He fell.
There was no ceremony to it.
No heroic leap.
No whispered vow to the quiet stars above the void.
Just a step off the crooked throne —
SFX: fwip—coat snapping like a defeated flag —
and then gravity, old and starved and patient, wrapped its hands around him and pulled.
The crack in the sky yawned beneath him, a thin silver wound.
Sunny passed through it like a bullet through glass.
SFX: krrshhh—fracture ripple across the heavens
The first thing he felt was cold.
Not the temperature.
The recognition.
The air here remembered him.
It tasted of rust, salt, and that specific, metallic despair only chains know how to bleed.
Then the water hit.
Black.
Thick.
Endless.
SFX: WHUUMPH—submersion impact
The moment his skin touched it, every memory of the Forgotten Shore detonated behind his eyes.
SFX: BAKKA—memory explosion / rapid-fire montage
He was sixteen again — wrists raw, vomiting bile on a slave wagon floor while guards laughed.
He was seventeen — hands slick with his own blood, driving a bone knife into the throat of some nightmare with too many legs and a child's face.
He was eighteen — staring into the ruined cathedral as Nephis's fire carved a hole in the dark, something inside him cracking open like sunrise.
He was twenty — kneeling beneath the Crimson Spire, trading what remained of his soul for one more day of survival.
He was every age he had ever been on this cursed coast
all at once,
screaming.
The water did not resist him.
It welcomed him.
It was made of tears.
Every tear shed by every slave who ever walked this shore.
Every tear he had never allowed himself to shed.
They poured into him — mouth, eyes, lungs.
He swallowed centuries of grief and kept sinking.
Down.
Down.
Past the skeletons of ships that had never belonged to any sane ocean.
Past drowned Awakened whose chains had grown from their own regrets and dragged them back to the deep.
Something brushed him.
Not a touch.
A presence.
Vast.
Ancient.
Older than the Spell.
Older than the Forgotten God.
Older than mercy.
It moved like a continent remembering how to shift.
Its skin — if skin existed — felt like every promise Sunny had ever broken.
It knew him.
It had always known him.
A low vibration rippled through the water.
Not a voice.
The memory of one.
Little liar…
Then it slid away into depths that should not exist.
Sunny kept falling.
Until the water grew shallow and mean.
His boots scraped stone.
He rose —
SFX: gasp—airless breach of the surface
— black water streaming off him in perfect silence.
He stood in the exact place he had begun four hundred and thirty-one years ago.
The slave caravan camp.
The wagons were still there — crushed, rusted, half-sunk, as if they'd tried to crawl away and failed.
Chains dangled from broken wheels like frozen, metallic vines.
The fire pit was cold.
And full of teeth.
Everything was exactly the same.
And everything was wrong.
The sky was a lid of red iron.
The sun was a hole punched through it, bleeding slow, unmoving light.
The air tasted of iron and old blood.
The ruins were silent.
Too silent.
Then the wind stirred.
It slid across the broken ground like a tongue tasting a wound centuries old.
It spoke with a voice made of a thousand dead slaves, soft and intimate.
"Welcome home, Master Sunless."
Sunny did not move.
The shadow at his feet stayed still.
But something inside him — something small and human that had survived four centuries on a throne of regret — flinched.
He looked at his hands.
They were clean.
For now.
Somewhere in the distance, the Crimson Spire began to sing.
SFX: mmmmnn—low, hungry resonance stretching across the coast
Patient.
Starved.
Waiting.
Sunny closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, they were black from edge to edge.
He took one step forward.
SFX: clink—chains stirring like waking snakes
The Forgotten Shore had waited long enough.
It was time to begin again.