The Black Sea did not carry sound.
Every footstep Sunny took was swallowed the instant it was born. No splash, no echo, no heartbeat. Only the wet, velvet silence of something that had already mourned the entire universe—and found it insufficient.
He walked.
The surface beneath his bare feet was warm, almost alive. It pressed up between his toes like a tongue tasting him. Every few hundred meters the texture shifted: sometimes smooth as oil, sometimes ridged like scar tissue, sometimes sharp with the edges of half-dissolved memories. Once he stepped on a child's shoe; the tiny bones crunched into dust that the sea drank greedily.
Islands drifted past.
A woman in a red dress stood on a frozen wedding cake, arms outstretched to a groom forever turning away.
A soldier knelt beside his squad, reloading a rifle with no magazine, tears cutting clean trails through blood on his cheeks.
An old man held a door open for someone who would never arrive.
Sunny did not look at their faces. Recognition only made the weight heavier.
The shadow cloak trailed behind him, spreading across the surface like spilled ink. Where it touched, the islands stilled. The looping tragedies paused mid-scream. For one merciful heartbeat, the dead were allowed to rest.
Then the cloak moved on, and the scenes resumed.
He walked for what might have been hours—or centuries. Time was a lie the Spell had told to keep children obedient. Without the Spell, everything happened at once and never.
Eventually, the islands grew fewer. The sea deepened, darkness below gaining weight, pressure, teeth. Something circled.
He felt it long before he saw it: a displacement, a cold current sliding against his calves. The shadow cloak bristled, spikes pointing downward like a startled cat.
Sunny stopped.
The surface bulged.
A shape rose slowly, deliberately, savoring the moment.
First came the antlers—black bone, fractal infinities, each tine tipped with a dying star.
Then the skull: long, equine, but wrong. Too many joints, too many eyes.
The neck followed, a column of segmented shadow wearing human faces like vertebrae. They opened their mouths at once.
A voice rolled out, layered, choral, intimate.
"Sunless."
His True Name, spoken aloud for the first time in four hundred years.
The creature finished rising. It towered thirty meters above the sea, yet its hooves made no ripple where they touched the surface. Between the antlers hung a broken crown of white flame, dripping upward into the bleeding sky.
Sunny knew this thing. He had killed it once.
[Corrupted Echo of the Forgotten God — The Seventh Prince of the Void]
[Former Rank: Divine]
[Current Rank: Dead, but dreaming]
The Prince lowered its great head. A hundred eyes the color of deep space stared into Sunny's own black ones.
"You devoured my heart," it said, almost fondly. "Do you remember the taste?"
Sunny's lips parted. The shadow cloak rippled, revealing glimpses of armor beneath—black plates grown from the carapace of the Nightmare Dragon he had murdered in the Red Colosseum, etched with the names of every Cohort member he had betrayed.
"I remember," he said. "It tasted like her scream when I lied and told her I'd come back."
The Prince laughed. A sound like a cemetery realizing no one is coming to visit anymore.
"Then let us finish the meal."
The sea exploded.
A forest of black spears erupted upward—lances forged from every promise Sunny had ever broken. They moved faster than thought, faster than regret. The shadow cloak surged to meet them, weaving a dome of darkness that drank the spears and spat them back as crows made of frozen screams.
The Prince moved. It stepped forward once, and the distance vanished. A hoof the size of a house descended where Sunny had been.
He was no longer there.
He stood on the Prince's back, between the antlers, fingers buried in the broken crown. White fire licked his skin and found nothing to burn. He pulled. The crown resisted, then tore free with a sound like the universe ripping along a seam.
The Prince screamed with ten thousand throats. Sunny leapt clear as the creature bucked and thrashed, white fire pouring from its skull like molten tears. Where the fire touched the sea, memories boiled away into nothing.
He landed lightly, crown now a circlet of frozen flame in his left hand. The Prince spun, antlers lowered like a charging bull.
Sunny raised his right hand.
The shadow cloak detonated outward. Seven colossal arms unfolded from his back—each forged from a different Saint he had murdered.
One arm wore Mordret's mirrored gauntlet.
One ended in Effie's broken shield.
One dripped Kai's starlight blood.
One held Nephis's burning heart, still beating.
The seventh arm was new. Made of Sunny himself—every version he had killed to survive, every lie he had become. The hand opened, palm forward.
The Prince charged.
The seventh arm caught its skull. For a moment they strained—Divine corpse against the last human, oblivion against oblivion.
Then Sunny spoke a single word. Not aloud. Inside the place where names lived.
The Prince froze. A hundred eyes widened.
"No," it whispered. "You can't—"
Sunny twisted the seventh arm. The Prince came apart. Not destroyed. Unmade. Every fragment of its essence—every stolen soul, every devoured god—was dragged screaming into the waiting darkness of Sunny's shadow. Antlers shattered into black snow. The crown in his hand went dark.
The sea drank what was left. Silence returned, deeper than before.
Sunny stood alone, breathing hard. The seventh arm dissolved back into his cloak, but its weight remained—a phantom heart beating against his ribs.
A new notification appeared, small and shy:
[You have consumed a Fragment of the Forgotten God.]
[Your True Name evolves.]
[You are one step closer.]
[Or one step further gone.]
He dismissed it. The circlet of frozen flame shrank until it was the size of a ring. He slipped it onto the smallest finger of his left hand. Cold as the void between stars.
He resumed walking.
The sea changed. The islands stopped showing strangers. Now every frozen scene was of him:
Sixteen-year-old Sunny kneeling in snow, begging Jet to teach him survival.
Nineteen-year-old Sunny watching Nephis burn the sky to save a city that would curse her name.
Twenty-five-year-old Sunny cutting Cassie's throat, prophecy claiming one must die so he could live.
Older versions. Worse versions.
He walked through them like a ghost.
An island held a Sunny on a throne of broken swords, wearing all seven crowns taken from Sovereigns' corpses. That Sunny looked up. Smiled with too many teeth.
"You're late," it said.
Real Sunny did not stop. The island fell behind.
The sea shallowed. Liquid shadow thinned until knee-deep, ankle-deep, then mirror-smooth, reflecting a sky that wasn't there.
Ahead, land rose—black sand and obsidian cliffs, waves of darkness crashing in slow motion.
The far shore. Beyond it, the Hollow Mountains waited: the spine of the world, where dead gods were buried and living ones came to die.
Sunny stepped onto sand. It screamed beneath his weight. Every grain was a soul that had tried to cross the Black Sea—and failed. They recognized him. Recognized what he had become.
He did not apologize.
At the top of the first cliff stood a gate. Not metal or stone. Made of Nephis—or what remained. Her body flayed into wings: white feathers edged with gold, stretched across a frame of her bones. Her arms formed the crossbar. Face as keystone, eyes burned out, mouth sewn shut with silver hair. Chains of divine flame anchored her to rock. They pulsed like arteries.
Sunny stopped. For a long moment, he only looked. Then he reached up and touched her cheek. Warm.
"I'm here," he said.
The sewn mouth twitched. A single tear of liquid fire rolled down beneath his fingers.
Sunny leaned forward, forehead pressed to hers.
"I know," he whispered. "I'm sorry."
He stepped back.
The shadow cloak rose like a tidal wave. One sweep of seven-armed silhouette tore the gate apart. Wings shredded. Bones snapped. Chains shattered, clanging to stone.
The remains of Nephis dissolved into motes of white fire, swirling once around him like a final embrace, then sank into his chest and were gone.
The way was open.
Beyond the broken gate, a path wound upward between cliffs of screaming stone. At its end, far above, something burned with a light that had no warmth.
Sunny started climbing.
Behind him, the Black Sea began to sing—a low, mournful note containing every name he had ever stolen.
He did not look back. There was nothing behind him anymore. Only ahead. Only the throne. Only the end.