Chapter 1233 Coming to Terms With the End of the World
Not paying the Sin of Solace any attention, Sunny bent down and studied the rune.
It was carved into the wood, but not with any kind of instrument. The grooves were deep, but crude and uneven, with rough and shaky edges. It was as if someone used their nails to scratch the rune into the wooden surface in a fit of madness.
The rune was a familiar one, too.
"Wish."
It had other meanings, too — desire, yearning, longing, aspiration... even hope, sometimes, depending on the context. Sunny knew that rune all too well. How could he not, after spending so much time on the Chained Isles?
But its most fundamental meaning was just that, a wish.
He stared at the rune for some time, thinking.
Who had carved it into the ancient wood? And why?
Had it been carved before the piece of wood he was using as a raft ended up as flotsam, or after?
What did it mean?
Sunny hesitated for a bit, then tentatively scratched at the wood with his nail. It was really tough — much tougher than mundane would have been. This raft of his turned out to be really sturdy. He wouldn't be able to leave a scratch on it without losing a nail or two...
"What are you doing?"
Sunny gleaned at the Sin of Solace, who was looking at him with a bewildered expression.
'Playing dumb, huh?'
He pointed to the rune.
"Were you trying to hide it from me?"
The apparition tilted its head in confusion.
"Hide what?"
The Chain of Nightmares was only the start of a global catastrophe. Sunny did not know how many years the destruction of the waking world would take — a couple, a dozen, or a hundred — but he believed Morgan when she told him that it was inevitable.
The scope of this truth was so vast that he could not even really comprehend it.
It was the end of the world.
Or was it?
'I'm stuck here in the Third Nightmare, and may very well die. But Rain is out there in the waking world, which might be consumed by a global cataclysm at any moment.'
Sunny could not help but feel restless, disheartened, and afraid for his sister.
'At least Serpent is with her. It will protect her...'
Regardless of that, the revelation of the dire future forced him to look beyond his own experiences and motivations.
Sunny had been struggling against many things ever since becoming an Awakened. His personal indignation at becoming bonded with Nephis, his desire to be stronger than her and escape the chains of fate, his animosity toward the great clans and his ambition to see as many people as possible survive the Chain of Nightmares... all these matters were important and valid.
But, blinded by them, he never seriously considered the most fundamental and important conflict... mostly because it had always seemed too large and distant to have anything to do with a small and insignificant person like him.
The Nightmare Spell, which was slowly consuming humanity.
Now that he knew that the waking world had reached the point of no return, Sunny couldn't ignore the looming terror of it anymore.
'This is... this is just infuriating. I can't believe that I ended up being the bigger fool, out of the two of us!'
Back when Nephis had told him that her goal was to destroy the Spell, Sunny called her a lunatic. And he still believed that she was — her desire was nothing but pure madness!
However, as it turned out, the world they lived in was a world of madness. So it was Sunny, who just wanted to operate a Memory store and live a peaceful life, who was misguided.
In retrospect...
Maybe Neph's desire to conquer all the Nightmares and destroy the Spell was a bit insane, but Sunny's desire to just be free of it all and live carefree was pure lunacy.
The only sane ones were probably the people who fell somewhere in between these two extremes.
Like Effie.