The staircase ended in a door.
Not stone.
Not metal.
Not memory.
Wings.
Two vast, petrified wings—once white, now grey as ash, cracked like old porcelain—stretched across the entire height and breadth of the Spire's interior. Folded as if in prayer, pinions interlocked, forming an impenetrable wall. Veins of dull gold ran through the feathers, pulsing faintly—the last echo of divine blood.
Sunny stopped at the foot of the door.
Ash's ashes were warm against his chest, fused with Nephis's flame into something new—white shot through with threads of gold, steady and terrible.
He had no left arm.
Half his shadow clung to him in ragged strips.
His coat hung in charred ribbons.
He looked small beneath the wings. The wings looked ancient. They had waited four hundred years for this moment.
There was no handle.
No lock.
No inscription.
Only a single feather—pure white, untouched by time—drifting slowly before the door. Turning. Waiting.
Sunny reached out. The feather settled into his palm like it belonged there.
A voice—not sound, but pressure inside his skull—spoke with Nephis's cadence, older now, patient.
Speak.
He knew what it wanted. He had not spoken his True Name aloud since the day he took the throne.
Since the day he buried it with the Shore, sealed it, tried to forget it existed.
Names have power.
True Names have chains.
He had cut every chain he could find. This was the last one.
Sunny closed his eyes.
He remembered the boy in the cage—recognition, grief. He remembered Ash's last smile. He remembered Nephis—real Nephis—on the throne of stars, pressing her forehead to his, begging him to burn it all down if he had to.
He opened his eyes.
The wings waited.
He drew a breath that tasted of rust and endings.
Then he spoke.
Not loud.
Just once.
Clear.
"Sunless."
The word left his mouth and became a blade.
It cut the air.
It cut the Spire.
It cut reality itself.
The Shore heard.
Every chain on the Forgotten Shore snapped taut at once.
Every corpse opened its mouth and screamed with a single voice.
The red sky tore wider.
Black water rose in a perfect circle around the Spire, forming a wall a thousand meters high.
The wings heard. They shuddered.
Cracks raced across the petrified feathers—bright, molten, alive.
Dull gold veins ignited.
White fire—pure, absolute, Nephis's fire—poured from the fractures.
The wings did not open.
They shattered.
A storm of stone feathers and divine flame exploded outward.
Sunny stood in the heart of it, unmoving. The fire did not touch him. It knew him.
When the light faded, the door was gone.
Only a figure remained.
She stood exactly where the heart of the wings had been.
White armor—once pristine, now scarred and blackened, cracked in a thousand places but still whole.
Hair like molten silver, moving though there was no wind.
Eyes burning with the light of a dying star—gold, endless, ancient.
Nephis.
Or what the Shore had kept of her.
She was taller than he remembered. Older. Terrible.
Her armor fused to her skin in places.
Her hands ended in talons of bone and fire.
Great wings—real wings now, not petrified—rose behind her, white feathers edged with living flame.
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she smiled.
It was the same smile she had given him the day she decided to burn the world to save it.
Small.
Certain.
Unforgiving.
She opened her arms.
The fire followed her gesture, spreading like sunrise over black water.
"Hello, Sunny," she said, soft and terrible.
"I kept the fire warm for you."
Behind her, the staircase continued upward—red, endless, patient.
The first threshold was passed. The long climb had begun.
The Shore was awake.
The dead were angry.
And Changing Star had never forgiven him for surviving when she didn't.
—To be continued.