrified. 'What have you done?! You LUNATIC!'
'Damnation! I'm finished!'
Cassie's mouth had opened slightly. She looked like someone had handed her proof that penguins could fly.
"...You mean that?"
"No—" Sunny said immediately.
The pain hit him like a brick wall.
He winced, and Cassie heard it. Her expression shifted — suspicion first, then something slower and softer underneath it. She'd already surmised what his Flaw is quite recently, and therefore—
"Y-You actually mean it…"
Sunny said nothing. He had nothing to say.
Cassie was quiet for a long moment.
Then her arms found him.
She hugged him. Carefully, in a gentle manner that she hadn't ever used before. Her grip was light but certain, her face pressed against his shoulder, and she didn't say a word.
Sunny sat with his arms slightly raised, completely unsure of what to do with them. He settled on placing them carefully on her back. Once. Twice.
'What is happening. No… no! This can't be!'
'What terrible thing has happened to my subconscious…?'
She sniffled, just once, and tightened her grip.
Sunny stared at a fixed point on sea ahead of him.
He had just promised, with complete sincerity and zero deliberation, to protect Nephis with his life. To a blind girl who was now hugging him. On a cursed shore full of things that wanted to kill him.
'I need to have a serious conversation with myself.'
He looked down at Cassie in his arms, and gave a small smile.
'...Though, that can come later.'
—
The Dark Sea was still tonight.
That, more than anything, put Sunny on edge.
He sat on the base of the ancient statue, one leg dangling off the edge, watching the black water move in slow and soundless rolls beneath them. The usual sounds of waves were absent. The distant, occasional breeze was as well.
Deeply suspicious.
"You're frowning," Cassie said, from somewhere to his left.
'Uh, excuse me? How the hell can you tell?'
"Well… yes, but I'm thinking.."
"Uh-huh..."
Nephis, sitting cross-legged with her sword across her knees, said nothing. She was looking at the horizon, which was her version of relaxing.
Sunny considered the water for another moment, decided nothing was about to kill them, and leaned back on his palms.
"Hey," he said. "Have I ever told you two about the time I accidentally got hired as a debt collector?"
Cassie turned her head toward him with a curious expression.
Nephis did not turn her head, but something shifted slightly in her posture. Attention, in Nephis terms.
"I was thirteen," Sunny said. "Maybe twelve. Old enough to know better, as well as take jobs."
"What happened?" Cassie asked.
"…There was this man in the outskirts — everyone called him Bricks. Nobody knew his actual name. He ran a small operation out of the back of a noodle shop, lending credits to people who had no business borrowing them. Small amounts and terrible interest rates." Sunny paused. "I… I think he had a sign on the door that said 'Assistant Wanted' and well, I was quite hungry at the time."
Cassie's mouth curved.
"So you applied?"
"Indeed I did! He asked if I was good at persuasion. I said yes, because technically I hadn't lied — I was very persuasive when it came to convincing people to give me their leftover food. He didn't ask for specifics, and I wasn't gonna give them for free."
"That seems like a poor foundation for employment," Nephis said.
"W-What?! I'll have you know that it is a catastrophic foundation for employment! He sent me to collect from a woman three blocks over who owed him forty credits." Sunny looked at the water. "She was enormous, and I mean that in every possible direction. She had a dog the size of a small horse that had, at some point in its life, decided it didn't like pale scrawny boys with short black hair. Truly, I don't know what I did to anger it so deeply."
Cassie made a sound and attempted her mouth with a hand.
"I knocked on the door, and instead of a fellow outskirt rat, an enormous, vicious, terrible dog answered. The woman appeared behind it and looked at me — I was, at this point, again, a fairly scrawny twelve-year-old in clothes that were slightly too big — and she asked me what I wanted." A pause. "I told her, very professionally, that I was there on behalf of Mr. Bricks to collect the outstanding balance — or well, debt that she apparently owed the man. I did not know this until the moment came..."
"What did she say?"
"She laughed for quite a long time." Sunny's expression was perfectly flat. "Then she told me to tell Mr. Bricks that if he sent another child to her door she would come down there herself with her… companion. But! Surprisingly, she gave me a significant amount of synthpaste! That was one of the best days of my life."
Cassie's chuckled a moment. Truly, it was one of the most beautiful sounds he had ever heard in his short life. It brought a genuine smile to Sunny's face.
"You… you took it? From a random woman? Isn't that dangerous, Sunny?"
"I… I was hungry! Of course I took it. Who would refuse free food? I stood in her doorway and ate the whole bowl while the dog watched me with naked contempt." He paused, then smiled. "Then I went back to Bricks and… sort of told him she wasn't home?"
Cassie laughed again, not bothering to hide it at all. He was glad to see it.
Sunny glanced at Nephis.
She was looking at the water still. But the corner of her mouth had done something. Just briefly, he could've sworn it curled upward.
"Did Mr.Bricks believe you?" Cassie asked.
"Ah, well, I wish. But no — hell no. That old man sent me back three more times, and I was scared shitless every time I saw that woman's dog. Thankfully, She gave me rice every visit. By the fourth time, even she knew my name." He scratched the back of his neck. "She ended up paying her debt eventually. I have no idea if that was related to my efforts."
"It wasn't," Nephis said.
"Almost certainly not," Sunny agreed, without any particular anguish about it. "But I ate well for two weeks, which was the actual achievement."
Cassie shook her head, still smiling. "You really are something, Sunny. I don't think I could've managed that, considering how you've described the Outskirts."
He considered that.
"…I survived," he said, after a moment. "What other choice did I have? Every stupid thing you do that you walk away from is a success."
He meant it as a joke. Mostly.
But suddenly, his expression grew somber, if only a moment. He had forgotten that after those two weeks ended, the kind woman was found dead just like any other rat.
He also neglected to share the fact that she met an abrupt end.
Nor the fact that he found those responsible, and ripped them apart.
Thankfully, not sharing this information was the right choice. After all, Cassie's smile stayed warm in a way that made him want to stare at it forever. And hell, she couldn't see him, and Nephis wasn't going to stop him.
Nephis herself had gone back to watching the horizon, but her posture had settled into something slightly more relaxed than it had been before.
The Dark Sea continued its calm movement beneath them.
For once, nothing screamed or writhed in agony.
Sunny leaned back on his palms, turned his gaze toward the sea, and decided that he had done enough. He managed to get his companions in a good mood, and uplift his own spirits.
— Night of Parting
The morning came the way mornings always did on the Forgotten Shore—indifferent to whoever had died the night before.
Sunny woke with a start, already half-upright, hand reaching for a weapon that wasn't there.
Fortunately, there was nothing. No one was there. Just the familiar and terrible smell of damp wood and ash, as well as the faint sounds of other Sleepers stirring to life.
He sat there for a moment, breathing.
Then he rubbed his face and swung his legs off the cot.
The routine helped. Splash water on his face. Don't think about it. Eat something if there was something to eat. Don't think about it. Check the shadows at the perimeter—old habit, automatic by now. Don't think about it.
Harper's face kept finding him, regardless of his protests.
Not the dead version. The living one—that careful, timid thing, always watching from the corners of rooms, always smiling at the right moments for entirely the wrong reasons. The face of a person who had been so afraid of dying that he'd made absolutely certain someone else would do it for him eventually.
'If they don't care, why should I?'
Sunny repeated it to himself the way he repeated a lot of things lately. Flatly. Without conviction. The outskirts had a saying for it—the dead don't bleed twice, so why are you still getting blood on you?
It wasn't helping.
He spent most of the day in his new room. He went out once to train with the Midnight Shard, moving through the katas with the focus of someone trying to crowd every other thought out of his skull. He was halfway through the third sequence when he caught the faint weight of Nephis's attention from far away—that particular quality of observation she had, precise and assessing, like being measured for something you hadn't agreed to yet.
A second later she was gone, pulled away by the endless tidal demand of running a settlement full of people who needed things from her constantly.
'Good riddance. You haven't been paying any attention to me anyway.'
The anger was sudden and irrational and completely unhelpful, and Sunny dismissed the Midnight Shard and went back inside before he could examine it too closely.
He'd been doing a lot of that lately.
—
His new room was occupied when he returned to it.
Cassie stood with her back to the door, hands folded over her wooden staff, face pointed toward a wall she couldn't see. The particular quality of her stillness—that composed, unhurried quiet she carried everywhere—was present. But something underneath it was off. Like a painting hung slightly crooked. Almost imperceptible. Almost…
Sunny's pulse jumped before his brain fully caught up.
'Does she know?'
He arranged his expression and said, with a lightness he absolutely did not feel:
"Oh, hey Cas. Do you want something?"
She turned. A beat passed—just long enough—and then she smiled. It reached the correct parts of her face. Her blind blue eyes were aimed somewhere to the left of him, soft and directionless as always.
The smile was still… off.
"No," she said. "Nothing in particular."
Sunny blinked.
'What is going on with her today?'
She crossed the small distance between them without hesitation—she never hesitated on terrain she'd mapped—and her hand found his shoulder with the easy certainty of long practice.
"Actually," she said. "I have a present for you!"
He had just enough time to look confused before a spark of warmth traveled from her hand into him.
[You have received a Memory: Endless Spring.]
He stared at her.
The little glass bottle. The one she'd carried since the beginning, refilling itself endlessly, never once running dry. He'd watched her use it a hundred times. He'd drunk from it himself, on days when the Dark City had been particularly committed to killing them and stopping to find water felt like a luxury they couldn't afford.
"Why are you giving me this?" he asked, genuinely baffled.
She was quiet for a moment.
"I just wanted to." Her thumb moved slightly against his shoulder—small, almost unconscious. "Why? Can't I give you something, after everything you've done for us?"
"I… I guess you can. I just didn't expect it."
She didn't move away.
That was the thing that set alarms in his mind off—she stayed. Standing close, her hand still on his shoulder, with a particular softness that he simply wasn't used to.
Then, without any warning at all, she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around him.
Sunny went completely rigid.
'…Ah?'
It was a real hug. Not the brief, perfunctory kind. She held on, her cheek against his shoulder, and she didn't immediately let go.
The silence stretched on.
Sunny's brain, in its infinite helpfulness, produced nothing useful. He stood there like a board, arms half-lifted in the universal posture of a person who had been ambushed by sincerity and had no established protocol for handling it.
Truly, he was baffled.
Then, slowly, he brought one arm up and patted her on the back.
Once. Twice. The awkward movements of someone who had grown up in the outskirts and therefore treated physical affection approximately the same way one treated a venomous creature—with cautious respect and the small hope that it would end soon without incident.
"...Okay," he said, to the wall over her shoulder.
"Thank you," Cassie said. Her voice was very even. Very quiet. "For all the times you kept me alive when I had absolutely no business being alive."
Sunny opened his mouth.
Closed it.
"That's—" he started. "I mean. Someone had to."
"And for being so fun to be around."
He let out a slightly strangled sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite anything else.
"Fun. Right. I've been called a lot of things."
"I mean it." She pulled back then, just enough to look up at him—not at his face, exactly, but in the direction of it, the way she always did. There was something in her expression that he couldn't parse. Something that sat behind the calm like a tide behind glass. "You are, Sunny. Whether you believe it or not."
He rubbed the back of his neck.
"You've clearly been spending too much time in close quarters with the same four people. Your standards have degraded, Cassie."
She laughed. It was soft and genuine and it made the tightness in his chest feel worse somehow, which was the opposite of what laughter was supposed to do.
She stepped back fully and turned toward the door.
"We'll meet again soon, Sunny," she said.
"Of course we will." He watched her go, vaguely unsettled in a way he couldn't name. "Where would I go? The lodge is too small to avoid anyone for more than a day and a half, I've already tried."
She chuckled. Her hand found the doorframe.
"Yeah. You're right, of course."
A pause.
"I'll go now."
"Alright. Bye."
She stood in the doorway for a moment. Still. Her head turned slightly away, so he couldn't see her face.
Then:
"...Goodbye, Sunny."
She walked out.
Sunny stood in the middle of his room and stared at the empty doorway for a long moment.
'Weird,' he thought.
'Now that I think about it… she's been weird all day.'
He scratched his jaw, shook his head, and sat back down on the cot.
Outside, her footsteps faded slowly into nothing.
—
"...I'm going to destroy it."
Sunny stared at her. Nephis looked back, calm as she always was, white flames burning at the very back of her grey eyes, and he understood with a cold and sinking certainty that she meant every syllable.
She wasn't speaking in metaphor. There was no performance in it. Changing Star wanted to walk through every Nightmare that existed, kill everything that moved, and tear the Spell apart at whatever passed for its heart — not because she thought she could, not because she had a plan, but because she hated it.
That was it. That was the whole reason.
"You think Gunlaug can stop me?" She took a step forward. "You think a Fallen Terror can stop me? Anyone who dares will die. I'll kill them all."
Sunny took a step back and stared at her with wide eyes. He felt something cold touch the back of his neck.
"Why?" His voice came out quieter than he intended. "Why do you want to destroy the Spell so much?"
The corner of Neph's mouth curled slightly.
"Because I hate it."
Silence.
He blinked. Waited for more. There was no more.
She lived in a world stripped of pretense, he had known that for a while now, but occasionally it still managed to catch him completely off guard. Some other person might have given him a speech. Three paragraphs, minimum. Nephis had said four words and closed the door.
He closed his eyes.
"You are actually insane."
She smiled.
"What does it mean to be insane in a world that has gone mad? I would be wary of anyone who remained perfectly sane in this hell."
He had no answer for that. He didn't try to find one.
Sunny exhaled slowly, opened his eyes, and turned around.
"So," he said, to the alley in front of him and the last red edge of sunlight bleeding out at the end of it, "we are done here."
It wasn't a question.
He took a step forward.
"Come with me."
He stopped.
He hadn't anticipated those particular three words, in that particular order.
"…Excuse me?"
"You heard me." Her tone hadn't changed. Calm. Precise. The tone she used for everything from sword corrections to announcing she intended to destroy an immortal existence. "I am telling you what I need. I need people who will not fold. People who can fight and think and survive. You have demonstrated, repeatedly and against considerable odds, that you can do all three."
'There it is.'
The coldly reasonable case. Nephis argued for things she wanted — not with sentiment but with utility, making it sound obvious, making it sound like the only logical conclusion available to a reasonable person.
He had seen her use this on other people.
'It won't work on me.'
"I don't think so," he said.
"Why not?"
He turned, slightly. Just enough to see her in his periphery.
"Because I know how this ends, Neph. You told me yourself. Fire and rivers of blood. That's your grand plan — your words, not mine. And I won't be apart of a plan that requires bodies to execute." He shook his head. "I won't be one of those bodies that you'll tread over."
Something changed in her expression. A reassessment.
"What about Cassie, Sunny?"
Sunny went very still.
He had known, the moment she said come with me, that this was coming. He had known the second he'd resolved to leave that she would find the right angle, and Nephis always found the right angle, and the right angle here was — had always been —
'Cassie…'
'Using Cassie against me, Neph? Now that's just low.'
He thought of a blind girl sitting across from him not long ago, her unseeing eyes wide with disbelief. He thought of the question she had asked, low and quiet with everything must already know.
Will you protect her?
He had said yes. Even if it cost him his life. In those exact words.
The answer had come out before he could stop it, before his Flaw had even found the time to bite him in the ass.
'Damnation.'
And even with that promise sitting on him — he was still leaving. Because a promise made to Cassie and a death march orchestrated by Nephis were two entirely different things.
Sunny laughed. Short and bitter.
"That's exactly why," he said.
The silence stretched.
"What?" Nephis said, and it was perhaps the flattest he had ever heard her voice.
"Cassie." He faced the alley again. "That's exactly why I'm leaving her here. With you." He paused. "She's yours, Neph. She came to this shore on your account. She came out of the dark city because of you, not me. So she'll stay with you. Why even bring it up?" Another pause. "Besides… she is considerably safer with you than she is anywhere I happen to be going."
"You could protect her—"
"No." Very quiet. "I couldn't."
He said it the same way he might say the sky is dark or the shore is cold. There was no self-pity in it. It was the simple fact of one who had no luxury to protect others.
"I can barely protect myself," he continued. "I think we both know that. I have survived this hellish place through a combination of shadow sense, cowardice, and dumb luck, in roughly equal parts, and I am sincerely not willing to stake her life on any of those three." He shook his head. "Leave her with you. You are better at keeping people alive than I am. That is simply the truth."
"Sunny—"
"And besides." Something almost like humor found its way into his voice. Almost. "What exactly am I supposed to be useful for? You haven't looked at me in three days, Neph. There's a limit to how accommodating I can be. You've had your mind made up since the moment you brought me to this alley. You know what you're doing. You know what you want." He smiled, and it didn't reach anywhere. "You don't need me for any of it. So, tell me, 'Changing Star,' why would I stay?"
A pause.
He heard her open her mouth, then he heard her close it again.
'Gotcha.'
Nephis, for perhaps the first time since he had known her, did not have an immediate answer. She had just reached for something that wasn't there, and was processing the absence of it.
He didn't wait for her to find her footing.
"I'll see you on the other side," he said. "If there is one."
He started walking.
"…Come back here."
He kept walking.
"Come back, Sunny."
He kept walking.
"I said come back, Sunny! This conversation isn't over! Come back here right now!"
He stopped.
He stood still for a moment with his back to her, the last red light dying at the end of the alley, the night coming in fast behind it.
Then he turned around.
His expression was cold. Distant. Something present underneath it that he had made a decision not to show — quiet and heavy, carrying the faint trace of disappointment. Some in her, and some in how things are going to be.
"'If that's your will, try to stop me.'"
The shadows swallowed him whole. He turned around and continued to walk.
Though, he only made it three or four steps before—
"D-Do you trust me?"
He stopped cold.
Her voice was quiet now. Stripped of everything she usually kept wrapped around it. Even her pride was gone.
Sunny stood in the dark and did not move.
'I… I do.'
He turned it over. Genuinely. He owed her that much.
He thought of the past months. The cold calculations she made — always, always — the ones that never flinched, that took everything available and returned with the most efficient answer regardless of what that answer cost.
All of them. Of course.
That was what she had said, when he'd asked how many she was willing to sacrifice. Without pausing or flinching, she declared that everyone on the Forgotten Shore was another body to walk over.
That was who Nephis was. That had always been Nephis.
"Yeah," he said.
Low and even.
"I do."
Another moment of silence.
"And that's why I'm leaving."
He felt her go still behind him. Something in the space she occupied — she always overwhelmed it simply by being in it — had arrested completely.
"You'll go through with it, Neph. Every last part of it. Every single body it takes to build that road to your goal." He stared forward into the dark. "I know you will. I've never doubted it for a second."
A pause.
"And so, I'll say it again. I refuse to be one of them."
Nephis had no response.
"I won't be another body for you to walk over," he said quietly. "Even for a good and righteous reason. Even for your reason."
He exhaled slowly.
"So no. I won't stay. Goodbye, Neph."
He attempted to take another step — and halted.
Behind him, footsteps.
Her hand found his arm in the dark.
Sunny stopped entirely. He stood very still. She couldn't see him — but she managed to find him through sounds alone. Her grip was tight — desperately so.
He looked at her hand without turning his head.
He knew what expression she held. The shape of it was already assembled — down to the tension in her fingers and the sound of her breathing. The weight of everything she wasn't saying, or did not know how to say. He had spent long enough reading Nephis from the outside that her face had stopped being necessary.
He knew what was on it.
Slowly, he reached up and took her hand by the wrist.
And removed it.
He held it there for just a moment, in the dark, before letting go entirely.
Then he walked.
'Thank you,' he thought, in the quietest place of his mind.
'Thank you for trying.'
She had.
The shadows took him.
Behind him, Nephis stood alone at the edge of the light. The last ember of the sunset painted the stone dim and dying red. She did not move. She did not call after him again.
She had tried.
And regardless, he wasn't there.
— The Present.
The fog was gone.
All of it.
Sunny stood before the chained corpse and the ferocious demon mask, and for the first time since he had woken up on the Forgotten Shore with nothing but a unique Aspect, his mind was entirely, utterly clear.
He remembered.
He remembered the dormitory room. The soft mattress he'd been stupidly grateful for. The winter solstice night he'd spent staring at the ceiling, reading an appraisal that said things no appraisal should say, turning a word over and over in his head like a stone with something living underneath it.
Regressor.
He remembered why it had unsettled him so deeply. Not just the word—the feeling that came with it. The persistent, crawling wrongness of his own reactions. The way he'd made choices at the Academy that hadn't felt like his choices. Choosing Wilderness Survival for more of a reason than just Master Jet's advice. Sitting down next to Cassie at breakfast as though something in him already knew she was worth sitting next to. Looking at Nephis across a cafeteria and feeling something that didn't make sense for a first meeting.
He had written it off. He was good at writing things off.
But now both sets of memories were present simultaneously, sitting in his skull like two rivers that had finally found the same sea, and what they formed together was not confusion.
It was certainty.
He remembered the Dark City. Not the months he'd just lived—the other ones. The ones that had happened once already, in a version of events that no longer existed and never would again. He remembered his time on the Dark Sea, the black water and the cold and Nephis standing at the prow with her usual calmness.
He remembered Cassie's quiet and beautiful laugh in the dark, the particular warmth of it, and how it had always managed to surprise him no matter how many times he'd heard it. He remembered getting closer to both of them than he had ever intended to get to anyone. He remembered the small, stupid, precious moments—Nephis completely failing to understand a joke and then, a full minute later, laughing at it with no warning whatsoever. He remembered Cassie listening to his stories, the way that always made him feel like he owed her a debt he had no currency to repay.
His chest ached with it.
He had reached a conclusion. His future self—whoever that had been, whatever he had become—had arrived at the end of something.
And then he had come back.
And now he was here, standing in a cold underground chamber with ghostly torches and a chained corpse and a mask that stared at him with hollow eye sockets full of light and shadow both, and his intuition—that relentless, annoying, fate-adjacent thing that had been pulling him by the collar since he'd swallowed a drop of ichor—was completely, profoundly silent.
Because it had nothing left to say.
It had brought him here. Its work was done.
The rest was his to make.
Sunny inhaled slowly.
The golden-cracked corpse twitched.
A shiver ran through its broken limbs—not the movement of something living, but the tremor of something that had been waiting for a very, very long time, and had just registered that the wait was almost over.
He felt no fear.
That was the strangest part. He catalogued it as he exhaled: no fear, no dread, no urge to back away and come up with a sensible alternative plan. Just a clarity so complete it felt almost physical, like stepping out of a dark room into cold open air.
He took a step forward.
He thought of the Forgotten Shore. All of it—the beginning and the middle and the harrowing, blood-soaked mess of the parts in between. The people he'd met on that cursed coastline who he hadn't been planning to care about and had cared about anyway, because apparently he was fundamentally incapable of learning from his own stated policies. The battles he'd won ugly and the ones he'd barely survived and the handful—a very small handful—that he was quietly, privately proud of.
He took another step.
He thought of Nephis and Cassie. Not the memories—just the fact of them. That they existed. That they were, right now, somewhere on this shore or beyond it, doing whatever it was they did when he wasn't there to observe it and quietly worry about it while pretending he wasn't.
He hoped they were all right.
He genuinely, sincerely, with no self-consciousness about it whatsoever, hoped they were all right.
'Please be all right.'
He took the final step.
The golden cracks in the corpse's surface pulsed once, brilliant and sharp, like a breath held to its limit.
Sunny reached up with one hand.
His fingers met the mask.
The world went silent.
Not quiet—silent. Absolute. Total. Every sound in existence simply ceased, and with it the chamber, the torches, the cold stone floor and the ancient dark and the distant memory of open air. All of it collapsed into nothing in a single, seamless instant.
He was standing above black water.
His own reflection looked up at him from below, still and perfect, undisturbed.
He knew this place, he realized. Or something in him did. The particular quality of the silence, the particular depth of the dark around him—it resonated with something that lived in the part of his soul that had been shaped by a god's dead blessing and a borrowed childhood spent in shadows.
His hand was still raised.
The mask was in it.
He turned it toward him slowly and looked at its face.
The ferocious demon stared back. Teeth bared, four fangs, three twisted horns. The hollow eye sockets churned with light and shadow, intertwined, inseparable, neither one consuming the other.
He looked at it for a long moment.
Then the Spell spoke.
[The Iron Key has fulfilled its purpose.]
[The lock has found its key.]
[The key has found its lock.]
[You have received a Memory.]
A pause.
[Attribute 'Regressor' is trembling.]
[Dreamer… would you like your lost road returned, your devoured power made whole, your suffering accounted for, the future you fed to the dark restored to your hands?]
Sunny's breath caught.
He almost said yes. The word was right there.
But the Spell wasn't finished.
[I must warn you. If you choose to reclaim it, there is no turning back. From this point forward, fate will be—■■■]
It stopped.
The silence stretched.
Sunny stared at the mask.
He thought about what it was offering. Not just the memories—not just the events, the battles, the progression, the accumulated weight of a life he had apparently already lived once. It was offering the knowledge. The full shape of a future that no longer existed, from a version of himself that had walked all the way to the end of something and then, somehow, found his way back to the start.
He would remember a future that couldn't happen anymore.
He would know what was coming—or what had come, once—while standing at the beginning of a story that was already being rewritten by the mere fact that he was here.
His concluded self had reached an end.
And then he had come back.
'Why?'
The question he'd been circling for months, never quite letting himself land on it. Why regress? Why return to the beginning? What had been so unfinished, so unacceptable, so fundamentally wrong about that conclusion that the version of him who'd reached it had chosen to unmake it?
He wanted to know.
The desire was so sharp it almost hurt.
He needed to know.
What else had all of this been for? The key. The Cathedral. The strings of divinity pulling him forward through every ugly corner of this shore. The appraisal that had told him, in the Spell's flat and merciless way, that he had faced his conclusion and refused it. All of it, every step, pointing here.
What would have been the point, if not this?
He exhaled slowly.
Then he lifted the mask, and put it on.
The fit was perfect. It had always been going to be perfect.
Yes.
For one moment, nothing happened.
Then the Spell's voice returned—and it was different. Quieter. Almost something else entirely.
[Welcome back, Lost from Light.]
[Dreamer! Prepare for your '???' Trial…]
[Welcome to the '???'.]
The world faded to black.
And then the world was gone.
Sunny dreamt…
He dreamt of happiness and of sorrow, trailing its footsteps through the silent halls of memory. He dreamt of paradise, lingering with fleeting moments and beautiful laughter, and of despair that dwelled thereafter.
He dreamt of a woman whose light once guided him through endless darkness. He dreamt of that same woman standing before him with unfamiliar eyes, amidst a snowfield painted white, gazing at him with no recognition at all, as though he had never existed.
Sunny dreamt of the beginning.
Sunny dreamt of the end.
—
The land was no longer a land.
Black petals lay scattered across the fields of a desert, drifting through the air in slow spirals of rich life. They gathered across the horizon like fallen stars that had forgotten how to shine. The sky stretched endlessly above them, inked in a deep and terrible darkness that swallowed the world whole.
Everything that had been.
Everything that would be.
Everything was painted dark.
As well as the battlefield silent beneath that sky.
Bodies covered the land in every direction, still and unmoving beneath the endless rain of shadowed petals. Once they had been warriors, kings, monsters, and friends. Once they had carried voices that filled the dying world with life.
Now they had been reduced to the elements.
Nightingale—Kai that once took to the skies lay nearby, his body torn and folded against the blackened sand. Song of the Fallen—Cassie rested beside him with her sightless eyes lifted toward the sky that no longer held any stars. Raised by Wolves—Effie's Divine Spear had shattered into fragments scattered across the ground, its wielder collapsed beside it peacefully.
Soul Reaper—Jet.
Promise of a Distant Sky—Rain.
Blood Lord—Seishan.
All of Song… all of Bastion…
Their bodies formed a silent monument across the ruined sands.
Further still lay those who had once been legends.
The King of Nothing—Mordret now reduced to over-darkened mirrors.
Original Dreamspawn—Asterion, reduced to a still form submerged within the dark lands that had once trembled beneath his overwhelming power.
Even Sunless lay there.
Oh, so broken and silent. The battlefield had become a paradise of drifting flowers where nothing else moved and nothing else breathed.
Sunny dreamt.
Sunny dreamt.
Sunny dreamt…
—
Once again, he cursed the sky.
Though the words themselves never left his mouth, for the heavens already knew. He need no longer speak.
Darkness flooded across the fabric of reality in swallowing tides. The world beneath it had already ended long before this moment arrived. The ground lay buried beneath drifting petals of Shadow, a silent field where ruin had settled.
Sunny knelt among them, and Nephis rested in his arms.
Again.
Her body weightless, her breath hollow. Such a fragile thing—once the Queen of Humanity, now reduced to a flickering flame. Her countless stars of desire had faded, long before they ever managed to confront the Profaned God.
Her hand—her remaining one trembled against his chest. A faint light gathered there, so weak and fading.
Again.
The final embers of [Light Bringer].
Sunny watched it with understanding. For so long, chains had wrapped around his existence. The invisible, sweet chains woven through his True Name to bind himself to a master.
For Shadow Bond to bind his shadow to her light. Threads to something he could never escape.
Until now, that is.
The last fragments of it drifted upward between them, dissolving into the darkness.
And with it, again, something within Sunny was freed.
The bond—though not broken, was instead fulfilled.
Completely.
For the first time since she called his name upon the Forgotten Shore, Sunny stood alone, his soul his own.
Free…
Though the realization was not one of joy. There was no grand triumph within it. Freedom had come far too late to mean anything. What future would he have now? What was the point of freedom, if there was no one to enjoy it with?
By the time he turned his gaze downward, Nephis's hand had slid from his chest. Her light utterly vanished.
She joined the dead.
Sunny remained still for a long time, even as he felt bright white wings unfurl from his back. Even as he felt his entire being complete—becoming something anew.
It did not matter. Soon enough, he would join every other name that had become the same ending.
The land had become a grave large enough to swallow the world.
Sunny lowered his head slightly, resting his forehead against Nephis's one final time. The young supreme cried and screamed until he had no voice to do so. He cradled her until the darkness took her form whole.
Then, he was truly alone.
He looked up, and above, the sky had opened once more.
Something waited there. It was a scene he had seen over a hundred times now.
A vast and ancient wrath pressed down upon the ruined world, looking upon the last existence that dwelled there.
It had many names.
Only a few remained.
Abaddon…
Sunkiller…
Lord of the Abyss…
A Profaned God—an Unholy Titan.
Drawn by the scent of the Sun God's Heir, the Queen of Humanity, Abaddon awoke and brought its paradise down upon them.
A paradise of everblack flowers.
A darkness rich with life, overwriting the fabric of the world.
Sunny looked upon it all with a bitter, hoarse smile.
He had nothing left to lose.
He slowly rose to his feet, Nephis's blackened body slipping from his arms to rest among the dark petals, alongside his family and friends.
His gaze lifted toward the Profaned God and its influence.
There was nothing left to lose.
He faced the sky.
He faced the god.
And the god gazed down upon him.
It was merciful in its destruction.
Rather than a relentless wave of terrible death, it offered a peaceful demise.
Sunny felt no pain as he died.
He was simply overtaken by its sweet release.
The end came quickly as the darkness claimed him as well.
Like a virus, it invaded his soul and flooded it from within, becoming one with the rich, torrenting life of its True Darkness.
Sunny's world was painted black.
And he died.
Again.
Then the dream stirred once more.
He dreamt.
He dreamt of happiness.
He dreamt of sorrow.
He dreamt of a black paradise.
He dreamt of despair.
He dreamt of the one he loved.
He dreamt of the one who could never remember him.
He dreamt.
He dreamt.
He dreamt.
Sunny dreamt of the beginning.
Sunny dreamt of another end.
[The Attribute 'Regressor <255th Turn>' has activated in an unstable manner!]
[The Attribute 'Regressor <255th Turn>' has been modified!]
[Regressor <256th Turn> (???)]
And for the two hundred and fifty-sixth time, the end began again.