Three hundred seventy-one years after Sunny took the throne, the world below had forgotten it had ever been broken.
They called the quiet, silver-eyed watcher in the sky the Silent Guardian.
Children drew him as a tall shadow with kind hands.
Old Awakened whispered stories of the Last War, claiming the Guardian had once been human.
No one believed them anymore.
Then, one morning, the sky cracked.
Not dramatically. Just a hairline fracture, no wider than a finger, stretching from horizon to horizon, directly above the patch of ocean once known as the Forgotten Shore.
From the crack fell a single drop of black water. It hit the sea. And the sea screamed.
Far above, on the crooked throne floating in a garden of quiet stars, Sunny opened his eyes.
The child was no longer a child. Now a young man, silver streaking his hair, laughter in his voice, already standing on the armrest, staring down.
"That's new," the young man said.
Sunny rose. The void rippled around him like disturbed water. He peered through the crack.
Below, the Forgotten Shore—the place that should have been scoured clean when the worlds merged—was rising.
Not metaphorically. The entire cursed continent, drowned for centuries, clawed itself from the sea like a corpse refusing burial.
Black water cascaded off jagged cliffs that had once been the Labyrinth's walls.
The crushed Gate stood upright again, iron teeth grinning.
The Crimson Spire pierced the clouds, bleeding a slow red light.
And something moved inside the Spire. Something older than the Spell. Older than the Forgotten God. Older than Sunny himself.
A voice drifted up through the crack—wet, patient, full of rust and salt.
"Little liar… you only locked the door. You never threw away the key."
Sunny's hand tightened on the back of the throne.
The young man—once the child, once the fragment of Sunny that had stayed behind in the First Nightmare—looked at him with eyes that had seen four billion deaths and learned how to smile anyway.
"So," he said lightly, "family reunion?"
Sunny exhaled. The sound was wind over a graveyard.
"Looks like it."
He stepped off the throne. The garden of stars folded around him like wings.
Below, the Drowned Forgotten Shore waited—exactly as it had been the day he first crawled out of the slave caravan, only worse.
The water was black glass.
The sky a lid.
The air tasted of chains and old screams.
And somewhere in the dark, seven bells began to ring backward.
Sunny glanced once at the small, gentle world he had spent three centuries keeping safe. Then he looked at the young man.
"Tell Nephis and the others to keep the light on," he said.
The young man saluted with two fingers.
"Try not to die again. It's getting embarrassing."
Sunny smiled—small, tired, ancient.
"No promises."
Then he fell.
Straight down through the crack, coat snapping like a torn battle flag, shadow spreading behind him in seven vast wings.
The Forgotten Shore opened its arms to welcome its prodigal son home.
The water closed over his head without a splash.