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Summary
What if a couple careless sentences at the Valor Ball cost Nephis more than she thinks?
This is a What If — or, if you want to be less generous about it, a low-effort self-indulgent side project running alongside my main fic, because apparently one multi-ship story wasn't chaos enough for one author. The divergences start small and snowball fast the further in you get.
The premise: Nephis's words at the ball send Sunny down a far more ruthless, power-hungry path than the canon ever gave him. He claws his way to the Fourth Step of Shadow Dance and Tyrant-rank months ahead of schedule, throws himself into sorcery with a new kind of obsession, and builds a web of connections he never would've bothered cultivating otherwise. And somewhere in all of it, he starts to deliberately put distance between himself and Nephis.
Everything traces back to that one moment at the ball — though the roots reach all the way back to the Forgotten Shore.