"I never wanted this."
Her voice came out wrong too soft, too thin, stripped of every layer of certainty she had spent years forging. It sounded like it belonged to someone else.
Someone small.
Someone afraid.
She hated how it trembled. But she let it, this once. She let it.
Her fingers curled tightly in her lap, because the next words felt like they were being dragged out of her with hooks.
"Not like this. Not with you."
She stayed silent for a long moment, her gaze fixed on the floor.
"I'm bad with words," she finally said. "You already know that but I… I was always, I was scared, when I was little. I never knew my mother. I lost my father. I lost everything else." She paused. "My grandmother. My feelings. And I don't think I'll ever truly heal from that. That's why I'm so inept at explaining myself properly."
She swallowed hard, her fingers tightening around the edge of her sleeve.
"I don't have many happy memories from that time. As a child, I could only pray to live another day. I prayed every night that my grandmother wouldn't disappear. She was, she was extraordinary. I was so weak, so useless, and she was my only happiness. My only ally. I grew up in a house that was far too big and far too empty for someone as small as I was. She was my anchor. The only person who kept me safe from everyone who wanted me gone."
Her voice cracked just once, barely audible.
"She was the reason I didn't break completely. At that time, I spent every day trying to destroy every piece of weakness inside myself. Weakness is my sin. I still believe that... And I couldn't allow myself to fail, to rest, to lose what was mine ever again. I needed to be strong." She let out a slow, unsteady breath. "But I don't think that mentality was something I should have carried. Not if I ever wanted to be… normal. But I just wanted so badly to be strong without care for the cost."
A trembling exhale.
"It numbed a lot of things in me. I lost count of how many hours I spent training, exhausting myself until my hands bled and my body simply stopped moving. I couldn't sleep at night, the nightmares wouldn't allow it. My mind was remarkable at conjuring new variations of the same horrors, again and again, until I learned to train through them rather than lie awake inside them."
Nephis was quiet for a moment, her gaze distant.
"My grandmother was the one who gave me my love for music. It's one of my fondest memories of her she believed it was normal for a girl my age to be curious about many things. She tried so hard to give me everything I never had the chance to experience. She studied magazines, asked about other people's daughters for reference, brought me drawing supplies, toys, films… anything she thought might bring a little light into my life."
A faint, bittersweet smile touched her lips. "Nothing really stuck for long. I was too restless, too focused on becoming stronger. But music was different. Music was the one thing that stayed."
She paused, then added, quietly: "And no — I never asked for Kai's autograph. Even if I did wanted one."
Something almost wry moved across her face, brief as a shadow.
"When she finally saw that I had found something I loved that wasn't a sword, she was overwhelmed. She learned everything she could about it, learned more songs than I could count, brought me recordings, talked about composers the way she talked about history. She was perhaps a little overwhelming, even for me." The almost-smile faded. "When I first arrived at the Academy, I had a pair of headphones with me. One of the last gifts she ever gave me. I used them almost every day."
Nephis finally looked at Sunny, her voice quiet and steady.
"She wanted me to have something beautiful in my life. Something that wasn't only about survival or strength. And somehow, she succeeded."
Her eyes glistened, but she refused to let the tears fall. Not yet.
"My grandmother was the only voice that could reach me. She soothed me to sleep. She cooked the most extraordinary meals. Nearly everything I know, history, science, mathematics, the old stories… came from her. She was a simple mundane, with no power at all. And yet she was the strongest person I have ever known. She was my everything. My model. My whole life revolved around her."
She looked up at Sunny, and her eyes were very bright.
"And when she died… I felt like the last light in my world had gone out."
A slow, shaky breath.
"I became… detached. I stopped feeling the things I used to feel. I stopped pretending. I stopped forcing myself to look at my mother as if she were still… my mother. She was nothing more than a corpse to me. A hollow shell that used to hold someone I never truly knew. The grief, the longing, even the fear. I had some retainers, some acquaintances but I closed my heart to all of it. I told myself I didn't need anything else. That I was fine. That I should simply grow stronger."
She gave a small, broken smile.
"I really hate the Spell. As if my suffering wasn't enough for my First Nightmare, it made me live the life I never had. Everything I ever wanted as a little girl. A warm home. A mother who smiled. A father who stayed." The smile vanished. "And my Second Nightmare showed me that all the strength I had built, all the pride I carried was worth nothing."
She paused.
"Sorry. I already told you that."
Nephis looked down at her hands.
"It's just the world really does seem to hate me. Even my Attributes keep reminding me of it." She let out a fragile breath. "You know I once found two beings nailed to an ancient tree, during my time in the Dream Realm. I was lost. Desperate. I speak to them to understand if they could help me find a way out."
Her eyes glistened faintly.
"One called himself the King of Kings, the Plague of Steel, the Mighty Azarax, conqueror of a hundred thrones." A pause. "The second insulted me first called me revolting and then mentioned casually that he had once split the throat of a god."
"So I chose him as my guide," she said quietly. "Simply because… I thought of you."
A small, self-deprecating smile touched her mouth.
"It seems I, too, am not always the most rational when it comes to decisions. Choosing someone purely because he reminded me of you it was fairly foolish."
Her voice softened further.
"But you know I've already told you this. You became something that kept me sane. Every day was a question of survival. I was alone, truly and utterly alone. But thinking of you imagining your life, your progress, your stubbornness it was my only—"
She stopped.
Something moved across her face, a hesitation she hadn't expected.
Her lips pressed together for a moment.
"My only happiness," she finished, carefully. "No one else, Sunny. Only you."
She let that sit between them before continuing, and when she did, her voice had gone somewhere quieter and more private, the way it did when she was saying something she had turned over many times before allowing it out.
"I am glad I met you. I know that is a simple thing to say after everything that has preceded it, but I mean it. I have thought about what my life would have looked like without you, I had enough time alone to map it precisely. I would have been efficient. Formidable. I would have pursued everything I believed I was meant to pursue, and I would have done it well." A beat. "And I would have been entirely hollow. You are present on every page of myself that I can still stand to read. Not as a footnote. Not as a variable. As something load-bearing." She looked at him steadily.
"Without you, I am not certain there would be anything left in me that I would recognize as mine."
She paused, fingers trembling.
"I didn't know at first, you know. How could I have understood? It was something strange to me not a fact I could grasp or measure or fight. My understanding of it, the little I had, came only from my grandmother. So I didn't realize what it was. Not at first. It was perhaps only a hunch the way my gaze lingered on you a moment too long. The way I favored you. The way I wanted you to become strong, to become my equal, someone who could walk at my side. The way I always ended up comparing others to you. The way I kept wanting to talk to you, and then finding reasons not to."
She looked at him, her eyes glistening.
"At first, I probably tried to explain it logically. I needed you to be strong. I needed you to trust me or me to trust you, to survive, to fight, to come back. But I realized eventually that it wasn't any of that." A slow, shaky breath. "When I look back, I made a series of entirely irrational decisions. But perhaps that is what it is an irrational leap of faith toward someone you care about deeply. Something in me moved toward you first, and then I constructed reasons to justify it. To lie to myself." A faint, wry exhale. "I learned from the best, after all."
She went quiet for a moment.
"Because even now I still don't understand myself as well as I think I should."
She lifted her gaze and looked straight into his eyes. For a brief moment, something vulnerable and raw flickered across her face a quiet realization, a sudden surge of emotion she hadn't meant to let surface.
Her lips parted slightly.
"But, I lo… hm." She corrected herself quickly, a faint warmth touching her cheeks. "Oh. Right."
A flash of surprise crossed her expression, quickly followed by a faint, almost embarrassed correction. Her eyes widened just a fraction, as if she had caught herself mid-sentence, realizing what she had almost said.
"You still like old stories, don't you?"
She waited for the smallest nod before continuing.
"Good. I'm glad I saved this one then."She sighed quietly, the sound almost like an attempt to reassure herself. She chose her words carefully, slowly.
"There was a time, long ago, when humans were not as we are now. They were whole complete, spherical beings with four arms, four legs, two faces looking in opposite directions. Some were all male, some all female, and some both at once."
Her gaze softened as she spoke, settling somewhere between him and the middle distance.
"They were powerful. Too powerful. They became arrogant and tried to challenge the gods themselves. So Zeus split them in half cut them right down the middle, like slicing an apple. And ever since that day, every person has been searching for their missing half. That desperate longing, that feeling of incompleteness that is what they call love."
She paused, her eyes finding his.
"Aristophanes said that when someone finally finds their other half, they feel something beyond words. A sense of coming home. Of becoming whole again."
A small, almost shy smile touched her lips.
"I thought you might like that story."
Her gaze lowered for a moment. Then she continued, her voice softer than before.
"When I remember it… I think of you. I cannot imagine feeling this way for anyone else. This ache, this pull it doesn't feel like something I chose. It feels like something that was always meant to be there. As if a part of me has been missing, and only you fit the shape of what was taken away."
Her breath came unsteadily.
"I don't think love is something you prove with logic or strength. I think it is something you endure. Something you feel so deeply that it hurts even when you try to stay silent."
She let out a trembling exhale.
"That is why it hurts like this. Because even when I try to be rational even when I try to convince myself that I should be stronger, that I should know better the feeling remains. Raw. Unyielding. Real."
Her voice dropped to barely a whisper, but her eyes never left his.
"You are my other half, Sunny. I know it whether that story is true or not, I know it. The one I had been searching for without understanding that I was searching."
She swallowed. Her throat was tight.
"I love you."
The words came out more quietly than she had intended not because she doubted them, but because saying them out loud still felt like stepping off the edge of something high.
Like the act itself cost her in ways she hadn't fully calculated.
"I love you," she said again, more steadily this time. "And maybe, if I could spend a lifetime with you, maybe I could tell you all those feelings for which a single word isn't nearly enough to convey."
She was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke again her voice had gone to a place that was not quite grief and not quite tenderness but existed in the precise country between the two.
"You wondered why I gave you my family's art. I had time to thought about that, why I did it, what it meant. I may have told myself then that it was obvious, that it was simply the right thing, and I still believe that. But I understand now that the exchange was never one-sided." She paused, choosing her words with the care she usually reserved for battle.
"You taught me things that have no names in the vocabulary I was raised with. How to deceive without lying. How to find the angle in a room before anyone else has stopped to look for it. How to hold something you want without announcing that you want it."
A breath.
"You taught me how to lie, a little. And you taught me love I have no cleaner word for it. I had theory before you, and my grandmother's warmth, and nothing else that was real. You made it specific. You made it matter." She looked at him. "If I took something from you when I gave you that art, you took something from me in return. And I am glad you did. I would not give it back."
The tears came then, quiet and unstoppable. She hadn't felt them building. One slipped free and tracked down her cheek, hot and silent, and she didn't wipe it away. She couldn't. The last time she had cried like this, really cried, had been the day her grandmother died. She had been a child then. She wasn't a child anymore.
And yet here she was, breaking open in front of him, showing him something she had never meant to show anyone.
She pressed on, because stopping now would be another kind of cowardice.
"And please forgive me if I say this poorly. But I don't want to only halfway understand you not when you're suffering this much. And when I try to put it into words they tangle with each other and I can't say them properly."
She had to swallow twice before she could continue.
"Understanding alone isn't enough. Apologizing alone isn't enough. I have spent every day since the Crimson Spire feeling sick with what I did to you. Not because I didn't know what I was doing, I knew. I told myself it was necessary. I told myself the path required it. And I have never found a single clean thing in that decision. Not one."
Another tear fell. She let them come, slow and relentless, because hiding them now would be another kind of lie.
"Every time I came back and saw that shadow of doubt in your eyes, every time you hesitated when you looked at me, every time my words landed wrong because of what I am to you, I hated myself for it. Not as something that passed. As something constant. I told myself I would fix it. I told myself I would unmake it."
Her voice broke on the last word. "I haven't. And every day that I fail, I keep my name carved into your soul and I call it protection."
Her breath hitched, raw, ugly, undignified. She pressed her lips together for a moment but the control was gone and she knew it.
"I enslaved you, Sunny. I know what that word truly means. I know what it costs. And I did it to you. I have already stopped searching for any way to make that acceptable, because I know there isn't one."
"And I said something to you, once." Her voice was very quiet now, and underneath the quiet it had the quality of someone laying down a weapon they had been carrying for too long. "I told you I didn't need slaves. That I didn't need a collar to make people serve me. That if I ever made you mine, it would be because you wanted it because loyalty freely given was the only kind worth having."
She stopped.
Breathed.
"I believed those words when I said them. I believed them completely, with the certainty I bring to everything, and I spoke them to you while I was already your Master. While the Bond already existed."
She looked at him, and the expression on her face was the specific expression of someone who has arrived at a truth they cannot look away from.
"I stood in front of you and declared myself above the very thing I had already done to you. And I didn't see it. I didn't let myself see it. That is not a failure of knowledge, I knew what the Bond was. It was a failure of honesty."
Nephis fell silent for a moment. Then, slowly, she rose from her seat.
"And I owe you that honesty now: I was wrong. Every word of that speech was wrong, not in its ideal, but in the mouth that spoke it. I don't ask you to unhear it. I only want you to know that I have heard it myself, finally, as it deserved to be heard."
Without a word, she bowed deeply the kind of formal bow reserved for the gravest apologies. Her back stayed straight, but her head dipped low, fully exposing the nape of her neck in a gesture of absolute humility.
For several long seconds she remained like that, silent and unmoving, as if a simple "I'm sorry" could never be enough to carry the weight of what she had done.
When she finally straightened, her voice was quieter, but no less sincere.
"And I was so glad when you stayed. You cannot understand how desperately glad I was, how afraid I was of losing you. When I came back, everything felt foreign to me, every space, every face, every room. I could have stayed elsewhere. But there was no choice, for me. There was only you. I wanted to be near you again. I wanted to feel certain you were real. You were the only reason I came back at all."
For a moment, a shadow of doubt crossed her face a quiet, painful realization.
"I thought… I had made yet another mistake with you that day." she admitted, her voice barely above a whisper. "When I told you all of that, and I saw you leave, I was terrified that you might not come back. After everything I had already taken from you… how much damage can one person endure before they finally walk away?"
She gave a small, fragile smile, full of self-deprecation.
"I really am not made for expressing myself, am I?"
She looked at him steadily, through the tears.
"And now you tell me you love me. Through all of it, through the Bond and the nightmares and every terrible choice I made or failed to undo. I should be glad." Her voice fractured completely. "Part of me is. But mostly I am terrified. Because I know myself. I know what happens when I make important decisions. My voice, my intention, my choices.. they always seem to land wrong on the people I—"
She stopped. Her throat worked.
"On the people I love. And if I break you, if I fail you the way I keep failing the people closest to me, it won't be some distant catastrophe. It will be me. My voice. My mistake. And I don't know if I could survive that."
She remained standing, the weight of her bow still lingering in the air between them.
Two careful steps.
Three.
She stopped right in front of him, close enough to see the deep exhaustion carved into every line of his face, the way the soft light from the porthole traced the sharp edge of his jaw.
For a moment, she simply looked at him perhaps truly, for the first time since she had begun speaking.
Sunny stood before her, his shoulders slightly drawn inward, as if the weight of what he they said had yet to settle. He looked exhausted, but not in any way that had to do with the body. It was something deeper, something worn down over time rather than spent all at once.
His dark eyes were unsteady, stripped of their usual distance, and a faint tension lingered in his jaw, like something barely held in place. The sharp, almost unreal beauty of an Ascended was still there, but it no longer felt untouchable. Tonight, it had given way to something far more fragile. Something human. Something mundane.
She had seen him bloodied, broken, dragged back from the edge more times than she could count.
But never like this.
Not unguarded.
Not exposed.
He looked like someone who had set something irreversible in motion and could no longer take it back.
Like someone who had finally chosen to be seen and to see and was already bracing for the cost of it.
And yet, beneath the strain, there was something else.
Faint. Unstable.
A flicker of something that didn't belong to fear.
Because the words existed now.
Between them. Out in the open. Impossible to take back.
His expression held too many things at once relief tangled with doubt, something close to hope undercut by the certainty that it might not last. He looked like someone standing inside the moment he had waited for, already anticipating its collapse.
Nephis felt her chest tighten in response. She knew she couldn't look much better eyes burning, lips pressed together to keep them steady.
Then, with a hand that trembled despite her best efforts to keep it steady, she reached out. She gave him every second he needed to pull away. But he didn't. So she let her fingers settle lightly against the back of his hand warm, hesitant, and carrying all the fear she couldn't put into words.
"I don't have a plan," she whispered. "I don't have words big enough for what this is. I know anything I say will be inadequate, a pale shadow of what I actually feel. Because what I feel for you isn't noble or clean or beautiful the way they describe it in books. It's massive. It's ugly. It's terrifying. It sits in my chest like something that would tear me apart if I tried to remove it."
Her fingers curled gently around his, tentative and careful, giving him every chance to pull away.
"I never imagined anyone could become this necessary to me. I never thought someone could turn into a part of me. You are not just an ally. You are not just the person who stands beside me. You are you, the boy who survived on spite alone. The shadow who stayed when he didn't have to. The man who argues with me and refuses to let me win when I'm wrong and still chooses to come back."
A sob caught in her throat, small and broken.
"And I still don't understand how you can look at me like this. After everything I've done."
She swallowed, but kept her gaze steady on his.
"People say I show nothing. I am aware of it. I have heard it in many forms, some respectful, some cruel. A blank slate. A cold star. A thing without warmth. They are not entirely wrong."
She paused, her voice steady but quieter.
"I learned very young to bury everything that could be used against me. Every softness. Every preference. Every involuntary response. It became survival first, then habit, then something so deeply ingrained that I sometimes forgot there was anything left beneath the composure."
Her gaze remained fixed on him, unflinching.
"But you knew. Whether it was the Bond or simply the way you have always looked at me as though you could see what the rest of the world could not, you knew the difference between my silence that meant nothing and my silence that meant everything. You never confused them. You looked at my indifference and saw it for what it was: a wall, not an absence. You never tried to tear it down. You simply kept looking."
Her voice dropped to a near-whisper, raw with honesty.
"And I noticed. That your eyes never stopped finding mine. Even when I gave you every reason not to. And that… that is the only thing that truly matters to me."
Her eyes shimmered, but her gaze held steady on his.
"When the whole world seemed to turn against me to remind me of my place, my failures, my limits you were there. Either beside me or in my heart. You gave me hope when I had none. You gave me a reason to keep fighting that had nothing to do with destiny or duty or any of the things I had told myself I was fighting for."
She let out a shaky breath.
"I don't care what the others think," she continued, her voice quieter but no less certain. "They can say what they want. They can call me cold, monstrous, inhuman… it may hurt sometimes, but they are just others. Their words don't define me."
She paused, her eyes softening as she looked at him.
"But you… you are different. You have always been different. You are the only one whose opinion truly reaches me. The only one whose gaze I cannot ignore. The only one I cannot bear to lose. And I will never truly understand why you love me the way you do. Not after everything I took from you. Not after the pain I caused. But I know this."
Her voice steadied, the way the flame inside her burned quietly, without flinching.
"I love you, Sunny. Not the version the Spell made convenient. Not the version the Bond shaped into something manageable. Just you. The difficult, sharp, honest one. The one sitting here right now, torn open and still telling me his truth."
She paused. One more breath.
"I want to understand you. All of you. I want to know you well enough that you can feel relief beside me not vigilance. Not careful distance." Her jaw tightened slightly. "It's a selfish wish I want. That I desperately need. I know that. It might even be an impossible one. But I want it anyway, because I have never been very good at wanting things halfway."
She leaned forward slowly, giving him every second to stop her, and rested her head against his chest, right over the place where she could feel his heartbeat if the ship was quiet enough.
She let her weight settle into him.
All the rigid composure she had maintained for years the careful architecture of someone who had learned very young that softness was a liability, she let it go.
Just this once.
Just here.
With him.
She had no strength left. Not anymore.
She couldn't even remember the last time she had felt this fragile, this exposed. The words she had just spoken… she no longer knew if they had been the right ones. She had so much more to say, years of feelings, fears, regrets, and longing but they all blurred together now. All she could feel was this overwhelming, terrifying love for him.
A love so vast it left her shaking.
She was afraid.
Afraid that she had said too much.
Afraid that she hadn't said enough.
Afraid that even now, after everything, he might still pull away.
She closed her eyes, pressing her cheek more firmly against his chest, listening to the unsteady rhythm of his heart.
"So…" she whispered, her voice raw and trembling against the fabric of his shirt, "would you tell me… if it's Not Too Late? That we can still try… if you want to."