He remembered the first century as silence.
Not absence of sound—children laughing in new villages, rivers finding their courses, the quiet murmur of a world learning to breathe without the Spell choking it—but the silence inside his own chest.
Sunny sat on the crooked throne in the garden of quiet stars and watched the small blue-green planet turn beneath him.
Days bled into decades.
Decades bled into centuries.
He watched the survivors rebuild.
He watched them forget the Awakened. Forget the Nightmares. Forget the Spell.
They named the silver-eyed shadow in the sky the Silent Guardian, told their children bedtime stories of a man who had once carried the world so they would never have to.
He never moved.
Nephis's flame burned steadily over his heart—warm, patient, content to exist.
Sometimes the child—no longer a child, now a young man with laughter lines beginning at his eyes—would perch on the arm of the throne and talk about nothing. Flowers blooming in the rebuilt Antarctic Shard. A girl who learned to fly without wings. Oceans that had finally stopped tasting of blood.
Sunny would nod and listen. Never speak of the hollow inside him that still echoed with seven names.
He thought the Shore was gone.
He had cut it out himself—clean, surgical, merciless.
Folded the cursed region into a wound in reality. Sealed it with his Name. Buried it deeper than the Forgotten God had ever buried anything.
He was wrong.
The first tremor came on the hundred-and-forty-third year. A flicker. A hiccup in the turning of the world.
He felt it like a skipped heartbeat—his own, or the planet's. He no longer knew where one ended and the other began.
Far below, in the patch of ocean that had once been the Forgotten Shore, something stirred.
A pressure. A whisper. A Name.
His True Name—the one he had buried with the Shore—spoken aloud in a voice made of rust, salt, and old promises.
Sunless.
Faint. Distant. Hungry.
He told himself it was an echo. He told himself many things in those years.
The second tremor came thirty years later. Stronger. The third, twenty years after that.
Each time, the whisper grew clearer. Each time, the Name sounded less like memory and more like a summons.
He began to dream—something he had not done since taking the throne. Chains. A red sun nailed to the sky. A boy in a cage whispering: You promised you'd come back.
He woke with Nephis's flame flaring hot enough to scorch his ribs from the inside.
On the three-hundred-and-seventy-first year, the sky cracked.
He felt it—the exact moment the seal tore.
A single drop of black water fell upward from the planet, through the crack, and struck the garden of stars.
Where it landed, a black flower bloomed. Its petals were made of wagon wheels. Its heart, a screaming child.
Sunny stood. The young man—no longer a child—was already there, face pale.
"It's calling you," he said quietly.
"I know."
"You don't have to answer."
Sunny looked at the black flower.
"I already did."
He stepped off the throne. Fell.
Memory dissolved like smoke. Reality snapped back.
He was walking again.
Ash led him through a landscape of broken teeth and drowned memories. The ground, black glass in places, reflected a red sky that never moved. Air tasted of ash and old fire.
They had been walking for days since the hanging city fell upward into the pit.
Ash had not spoken of what she saw in the cracked bell.
Sunny had not asked.
Now she stopped at the edge of a vast crater—the place where the cohort made their final stand.
The ground was glassed. Not metaphorically. A perfect circle, three kilometers across, obsidian fused by heat that should have vaporized continents.
It had happened in a single instant—Nephis's last flame, poured into holding the Crimson Terror long enough for the rest of them to escape.
The escape that never happened. The escape that left her behind.
In the exact center, something burned. A single white feather.
Floating a handspan above the ground, untouched by wind or time, wrapped in a flame so pure it had no color at all. Four hundred years, and it had never dimmed.
Ash's breath caught.
"That's hers," she whispered. "I thought the stories were lies."
Sunny walked forward. Each step rang on the glass like a funeral bell.
The closer he got, the hotter Nephis's flame over his heart burned—recognition, warning, welcome.
He stopped before the feather. It hovered at eye level, turning slowly, edges flickering between white and gold.
He reached out. Fingers brushed it. The world fell away again.
He was back on the throne.
This time, Nephis stood in front of him.
Not the quiet flame he carried. The real her.
Silver hair singed at the ends. Armor cracked, blackened. Gold eyes burning with the last light of a dying star.
She was exactly as she had been when she faced the Terror alone.
Her face crumpled.
"You came," she said, voice raw from screaming.
"I never left," he answered.
She pressed her forehead to his. The contact burned.
"I held the line," she whispered. "Four hundred years. It wasn't enough."
"I know."
"They're using me, Sunny. The Shore. The Spire. Whatever's left of me—it's a seed. A trap."
Her hands cupped his face, trembling.
"Find me," she said. "Before I finish what I started."
Her flame flared—white, blinding, absolute.
"Burn it all down if you have to. But don't let me become the thing I died to stop."
Then she was gone.
The feather fell into his palm, cool as moonlight.
Reality snapped back.
He was kneeling on the glassed plain. Ash stood a respectful distance, flame dancing nervously across her skin.
Sunny closed his fist around the feather. It did not burn. He stood.
In the distance, the Crimson Spire pulsed again—stronger. The red sky answered with a low, rolling thunder with no source.
Ash asked quietly, "What did she say?"
Sunny opened his hand. The feather was gone. In its place: a single white flame—steady, patient, alive.
He looked toward the Spire.
"She said hurry," he answered.
Then he started walking.
Ash fell in beside him without a word.
The glassed plain rang beneath their boots like a warning bell.
Far above, the red wound in the sky began to bleed.
And for the first time in four hundred years, Nephis's real voice echoed across the Forgotten Shore—not memory, not dream, but here and now.
Find me.
The eighth bell screamed in answer.