The sky bled in silence.
Crimson rain fell straight and heavy, each drop the size of a coin, striking the broken world with a sound like distant gunshots. Where it hit metal, it hissed and steamed; where it struck bone, it drank deep. Nothing was wasted. Nothing had ever been wasted anymore.
Sunny stood on the lip of the tallest tower that had once pierced the Antarctic Shard, back when the waking world still pretended geography mattered. The spire had snapped centuries ago, leaving a jagged crown of rebar and glass that pointed accusingly at the ruptured heavens. Wind tore through the hollow skeleton of the building, carrying the iron stink of slaughter and the low, endless moan of something that had no mouth left.
He was barefoot. The soles of his feet were black—not from dirt, but from the living shadow that had long replaced skin and sinew below the ankle. It flexed with every step, tasting the air.
A translucent pane of molten gold hovered before his eyes, larger than any notification he had ever seen. The letters did not flicker; they burned.
[The Spell is ending.]
[The boundaries between Dream and Waking have dissolved.]
[Final Trial issued to the Sole Survivor.]
[Objective: Slay the Forgotten God.]
[Alternative: Inherit the Throne of Oblivion.]
[Time remaining: indeterminate.]
He read it once, then again, then closed his eyes so the words would stop searing themselves into his retinas. Indeterminate. Of course. The Spell had always loved its little jokes.
With a thought, he dismissed the window. It shattered into sparks that the rain swallowed before they reached the ground.
Far below, the ruins of the city that had once been New Sydney lay drowned beneath a tide of blood. Skyscrapers jutted up like broken teeth. Between them, rivers of red flowed uphill, defying gravity, pouring themselves into the sky to feed the endless storm. In the distance, something that might have been a mountain—or a corpse the size of one—shifted and exhaled a cloud of black moths, each the size of a helicopter.
Sunny did not look for long. He had seen worse.
He turned from the edge and walked across the roof. His shadow followed, stretching thirty meters behind him, rippling with faces that opened and closed their mouths in silent screams. Every Saint he had ever killed had left a piece of themselves in that darkness. Sometimes they spoke. Sometimes they begged. Most of the time, they just watched.
At the center of the roof stood a crude shrine of scavenged bone and rusted rebar. A circle of skulls, each one once human, stared inward at a single object on a pedestal of cracked concrete: a child's toy. A cheap plastic knight, missing an arm, paint worn away until only the faded silver of its helm remained.
Sunny knelt. The shadow knelt with him, seven arms unfolding from nowhere to cradle the air.
He touched the toy's broken face with a gentleness that looked obscene on hands that had torn Titans in half.
"I kept it," he said. His voice was gravel dragged across glass. "Like you asked."
No one answered. No one had answered in three hundred ninety-one days.
He stayed until the rain plastered his hair to his skull and ran down scars that mapped his face like a topographical record of every betrayal he had ever committed. Then he stood.
The shadow rose with him, taller now, crowned with seven broken halos that bled starlight.
Sunny drew a slow breath that tasted of rust and old grief.
"Time to finish it."
He stepped backward off the roof.
No dramatic leap, no flourish. One moment he stood on concrete; the next, he was falling. Wind screamed past his ears. The city rushed up to greet him.
Halfway down, shadows caught him. They poured from every crack, every alley, every open grave, coalescing into a titanic hand that closed gently around his body and lowered him. When his feet touched the flooded street, the blood reached only his ankles. The shadow-hand dissolved into a cloak that settled across his shoulders, heavier than any armor.
He walked. There was no destination yet—only direction. West, where the sky was darkest, the rain hottest, toward the wound in the world once called the Hollow Mountains.
The streets remembered him. Corpses impaled on lampposts turned their heads as he passed, jaws creaking in greeting. Some had been people he knew. Most had not. All wore the same expression now: the slack, wondering look of the freshly damned.
Sunny said nothing. There was nothing left to say.
After an hour, the first challenger arrived.
It came from beneath. The blood in the street bulged upward, forming a perfect sphere the size of a house. Then it burst, and something stepped out.
A woman of mirrored glass and burning scripture. Her face was Nephis's, but her eyes were molten gold, pupil-less, ancient. Chains of divine flame wrapped her wrists and throat, dragging behind her like a bridal train. Every link bore a name Sunny recognized.
[Calamity of the Sunken Covenant — Saint Changing Star (Echo)]
[Rank: Transcendent]
[Threat: Absolute]
The Nephis-thing tilted her head. When she spoke, the voice was hers, but layered beneath it was the sound of a thousand funeral bells.
"You promised," she said. "You promised you would save me."
Sunny stopped. The shadow stillened, holding its breath.
"I tried," he said.
"You failed."
"I know."
Chains rattled. Mirrored skin reflected a thousand versions of Sunny, each more broken than the last. In some reflections, he was sixteen, crying over a dead girl in a ruined cathedral. In others, he knelt on a mountain of corpses, crown of black fire on his brow, weeping blood.
The Nephis-thing raised a hand. Light gathered, white and terrible.
"Then die with me."
The world ignited.
Sunny did not dodge. Light poured through him, burning the outer layer of shadow like paper in a furnace. Pain flared—old, familiar, almost welcome. When the glare faded, he was still standing. The shadow had regrown, thicker now, drinking the radiance and converting it into darkness.
One step forward.
The Nephis-thing's face fractured. Cracks spider-webbed across the mirrored skin.
"You can't—"
Sunny was suddenly in front of her. His hand passed through the chest as though it were only illusion. When he pulled back, he held a single burning feather of solid sunlight.
He crushed it.
The echo screamed Nephis's scream—the one from the day she burned the last of her soul to hold back the Nightmare Creatures. The sound tore streets apart, uprooted buildings, turned blood-rain to steam.
Then it was gone. Only the chains fell, clinking into the flood like broken bells.
Sunny looked at the empty air.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. This time, he meant it for the real Nephis, wherever she remained.
He resumed walking.
The city gave way to wasteland. Blood-tide grew shallow, only a red mist at his ankles. Ruined highways stretched into the distance, littered with the carcasses of the fleeing—some still in cars, skeletons fused to steering wheels, mouths open in eternal scream.
Night never came anymore. The sky was eternally bruised purple-red. Time had lost its meaning centuries ago. Sunny measured distance by shadow-weight and the growing pressure behind his eyes—the sensation that something ancient was waking, turning its attention toward him.
Somewhere, the Ivory City had floated once. Now it lay shattered, white towers blackened with mold and blood. Gates hung from their hinges. Streets were paved with feathers—white, black, gold—from the corpses of dead angels.
He did not enter. Nothing awaited inside that he wanted to see again.
On the third day—or what might have been the third day—he reached the Black Sea.
It was not water. It was liquid shadow, thick and slow, lapping at a shore of ground bone. Across it drifted islands of congealed regret: moments frozen forever—people waving goodbye, lovers turning away, children reaching for parents who would never return. Each island replayed its scene endlessly, soundless.
Something moved beneath the surface. Vast. Patient.
Sunny stopped. His reflection did not look back. Instead, the black liquid showed a boy with messy hair and frightened eyes, clutching a cracked phone, standing before a mirror in a crumbling apartment. The boy's mouth moved: Don't go.
Sunny crouched and dipped two fingers into the sea. The cold was absolute. Memories that were not his flooded up his arm—millions of deaths, billions of regrets, the final moments of every human who had ever lived and died screaming.
He withdrew his hand. The fingers were gone, dissolved into wisps of darkness, reattaching a heartbeat later. Somewhere beneath, something laughed with his own voice.
He stood. From his coat, he drew a single object: a small, tarnished silver coin. Sun stamped on one side. Crescent moon eclipsed by seven stars on the other.
The coin Nephis had given him the night before she sacrificed herself.
He flipped it once. It spun, catching the red light, then fell toward the sea. Before it touched the surface, a shadow-hand snapped out and caught it.
Sunny closed his fist around the coin.
"Not yet," he whispered.
Then he stepped onto the Black Sea.
The liquid shadow parted as if waiting centuries for this moment. He did not sink. Each footstep left ripples that screamed. Behind him, the shore crumbled into nothing.
No turning back. There never had been.
Half a world away—or perhaps only a heartbeat—something vast stirred on a throne of broken halos and frozen tears. Seven eyes opened, each a different apocalypse.
The Forgotten God smiled. Mouth without lips.
The last pawn moved into place. This time, there would be no Spell to save anyone. Not even the one who had killed it.