Effie's question had been about happiness, or the lack of it.
But in the end, it had always been about love.
But what is love about, anyway?
This question had already echoed endlessly inside her soft and merciless, like a single note played on a broken string. It had no single answer. It never did. And love changed its face with every heart that dared to look upon it, reshaping itself endlessly according to the eyes that beheld it, the wounds that received it, the hands that offered it.
To some, love was joy pure, simple, almost childish in its brightness. It was the warmth of shared laughter beneath a sky that had not yet decided to kill them. It was the quiet moment when Nephis's shoulders softened and her flame dimmed into something achingly tender as she watched Sunny's reluctant antics. It was Sunny's rare genuine smile that small, guarded curve of his lips when he watched Nephis struggle to maintain a conversation, like the first fragile ray of sunlight breaking through an eternal, devouring night.
But to others, love was the deepest cut imaginable.
It was betrayal wearing the gentlest mask of devotion.
The same hand that once held yours with trembling care became the hand that slipped a cold, unyielding collar around your neck. The promise whispered in the dark turned, by morning light, into a knife buried deep between your ribs, twisting slowly with every breath you struggled to take.
For Cassie, love had become the most twisted form of devotion.
She had betrayed Sunny out of love for Nephis. She had shattered the trust he once placed in her because her love for Nephis burned just a bit more fiercely to let her choose otherwise. And even now, she continued to betray them both again and again, with every quiet decision, precisely because she loved them so terribly.
She had become twisted. She knew it.
There was no other way left.
To protect them, she had to hurt them. To save them, she had to break them. To prove her love, she was forced to become the very thing they might one day hate.
And still, she loved them.
Terribly.
Desperately.
Endlessly.
In the end, everything was a matter of perspective.
Meaning came only from the mind of each individual. Even when there was a single truth, it could mean entirely different things to different hearts.
A kind act that caused ruin was not virtuous.
A cruel decision that preserved continuity was not evil.
Those words meant nothing outside of perspective.
Even as her love kept carving new wounds into the people she cherished most.
Everything depended on who was looking. On who was feeling. On who was bleeding.
Perception was the true architect of reality. It painted the world not with fixed, eternal colors, but with the ever-shifting hues of memory, fear, desire, and aching longing. Two people could stand side by side, gazing at the exact same horizon, and witness entirely different dawns, one seeing the radiant promise of a new beginning, the other drowning in the lingering pain of everything yesterday had stolen.
While others fought with shadows or flames, she waged a far lonelier war with visions that never granted her rest. She saw countless fragments of possible futures and shattered pieces of the past: endless branching paths, fragile moments, and silent turning points. She had to interpret every one of them, to understand how they had come to be, to weigh whether they should be allowed to happen or desperately prevented. She tasted every fleeting joy long before it could bloom, and witnessed every quiet tragedy before it took shape. And still she stood silent, radiant carrying the overwhelming weight of countless futures without ever letting them crush her completely.
Nothing was absolute.
Perhaps her understanding of love had been forged in the culmination of all the pain she had ever been forced to carry. Every vision. Every future. Every choice that left scars on souls she had never meant to hurt.
Even her True Name whispered of this cruel destiny. It marked her as the one destined to witness and forever carry the memories of those who would fall an immortal recorder of forgotten fates. A tragic, passive existence: forever seeing the downfall of others, forever bearing their stories, yet possessing so little power to truly change the ending.
And in the quiet depths of her being, the weight pressed heavier still.
After all, being Song of the Fallen did not mean someone was singing for her.
It only meant she was condemned to watch everyone else fall.
But who, then, was watching her?
Who was truly looking at her story?
And were they even capable of understanding what they saw?
Perhaps, after all, she was cursed by fate as well.
Perhaps the true curse had begun the day she spoke Sunny True Name to Nephis, that single, irreversible moment when her voice had shattered everything. A fatal mistake. A sin that would haunt her until the last breath left her body. It clung to her soul like a brand burned into living flesh, burning hotter with every passing vision, every future she was forced to witness.
She was merely reaping what she had sown in the blindness of her youth and love.
She had been so young then. So painfully naive.
She could not have known better or at least, that was what she told herself in the darkest hours of the night, when sleep refused to come and the memories pressed down like stones upon her chest.
Back then, she had believed there were only two paths before her: carry the crushing weight of knowledge alone, or share it and risk destroying everyone she loved. She had even said it to Sunny once, her voice trembling with the terrible truth she carried:
"You probably don't know. How could you know? But knowledge… knowledge can be really heavy. It can be as heavy as the heaviest thing in the world."
Those words still echoed inside her like a curse.
That choice still haunted her today. The sin would never fade. It would never be forgiven, not by the world, not by Sunny, and least of all by herself. Even if she were to fall to her knees and beg for forgiveness with every ounce of her broken heart, it would never be enough. He had never deserved any of all the pain she had inflicted upon him. None of it.
Sunny had never thanked her. He had never forgiven her.
And how could he?
He was still bound by the merciless chains of the Bond she herself had forced upon him chains forged from her fear, her ignorance, and her desperate need to protect what little light she had left.
Sometimes, in a corners of her mind, a small voice tried to defend her: if Sunny had given his True Name to anyone other than Nephis, he would have been even more miserable. Or he might already be gone. But that argument was useless.
Hollow.
It changed nothing. Because the truth was far crueler: she had taken the choice away from him.
She had stolen his freedom in the name of love.
Perhaps she should never have allowed herself to love him at all.
If her feelings for Sunny had been weaker, colder, or even laced with indifference, everything would have been so much simpler. She could have manipulated him without remorse. She could have used him as a tool, pulled the strings of his fate with steady hands and an empty heart. The guilt would not have eaten her alive. The chains she had forged around his neck would not have felt like knives twisting in her own chest.
But she loved him.
Terribly.
Desperately.
Endlessly.
She loved him so fiercely that every wound she inflicted on him tore her open twice as deep. She loved him so much that betraying him again and again felt like carving out her own heart with trembling fingers. She loved him so much that even the thought of not loving him seemed like the cruelest betrayal of all.
That was the real curse.
Her love for Sunny was both the source of all her suffering and half of the only reason she still kept walking through it the other half being her love for Nephis.
It was a cruel paradox.
The very thing that broke her every day was also what gave her the strength to endure. Two loves, intertwined like roots beneath scorched earth, kept her moving forward when everything inside her begged to stop. Sunny and Nephis the two flames that burned her alive and the only lights that kept her from surrendering to the dark.
Therefore she still flagellated her own heart without mercy, carving deeper wounds with every memory, every vision of his suffering. A corrosive self-hatred ate away at her from the inside, slow and relentless, like acid dripping onto raw flesh. And yet, even as she tore herself apart, she continued to offer them an unconditional love fierce, unreasonable, and far beyond anything she deserved to feel.
How many times had she tortured herself with the memory of pain blooming across Sunny's face? How many times had she relived the moment she shattered Nephis? She had seen it in her visions, felt it in her chest, understood every fracture it had carved into his soul.
For Nephis, the wound still lingered. She had accepted it in her own quiet, stubborn way, offering small gestures of friendship without reproach or hatred… yet Cassie knew it wasn't enough. It would never be enough.
For Sunny, the betrayal had cut deeper because it had come from her, one of the only two people he had ever dared to trust.
She would never ask him for forgiveness.
She was unworthy of it.
But she was only human.
She too suffered from her own choices.
She too made terrible, irreversible errors.
The weight of that knowledge pressed upon her chest until breathing itself became painful.
She had never asked for this.
She had once been just a normal girl, innocent, fragile, full of quiet dreams. She had wanted nothing more than to grow up beside her parents, to live a simple life, to fall in love one day, to grow old peacefully, to walk with those she loved until the very end. Nothing grand. Nothing heroic.
Just ordinary happiness.
But fate had decided otherwise.
And so the girl she once was had slowly disappeared, replaced by someone who carried chains, secrets, and endless regret. Every step forward made the burden heavier. The stronger she grew, the clearer the horror of the road ahead became. She realized how many lives she would have to touch, to twist, to sacrifice, to manipulate all in the desperate hope of saving as many as she could. Especially those who mattered most to her.
Every choice left new scars on her soul.
Every future she steered away from catastrophe demanded another piece of her humanity.
Still, she hoped against all reason and all justice, that one day he might look at her not with the eyes of the betrayed, but with the eyes of someone who understood that even the deepest wounds could sometimes be born from the deepest love.
When she looked back at her decision now, a myriad of better paths stretched before her in cruel clarity. The simplest one and the most difficult had always been to trust them. To explain everything. To share the unbearable burden of truth. To let Sunny and Nephis stand beside her instead of forcing to choose between them.
If only she had trusted them as much as she claimed to love them.
But she had chosen fear instead.
In her visions, she had seen it, Sunny and Nephis would eventually turn on each other. Shadows devouring a dying angel. That was the nightmare Cassie had feared most. The vision that had haunted her every waking moment.
She had believed she would be able to change it. That she could and must alter the course of their fate. That if she didn't intervene, if she didn't influence, if she didn't twist the future with her own hands, everything would end in ruin.
Yet in the end, with a heart torn in two and tears she refused to not choose, therefore she had chosen Nephis.
She had sacrificed Sunny to save Nephis.
She had chosen to betray him, bind him, break his trust all because she was convinced that if she didn't act, Sunny would swallow Nephis whole and leave nothing but ashes behind.
When she looked back with clear eyes, Sunny had made only two mistakes mistakes that weren't really mistakes at all.
And yet, unconsciously, selfishly, she had still chosen to sacrifice him for them.
The first had happened long ago, in the early days of the Forgotten Shore. When Nephis had given her hope and Sunny had coldly said, "Why are you burdening yourself with her?"
She had heard every word, lying awake in the dark, her heart shattering in silence.
But now she could understood. If she had been in Sunny's place carrying the same burdens, the same fear, the same exhaustion, she would have thought the exact same thing. Why risk everything for a useless, blind girl he had barely met? She loved him enough to understand him. And in the end, Sunny had proven that he changed with his actions, not his words. He had plunged into the Black Waters of the Forgotten Shore for her. He could have left her behind. Instead, he had risked his life to save her.
The second mistake was when she had asked him: "Can you promise that you'll take care of Neph? No matter what?"
His answer had been painfully honest:
"I can't. I can barely take care of myself."
How could he have answered differently back then?
He had been weak, distrustful, barely surviving. He couldn't lie not because he was noble, but because of his Flaw. Cassie hadn't known at the time, but she had her suspicions. With nothing else to do but listen and think, every hesitation, every careful choice of words, every raw truth he spoke had echoed loudly in her mind. She had pieced it together slowly, guessing the nature of his Flaw long before she ever confirmed it.
That brutal honesty had convinced her more than anything else.
At the time, it had felt like proof.
But as time passed, she realized how little weight those words should have carried.
None of it had happened the way she feared.
The nightmare she had foreseen never unfolded.
Sunny and Nephis had never truly turned on each other. Shadows had not devoured the dying angel. Instead, the exact opposite had occurred. Nephis had been ready to stay in the Dream Realm, to let herself being devoured away, to sacrifice everything away just to protect Sunny the only one who had finally made her feel something softer than duty.
And the cruelest part the one that made her want to scream until her throat bled was that Sunny had never truly wanted to kill Nephis.
Of course he hadn't.
He had fought her, yes, lost in rage but once his mind cleared and the anger faded, he knew deep down that he could never truly harm Nephis.
He had been ready to stay with her. To stand beside her. To remain trapped in the Dream Realm if that was what it took to be with her.
He had chosen Nephis, just as fiercely as Nephis had chosen him.
But Cassie had prevented it.
She had forced Nephis's hand, giving her Sunny's True Name and leaving her no other choice but to use it. In doing so, Nephis had been forced to enslave the man she loved the one who had slowly begun to thaw the ice around her heart.
And it was because of that very love that Nephis had chosen to stop him from staying.
Sunny had wanted to remain by her side out of love.
Nephis had wanted him to leave her side out of love.
And Cassie… Cassie had hurt them both out of love.
It had always been about love.
That single act had entangled the destinies of all three of them a sin that could never be undone, a knot that tied their fates together in pain and blood.
And because of her mistake, she had broken the two people she loved most.
The realization that her fear had been wrong that she had broken both of them for a future that never came to pass shattered something fundamental inside her.
Therefore in the deepest, darkest corners of her mind, a terrible thought had begun to take root:
Perhaps, at the end of it all, she deserved to die.
If everyone else could finally be happy if Sunny and Nephis could finally march and be together without her shadow falling across their path, then maybe, maybe her death was the only fitting conclusion. Either as the ultimate sacrifice required to reach that bright ending, or at the hands of the one she had wronged the most.
She could imagine it clearly.
She could see herself standing before Sunny, unarmed and unresisting, as his shadows rose around her.
She could feel the cold edge of his blade, or the silent grip of his darkness closing around her throat. And in that final moment, she would not fight. She would not beg. She would simply turn her face toward him with all the love she had never been allowed to speak aloud and accept it gladly.
While smiling.
Because she loved him.
If he decided her life held no worth, then perhaps it was true.
She had caused him too much pain. She had taken too much from him. Who was she to cling to a life she had stained with betrayal?
She only hoped, with the last few fragile scraps of her broken heart that if he chose to end her, he would let her live long enough to guide them safely to the destination she had envisioned. Just long enough to push them across the final threshold where he and Nephis could be together for good.
After that, he could take whatever remained of her. She would offer it willingly.
Because in the end, her love for them had always been greater than her fear of death.
But she was not willing to give her place to anyone else. Not in this story. Not in any of them.
She would not step aside while she still had breath and sight and the capacity to fight for what she loved. She would not let another person carry what she had chosen to carry, for the simple reason that no one else understood what it cost. No one else had seen what she had seen. And if bearing it alone meant becoming a vile witch, a traitor, the unforgivable one, then she would wear that title until the very end. Until there was nothing left of her to wear anything at all.
Until that day came, she would keep walking.
Carrying the weight of every choice, every betrayal, every unspoken apology that would never be enough.
She had tried, in desperate earnest, to prevent every horrible future she had witnessed.
She could not allow Nephis to become that hollow woman. She could not allow her best friend to transform into an empty thing without emotion, a perfect machine of purpose that moved through the world with cold precision but felt nothing. The simplest thought of seeing Nephis like that sent violent tremors through her entire body. Her chest would tighten until breathing hurt. Her hands would shake uncontrollably.
She wanted Nephis to achieve her vengeance.
She wanted her to reach every goal she had burned for since the beginning.
But more than anything, she wanted her to achieve them while still being able to smile at the end.
To have someone she could rest with.
To have someone she could smile with.
To have someone she could create something real and warm with.
And that someone had always been Sunny.
It had always been him.
And could only be him.
Ah.
How could two people be this perfectly made for each other?
And yet, she had tried to choose. In her fear, she had tried to save one by sacrificing the other.
How foolish she had been.
She finally understood her mistake with brutal clarity, she could not choose one without destroying them both. If she saved Nephis by sacrificing Sunny, she would only be inflicting upon her best friend the exact same wound she was desperately trying to prevent, the unbearable pain of losing the person she loved most. She would turn Nephis into the hollow shell she feared not by taking her flame, but by tearing Sunny away from her.
She had been wrong from the very beginning.
She could not choose Nephis over Sunny.
She could not choose Sunny over Nephis.
She had to choose them both.
Or she would lose them both.
How could the universe craft two souls so precisely that separating them felt like tearing the same heart in half?
She had watched them across countless futures clashing, hurting each other with words sharper than any blade, drifting apart only to be pulled back together by a force stronger than fate itself. Their bond was not gentle. It was not kind. It was raw, agonizing, and breathtakingly beautiful. When they were together, even the cruelest world seemed to soften at the edges for a moment. When they were apart, the emptiness that followed was worse than death.
She had seen what happened when their love was severed.
The mere memory of those futures made fresh nausea rise in her throat.
When Nephis fell and Sunny remained, the descent was absolute.
If the Sovereigns did not kill him or enslave him, if he somehow survived and clawed his way to victory, Sunny became something far worse than dead. He did not rage against the world. He did not seek vengeance. Instead, he simply lost all shape.
He became something formless.
A shadow without edges, without center, without any remaining trace of the man he once was.
He drifted through existence like a broken current sometimes merciful, sometimes cruel, sometimes utterly indifferent.
All without reason.
All without logic.
One moment he would slaughter lives by the dozens human or nightmare with cold, mechanical precision. The next he would shield a dying human from monsters, or guide lost survivors through the ruins of civilization, helping them rebuild a fragile shelter… only to suddenly stop, stare blankly at his own hands, and walk away as if he no longer understood what he had been doing.
Savior and destroyer in the same breath.
Kindness and slaughter woven together without warning.
Making the Mad Prince seem almost merciful by comparison.
He was no longer Sunny.
He was absence given movement a living void wearing the face of the man who had once dared to dream.
There was no morality left. No purpose. No hatred. No mercy.
Only motion.
Only the hollow continuation of a life that had lost its reason to exist.
A shadow that had lost its owner.
And the world, as if mocking the depth of his loss, kept sending him echoes. Whenever he saw a woman with silver hair that caught the light like Nephis's once had, or eyes that burned with even a fraction of her flame, or a voice carrying the faintest trace of her quiet steel, each resemblance tore him open. But the differences tore him even deeper. Because everything was measured against her. Every touch, every word, every face was compared, judged, and found lacking. He was forever trapped in an endless, agonizing comparison, centered entirely on the one person who was no longer there.
He remained incomplete a half-soul forever reaching for the missing piece that would never return.
When Sunny was the one taken from the world, Nephis did not fall into monstrosity.
She simply stopped being human.
She remained precise, efficient, terrifyingly powerful. Her flames still burned bright healing, protecting, guiding entire armies with flawless clarity. But the girl who had once burned with passion, with fury, with quiet moments of warmth, had vanished entirely. What remained was something far more terrifying than a monster.
She had become a true goddess in the cruelest sense of the word: benevolent, radiant, magnificent, and all-powerful, yet utterly devoid of humanity. There was no anchor left in her, no fragile mortality to weigh her down. She moved through the world like a perfect, untouchable flame, beautiful beyond measure, worshipped by many, feared by others, but completely empty inside.
Her eyes held no emotion.
No spark.
No depth.
There were no more smiles. No laughter. No flicker of joy, even in the greatest victories.
She achieved her goals with merciless accuracy, yet every triumph passed through her like wind through empty halls.
No one could reach her. Not Kai with his gentle charm. Not Effie with her boisterous love. Not even Cassie herself, in the futures where their bonds ran deepest. They could stand beside her, speak to her, offer everything they had and Nephis would respond with the same calm, distant courtesy she gave to strangers.
Her heart had become unreachable, sealed behind walls of perfect, icy absence.
Her flames could soothe the world, but nothing, nothing, could soothe the void where Sunny had once lived inside her.
She was not cruel.
She was not mad.
She was simply gone.
When she was forced to share her life with someone else, to lie beside another body in the night, there was nothing. No pleasure. No warmth. No sense that anything special was happening. It was merely another moment, another task, another breath in an existence that had lost all color.
But in every future where both still breathed, they found their way back. They realigned. They burned together. They were each other's half, irreplaceable, undeniable, eternal in their fragile, ferocious bond. They were inevitable. They were fated. They were two halves of the same wounded soul, drawn together by a force older and stronger than the Spell itself.
No one else would ever be enough. No one else could ever fill the wound.
And Cassie, carrying the unbearable beauty and terror of that truth inside her silent heart, loved their story more than she could bear.
Even as she sometimes had to help tear it apart.
Perhaps, in another life or in a kinder story, she might have been allowed to burn brightly instead of eternally extinguishing herself for the sake of others. In that gentler tale, she could have defied fate, shattered the cruel chains of destiny, and embraced her love for Sunny with all the fire and desperate hunger of her heart.
She had imagined it, of course she had. She had let herself dream, in the darkest hours of the night, of Sunny looking at her with the same tenderness and devotion he reserved for Nephis.
She had felt the sting of jealousy, sharp, shameful, undeniable.
How could she not be envious of what Nephis had? How magnificently those two souls fit together. But she would never rewrite Nephis out of their story. Not in this one. Never.
She may become a witch in the eyes of the world, but she refused to trample on the only love that still shone pure and true in this broken world. Their love was sacred. Their bond was not hers to steal, nor to rewrite. The mere thought of erasing Nephis's name to replace it with her own felt abject. Unforgivable.
So yes, in another story, perhaps, she could have embraced her love for him freely. But this was not that story. This was the story where she had to remain the silent flame that burned only to keep theirs alive. The one where the Song of the Fallen continued to extinguish herself so that their light could endure.
That love for Sunny ran to depths that felt almost unbearable, so vast, so absolute, so all-consuming that few could begin to imagine it, let alone understand it.
To most people, love meant only Eros the fierce, possessive flame that consumed whatever it desired.
But Cassie embodied something far more tragic.
She carried all four ancient faces of love inside her at once, and each one cut her in a different way.
Philia — the noble, joyful love of friendship that celebrated the other exactly as they were. Even when Sunny offered no reciprocation, even when his silence cut like glass, she chose to overlook it. For her, true friendship was a virtuous mirror: through it, one saw oneself clearly, in all one's naked truth, and thus found a fragile kind of peace. Sunny remained that mirror for her cold, silent, unforgiving yet she still looked into it every day.
Agape — the universal, charitable love that drew no line between friend and enemy. She loved the human in every being with a disarmed, almost foolish generosity. One did not choose whom to love, one simply loved, even when that neighbor had every reason to hate her.
Storge — that quiet, stable, protective love born from long familiarity and shared existence. Gentle yet steadfast. Forged in accumulated trials, long silences, and unspoken sacrifices. A love that did not shout, that demanded nothing, but watched tirelessly over the other like a faithful shadow in the darkest night.
And above them all burned Eros — the most dangerous and consuming. She loved Sunny precisely because he was what she was missing. She was drawn inexorably toward the very void he left in her soul. It was the kind of love that chose and burned, that consumed everything it touched, that made her into the sole judge in the silent courtroom of his existence. His name was the verdict she could never appeal.
Day after day, night after night, she destroyed the beginnings of futures that threatened them. She had spent years watching fragments of possibilities, learning how they branched and converged, how a single word or silence could shift the course of their lives. Even when the visions were incomplete, she analyzed them, crossed them, compared them, searching for the exact moments that would lead to their unhappiness.
She chose the lesser evils.
She made terrible decisions.
But no matter how heavy the cost, it would never be as devastating as the futures she prevented, the ones where they lost each other forever.
She did it for them. Always for them.
With Philia that celebrated their sharp edges.
With Agape that forgave even their hatred
With Storge that guarded them in silence.
With Eros that burned her alive from the inside.
She loved them so completely that she was willing to become the villain of their story if it meant they could one day be happy.
She was Cassandra of the old myths, but worse at least Cassandra's curse meant no one believed her.
Cassie had the opposite burden: she knew the truth, and the only way to prevent the catastrophe was to become the villain.
Even if that happiness would never include her.
They had threaded themselves so deeply into the fabric of her soul that the simple thought of unraveling either of them felt like the most exquisite, unbearable pain she could ever imagine as if someone were slowly pulling her heart out through her ribs while she remained conscious to feel every tear.
The original reason had lost its meaning long ago. She no longer remembered exactly why she had first chosen this path. All she knew was that she could not lose them. Not simply because they were the people she loved most in this cruel world but because they had become the very reason her story became what it was today. They were indistinguishable from her reason for still being alive. They were the only certainty she had left when everything around her was wrong.
They were right when the entire world felt wrong.
She never questioned why she did this for them. She never questioned the depth of what she was willing to sacrifice. She had grown addicted to them to the mere thought of them, to the ache of wanting to speak about them, to the quiet comfort of carrying their names inside her chest like sacred flames. She cared about them more than they would ever realize. She appreciated them more than they would ever think possible.
She refused to kneel to her past.
She refused to let it write their story for them.
She would carve a path for them, even if her hands bled doing it.
So, yes, Effie.
Of course she loved Sunny.
What kind of question was that?
But she wondered if she were to ask them would they cradle her pain?
Would even a simple "thank you" be enough to save what little remained of her?
And yet, would she even want them to recognize what she was doing?
She no longer knew.
Perhaps she would be fine staying the horrible witch in their eyes.
The vilest creature who had stolen Sunny's life, shattered his dreams, enslaved him with her own trembling hands.
Perhaps it was easier that way to remain the monster, rather than beg for understanding she didn't deserve.
Still, she hoped, selfishly, that one day, the future versions of them would feel the weight of every sacrifice she was making right now.
Every night she had resisted the pull of the abyss. Every time she had chosen to keep walking when all she wanted was to fall.
Or perhaps, if she eventually gave her life for their happiness, she wished that they might still remember her.
Speaking of her with quiet fondness. Leaving flowers on her grave.
She was allowed to hope for that small, foolish thing… right?
If only she could be brave enough or stupid enough to let them see themselves through her eyes.
In these same eyes that had witnessed every possible future and still chose to steal so many of theirs, they would finally understand the depth of her love.
They would see why she was willing to break herself apart, to become hated, to become the monster just so they could reach the ending they deserved.
But she didn't want their pity.
She never had.
She did it all for them.
Even if they never knew.
And so Cassie kept walking, silent, radiant, and utterly alone carrying the unbearable weight of loving them both.
Therefore she wanted to destroy Fate itself.
Not because she hated the world, but because Fate was the true culprit behind all their suffering. It was Fate that had forced her hand, twisted her love into betrayal, and written such a merciless story for the only two people who mattered to her. If she could burn the entire tapestry of fate to ashes, she would set the match without a single moment of hesitation.
She had already prepared the match.
She would make Sunny [Fateless].
She would cut the invisible threads that bound him to the cruel wheel of predestination, freeing him from every prophecy, every predetermined path, every chain the Spell had woven around his soul. It was the greatest gift she could imagine giving him and the greatest betrayal she had left to commit.
She knew exactly what it would cost.
She would just have to betray him again.
Because once Sunny became [Fateless], the world would forget him. Everyone who had ever known him, friends, enemies, even she herself, but most importantly Nephis, would lose every memory of his existence. He would vanish from the tapestry of fate like a thread pulled from a loom, leaving nothing but a gaping, nameless hole behind. Again, she would hurt them. Again, she would be forced to break them. The knowledge of it sat in her chest like something calcified too familiar by now to surprise her, but no less heavy for being familiar.
And yet she had not told him the truth.
Instead, she had spent months, no, entire years, meticulously crafting the perfect illusion of choice. She had guided every conversation, gently steered every coincidence, and sometimes used far more brutal methods, like what she had done with Mordret, to ensure that when the moment came, Sunny would believe he had chosen this path himself. That he had decided, of his own free will, to destroy the Fate that had tormented them all. That she may have given him the chance, but he had made the choice by himself.
She had orchestrated everything with cold precision and a bleeding heart.
Every subtle deviation in their talks, every seemingly random encounter, every calculated risk, all of it had been part of a single, terrifying plan. A plan to free him. A plan to save them both.
Even now, as the final pieces slowly fell into place, Cassie felt the familiar weight crushing her chest.
She was about to commit the greatest betrayal of all.
Not out of fear this time.
Out of love.
For she had seen what waited at the end of all the other paths she had foreseen. And this was the only way she had found to spare them from something far worse.
And in the quiet depths of her soul, she whispered the same painful truth she had carried for years:
She would rather be hated and forgotten by him than watch him remain a slave to Fate forever.
And now, everything was falling apart.
He was really, truly, infuriatingly annoying.
How vexing.
She had spent years, years, weaving this intricate, painful plan. She had sacrificed pieces of her soul, manipulated events, twisted coincidences, and carried the weight of countless betrayals, all for him. All so he could finally become [Fateless]. All so he could destroy the cruel wheel of Fate that had trapped them from the very beginning.
And now, with one single conversation, he had ruined everything.
Sunny had decided to confess to Nephis.
He had chosen to open his heart to her, to accept what had always been there between them. After all the fear, all the anger, all the bitter misunderstandings and silent wounds a simple, honest conversation had solved nearly everything.
Just like that.
Ah...
They really were idiots, those two.
It was always like this. Their words rarely aligned most of the time they spoke past each other, pride and pain turning every conversation into another battlefield. But when their hearts finally synced, when the walls cracked even for a moment, it was exactly like this. One quiet exchange was enough to bridge nearly the entire abyss between them.
She had stopped it before.
Many times.
She had diverted, interrupted, created distractions at the exact right moment to keep that conversation from ever happening.
But not this time.
This time, it had slipped through her fingers.
And now everything she had carefully built, every sacrifice, every calculated move, every future she had tried to steer, was crumbling because two stubborn souls had finally decided to talk to each other.
Because of that, her plan was collapsing.
He wouldn't go to the Estuary willingly anymore.
He would never reach the Well of Wishes.
He would never walk the long, painful path she had so carefully laid out for him.
Instead, he would stay. He would believe in Nephis. He would choose to fight beside her, to trust her completely, to love her openly.
And Cassie was completely, utterly, painfully screwed.
She sat in silence, feeling the weight of all her carefully laid plans crumbling around her like sand. Every sacrifice, every calculated risk, every night she had spent crying in secret all of it had become meaningless in the span of a single conversation.
She should have been happy for them.
Of course, a part of her was happy for them, the part that had always loved them both too much for her own good, the part that had watched them move toward each other across countless futures and felt something sacred in the seeing of it.
But another part, the tired, exhausted, bitterly honest part, could only think:
After everything I did.
After everything I broke.
After I was ready to let the world forget him.
That happened now?
She let out a soft, trembling breath, somewhere between a laugh and a sob.
They really were made for each other.
And she was left standing alone once again, watching her grand, desperate plan to destroy Fate dissolve into nothing because two idiots had finally decided to talk to each other.
How terribly inconvenient.
How painfully, perfectly typical of them.
She wasn't even angry.
Not really. It was simply that the future now unfolding before her was terrible.
Sunny would not become [Fateless]. He would not be forgotten. He would not disappear from the tapestry of fate like a thread pulled free.
Instead, the two Sovereigns would openly go to war. The third would expand his influence even faster, accelerating his terrifying descent into something far worse than madness. Sunny and Nephis would be forced to shoulder the burden of protecting what remained of humanity, fighting tooth and nail just to survive. Sunny would have to keep carrying the curse of being [Fated], forever chained to the cruel script written for him. He would have to find a way alone or with Nephis to slow down or somehow prevent the return of the Forgotten God.
All of it. Still waiting for them. And so much more besides.
Cassie closed her eyes for a long moment, letting the weight of this new reality settle over her like cold ash.
All her years of planning. All the betrayals. All the quiet nights spent carving her own heart into pieces so he could finally be free and in the end, nothing had changed.
The wheel of fate kept turning exactly as it always had. Only now, the path ahead looked even darker, even heavier, even more exhausting.
Sunny would still have to suffer.
Nephis would still have to burn.
And she would still have to watch, and work, and break herself apart for them.
What a tremendous, exhausting, heartbreaking pain in the ass it all was.
...
She remained there for a long moment, adrift.
She already knew the question that was about to come.
Yet she lingered in the vast sea of futures that would never come to pass fragments of a world already rewritten by her own trembling hands.
She always lingered longer than she should have.
She always did.
In some formless, drifting part of her awareness, she was already elsewhere suspended between what was and what could have been, between this dining room on the Chain Breaker and the countless mornings she had watched without being able to touch, without being allowed to change. The light was different in visions. Softer, somehow. Colder. She had spent so long moving through those other lights that sometimes the real one felt foreign by comparison.
She drifted in them, quiet and weightless, until —
"Cassie?"
Sunny's voice reached her from somewhere close familiar, carrying the faint, uncertain concern of someone who has been saying a name too many times without receiving an answer.
She blinked slowly.
She gathered herself back into it the creak of the ship beneath them, the smell of breakfast going cold on the table, the weight of her blindfold against her skin.
Effie's laughter still faintly echoing in her heads.
"Sorry," she murmured softly, a faint, tired smile touching her lips. "I was, lost for a moment."
Before Sunny could answer, something shifted in the quality of the space around them.
She was connected to Sunny she always had been, in ways that predated words and arrangements and every terrible choice she had made and through that connection she felt it.
Then light and casual as ever. Dripping with familiar mocking sweetness. Not a voice that anyone else present could hear. A voice she had despised since the day she first heard it the one that whispered poison into the mind of the person she had spent years trying to protect. It amplified everything. Every doubt, every mistake, everything, even AMoment of Weakness. It whispered that he deserved to suffer, that he was unworthy, that he should carry even more guilt than he already did. It fed on him constantly, twisting his thoughts, deepening his fear, making sure he never allowed himself even a moment of peace.
She hated it.
She hated it with every quiet, patient fiber of her being.
It was vile.
It was necessary.
And she hated it.
"Yo. Long time no see."