The eighth floor shattered.
Salt became knives of light.
The frozen sunrise bled molten gold across the sky.
The kneeling Saints were gone—only their absence remained, a hollow ringing in the air.
Nephis stood in the center.
Wings of living flame spread wide.
Eyes burning with something older than grief.
Sunny walked past her.
He did not look back.
She spoke once.
Voice soft.
Terrible.
"Then you are an enemy of the new dawn."
The words were not loud.
They were absolute.
The Spire heard.
Every floor below answered.
The war began.
**SFX: CRRRACK—stairs splintering, salt shattering, floors folding into themselves **
The staircase beneath Sunny's feet buckled.
The eighth floor collapsed upward—salt and light and broken dawn rushing like a tidal wave of judgment.
He ran.
The staircase became slope, then wall, then storm.
Floors fell in sequence—seventh, sixth, fifth—each shattering into weapons.
SFX: SHATTER… WHOOSH… CLANG…—shards of inside-out sky, burning books, screaming mirrors.
They chased him.
He climbed one-handed.
Shadow coiling beneath his feet.
Backwards fingers digging into stone that became lava, then ice, then memory.
The Crimson Terror returned.
Fully grown now.
Fifty meters tall.
Seven fused corpses braided into a single nightmare.
Nephis's face at the center.
Gold eyes weeping fire.
The others orbiting her like planets of grief.
Wings of broken halos spread wide enough to blot out the red sky.
It spoke with seven voices braided into one.
"Father."
Sunny laughed.
Raw.
Broken.
Free.
He met it on a fragment of the seventh floor still falling upward.
They fought while the Spire died around them.
The Terror's sword—Nephis's blade, grown monstrous—carved a canyon through the air.
Sunny ducked under it.
Shadow arms unfolded—seven colossal forms, each a screaming face of the cohort.
They wrapped the young man, crushed, tore.
He shattered them like smoke.
Light poured from his fists, his eyes, his mouth.
He fought with the fury of every century trapped in the First Nightmare.
With grief for every time survival had outweighed love.
With the rage of the child who had been saved—only to watch his savior walk back into hell.
A punch to the face peeled skin to bone.
He answered with a shadow spear that pierced Cassie's blindfolded face, carrying her scream into the void.
The Terror caught him by the throat with six hands.
Lifted him.
Mordret's mirrored eyes reflected every lie he had ever told.
Jet's frost spread across his skin.
The shadow-Sunny at the center opened its mouth and spoke with his own voice:
"You always wanted this," it said.
"To be the monster. To be done."
Sunny laughed harder.
Cried harder.
Burned.
He drove his one hand into the Terror's chest—straight through the fused sternum.
Found the heart.
The real heart.
The piece of Nephis that had never let go.
He wrapped his fingers around it.
And pulled.
The Terror screamed with seven voices.
The Spire screamed with it.
Then light—white, gold, pure—erupted from the collapsing floors below.
Ash.
She rose on wings of living flame—body gone, only bone and fire and will.
A spear of her own melted ribs in her hands.
She flew.
Straight into the Terror's heart.
The spear punched through.
Ash hung there, burning, smiling.
The Terror froze.
Ash looked down at Sunny.
Eyes twin suns.
Face Nephis's—seventeen and ancient.
"Tell Grandmother…" she whispered, voice soft as ash.
"I chose my own fire."
Then she detonated.
White-gold fire consumed the Terror from the inside.
Seven faces screamed—grief, release, love.
Halos shattered.
Fused corpses came apart.
They did not die.
They dissolved.
Into light.
Into peace.
Ash's fire poured into Sunny—willing, warm, accepted.
He opened his chest and let her in.
For the first time in four centuries, he took a soul without murder.
Her flame settled beside Nephis's—two fires, mother and daughter, finally together.
Warm. Not consuming.
The Spire stopped collapsing.
Silence fell.
Sunny floated in the wreckage of floors.
One-armed.
Bleeding starlight and dawn.
He looked up.
The final staircase waited—red stone.
Endless.
Patient.
Nephis's voice drifted down.
Soft.
Terrible.
"Top floor, Sunny."
A pause.
"Just you and me."
He smiled—small, tired, unafraid.
"Like it should have been," he answered.
Then he started climbing.
Ash's flame burned steady in his chest.
The war was not over.
But it had changed.
To be continued.