The staircase ended in a single, perfect step.
Sunny placed his foot on it.
The world exhaled.
SFX: fwooom— (reality unfolding like a curtain of fire)
He stepped into the top floor.
It was not a room.
It was a moment—
a single, endless instant suspended between the last heartbeat of the old world and the first breath of the new.
White fire filled everything.
No walls.
No ceiling.
Only flame so pure it had texture—
like silk woven from light.
The heat was gentle.
Almost kind.
The way a mother's hand feels on a fevered brow.
It should have incinerated him.
Instead, it caressed the burns he had earned on the staircase, soothed the raw places where memory had flayed him.
The Throne of Ash and Bone
In the center of the fire sat a throne.
It was made of Nephis's own bones.
Her skeleton—charred black in places, white in others, cracked and fused by divine flame—sat upright, wings of living fire spreading from the shoulder blades like a burning cloak.
The skull was intact.
Eye sockets glowing soft gold.
The ribcage had been opened, shaped into armrests.
The spine curved into a high back.
The crossed legs rested on a mound of ash that still smoldered.
Nephis sat in it.
Not on it.
In it.
Her living body overlapped the skeleton—
flesh and bone double-exposed, real and unreal at once.
Where her arms touched the bone armrests, fire bled between the living skin and charred remains.
Her silver hair spilled over the throne's back, mingling with flames that moved like molten starlight.
She wore the same white armor she had died in—
only now it was part of her.
Plates fused to skin.
Cracks glowing with the fire that lived in her eyes.
She was beautiful.
She was terrible.
She was waiting.
When Sunny stepped fully into the chamber, the fire parted—
a perfect circle of clear space carved around him.
SFX: shuuum—! (flame withdrawing like a tide)
Nephis smiled.
It was the same smile she had given him in the cathedral the night she first asked him to stand with her.
Small.
Certain.
Unbreakable.
Tea of the Dead
"Sunny," she said, voice soft as ash settling.
"You're late."
She lifted a hand.
Between her fingers, a porcelain cup appeared—
white, unadorned, steaming gently.
The steam smelled like rain on old stone.
Like blood drying on steel.
Like laughter around dying campfires.
She offered it to him.
"Tea," she said. "I brewed it myself."
He knew what it was made of.
The ashes at the throne's feet shifted—
revealing fragments:
Effie's iron tooth.
Kai's starlight feather.
Cassie's blindfold thread.
Jet's frost crystal.
Mordret's mirror shard.
Their cohort.
Ground fine.
Steeped in fire.
Sunny took the cup.
His hand did not shake.
The porcelain was warm.
He drank.
SFX: gulp… gulp… fssshhh— (the drink dissolving inside him like warm flame)
It tasted like every promise he had ever broken.
Like every time he had chosen to live when they had chosen to die.
Like forgiveness he had never earned.
He drank it to the last drop.
The cup dissolved into white flame and slid back into the throne.
The Lie That Created a God
Nephis watched him with gentle, ancient eyes.
"You kept me waiting," she said.
"Four hundred years.
I counted every sunrise that never came."
She rose.
The throne rose with her—
bone and flesh moving in perfect unison.
She stepped forward until they were an arm's length apart.
The fire around her dimmed, as if the world were holding its breath.
She reached up.
Touched his cheek—
fingers of living flame brushing skin that had forgotten how to feel.
SFX: sssshhh— (flame cooling on contact)
"I burned for you," she whispered.
"I burned the world.
I burned myself.
I burned everything so you could live."
Her thumb traced a scar he had not worn four centuries ago.
"And you lived."
Her smile widened—
sad,
proud,
terrible.
"You lived without me."
She stepped back.
The throne of bones opened its arms.
"Sit," she said.
"The fire is warm now.
No more pain.
No more lies.
Only dawn."
Sunny looked at the throne.
At the ashes at its feet.
At the woman who had waited four hundred years to offer him peace at the price of everything else.
He took one step forward.
Then another.
The fire parted.
He stood before the throne.
Nephis watched him like a star watching its chosen comet return home.
He reached out.
His fingers brushed the bone armrest.
It was warm.
Alive.
Waiting.
He looked at her.
"I drank your tea," he said—
voice raw from centuries of silence and recent screaming.
She nodded, expectant.
"Then sit."
Sunny smiled—
small,
tired,
ancient.
"No," he said.
The word was soft.
The World Breaks
It shattered everything.
SFX: KRRRRRRRNNNNNNNG—!!! (reality cracking open)
The gentle fire roared.
The throne of bones screamed with Nephis's voice.
The top floor trembled like a dying sun.
Nephis's smile did not falter.
It only grew sadder.
"Then we do this the hard way," she said.
She sat back down in her throne of burned bones.
The fire rose—
hungry, wild, divine.
And the war that had waited four hundred years
finally began.