There was no dawn.
There would never be one again.
But there was light.
A quiet, sourceless luminescence — the faded gold of old photographs left too long in a dead sun — flowed across the newborn void.
SFX: shhhh—light bleeding over black marble
It came from everywhere and nowhere, spilling like milk across the mirror-dark expanse.
Sunny sat on the ugly throne and watched the light drift.
He was vast now.
Not in shape — the throne was still the same crooked lump of iron and regret — but in scope. His shadow no longer ended at his feet.
It was the horizon.
His heartbeat was the slow turning of galaxies that had not existed yesterday. When he blinked…
SFX: blink—thrum—civilizations rise / fall like dust storms
…entire lifetimes passed in the space between breaths.
And yet he was also still Sunny.
A tired man with scarred hands and silver eyes, perched on a broken chair in the dark.
The duality did not tear him apart.
It fit, the way a cracked cup still holds water if you don't breathe too hard.
Sunny leaned forward, elbows on knees, and looked down.
Between his boots, the black glass had become a window.
A window into everything that remained.
A single world, patched together from the best pieces of the ones that died.
Oceans that remembered being blood… and chose to be water instead.
Continents stitched from the Forgotten Shore, the Ivory City, the Antarctic Shard, the Hollow Mountains — now quiet, green in places, scarred but healing.
People walked there.
Not many. A few hundred thousand at most.
The ones who'd survived the merging.
The ones who'd refused to let go even when the sky bled and the gods screamed.
They looked up sometimes at a sky with no sun but no darkness.
And they felt watched.
Protected.
Remembered.
Sunny watched them the way a gardener watches the first shoots after a forest fire.
Carefully.
Gently.
A small figure appeared beside the throne.
Not walking.
Simply there.
The child.
No coat now. No bleeding eyes.
Just a boy in a clean grey shirt, barefoot, hair messy from a four-billion-year nap.
He climbed onto the throne's armrest and sat, legs dangling.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi," Sunny answered.
They sat in silence — or maybe a thousand years. Time was a negotiable concept now.
Eventually, the boy murmured:
"It's quiet."
"Yeah."
"I like it."
Sunny glanced at him.
The child stared through the vast window at the patchwork world below.
"They're building something," he said, pointing.
Sunny followed his finger.
On a plain that had once been a Titan's corpse, a cluster of people — Awakened and ordinary — raised the frame of a house. Children darted between beams carrying nails. An old woman with a mechanical leg coordinated them with a stick and enough profanity to shame the dead.
No fighting.
No screaming.
There was… laughter.
Sunny felt something in his chest that was not pain.
"They kept the worst parts of us out," the child whispered. "The parts that needed the Spell to feel alive. The ones who only knew how to survive by hurting."
A pause.
"They're gone. You let them go."
"I remembered them," Sunny said softly. "That was enough. Memory without chains."
The child nodded, satisfied.
He leaned sideways until his head rested against Sunny's shoulder.
Warm. Human.
Sunny let him stay.
Minutes passed. Or centuries.
Then another presence stirred — not beside him.
Inside him.
A voice like sunrise on untouched snow.
You sit strangely for a god.
Nephis.
Not an echo. Not a memory.
Her. Whole.
She stood in the space behind his eyes: wings of white flame folded, silver hair drifting despite the stillness. Her golden eyes were the same — but older. Softer.
Sunny didn't turn.
"You're dead," he murmured.
So are you, she said. We just got better jobs.
Sunny's laugh was small, but the void rang with it.
SFX: gonn—temple-bell resonance across infinity
One by one, the others arrived.
Effie, leaning on a crutch made of laughter, grinning like she'd just pulled off the universe's greatest prank.
Kai, wings of starlight restored, eyes clear and gentle.
Cassie — no longer blind — seeing everything with a smile that forgave the cosmos.
Jet, arms crossed, hair full of winter wind, nodding once in approval.
Even Mordret, whole, mirrors intact… but the reflections inside them showed truth, not lies.
They didn't speak.
They simply existed, the way mountains do — quiet, eternal, present.
The child lifted his head.
"They're part of you now. Not prisoners. Not tools. Just… home."
Sunny looked back down at the little world.
A silver-haired girl was learning to walk. Her mother — tall, scarred, crying and smiling at the same time — held her hands.
Another child, dark-haired and solemn, stood on a hill and stared straight upward.
Straight at him.
The boy raised a hand in greeting.
Sunny raised one back.
The child on the throne watched with bright eyes.
"You kept your promise," he said.
"What promise?"
"That you'd make a world where no one had to be afraid anymore."
Sunny was quiet for a long time.
"I think," he said eventually, "I just made a world where they're allowed to be afraid… and still choose kindness anyway."
The child considered this, then nodded.
He hopped down from the throne.
"I'm going to play."
"Where?"
The boy pointed at the world.
"Down there. Someone has to teach them how to lie properly. For fun. Not survival."
Sunny almost smiled.
"Take your shoes."
The boy sighed dramatically, conjured battered sneakers out of thin air, and slipped them on.
Before leaving, he stood on tiptoe and kissed Sunny's cheek.
Soft. Quick. Embarrassing.
"Thanks for coming back," he whispered.
Then—
SFX: fwip—grey starfall streaking downward
He was gone.
A moment later, in a village square, a new boy appeared among startled children, already grinning, already lying about how he'd seen the end of the world and returned just to brag.
Nephis's voice drifted back to Sunny.
You know you can visit, right? You're not trapped.
"I know."
Then why stay?
Sunny looked around.
The throne that no longer wobbled.
The soft, sourceless light.
The silence that felt like home.
"Someone has to remember," he said. "All of it. The worst parts. The best parts. The parts no one else wants."
He settled deeper into the throne.
"Besides… the view's not bad."
Effie's laughter rolled through the void like thunder that had learned joy.
Kai hummed an old lullaby.
Cassie began weaving gentle futures.
Jet stood guard.
Mordret polished a mirror showing tomorrow being kind for once.
And Nephis stayed — a quiet flame beside him.
Sunny closed his eyes.
Far below, children laughed.
Inside him, the dead rested.
Before him lay an endless quiet road of tomorrows, untouched by Nightmare.
He breathed in.
He breathed out.
The universe breathed with him.
And for the first time in forever—
Everything was enough.