Love is Worth Waiting for

Sunny was surprised by his actions, in hindsight it was a stupid thing to do, but in the moment he was not entirely in control of himself.

For one, seeing Nephis had shaken Sunny, especially since she no longer remembered who he was but he still loved her. He also had found himself as the groom of a wedding, with her sister as the bride.

Secondly, his mind was being overloaded by controlling so many incarnations, all using [Shadow Step] and [Shadow Manifestation] to change their figures. He was also concerned with speaking as the Lord of Shadows and keeping the raised platform and altar intact, as well as doing one other thing. The last thing he was doing actually took the majority of his thinking.

All of these stimuli were a lot for even him to process, so he wasn't exactly in the clearest state of mind. In that situation, Sunny fell back on the knowledge he had to avoid thinking too much himself. This was the last problem.

All of Sunny's knowledge about weddings had come from the scarce amounts of romance he had read, and being fiction, were highly romanticised. In his mind, the key part of a wedding was the vows and a kiss, something his mind fell back on as an absolute truth to avoid the further load of thinking too hard.

All of these problems were also paired with his vague curiosity of if his Onyx Shell would be able to handle Morgan's flaw like it had when they were both masters.

Sunny only realised what he had done after the fact, and currently, wanted nothing more than to disappear. 

Sunny, however, had other problems to worry about, such as the image of the imaginary Shadow Clan. This required him to play it off as an intentional action on his part.

Luckily he had already planned for something to seal the agreement in a more literal way. Sunny decided to act as if the kiss was the symbolic part of it. The only problem was, it was hard to play it cool when Morgan was falling apart in his arms.

Morgan had lost all composure and dignity when he kissed her. She simply relaxed all of her muscles and would have fallen to the ground he hadn't been holding her. Mercifully, Sunny had snuffed out the ghostly flames that allowed the others to see through the ancient shadows. 

He pulled out of the kiss and tried to stand Morgan on her feet. She looked thoroughly shaken, he wouldn't have even imagined her being able to make such an expression.

When he thought he had gotten her stabilised and standing on her own two feet, he let her go, and she promptly fell again.

Sunny caught her once more and she finally snapped out of her reverie. Standing up, Morgan quickly regained composure and stood up like nothing had happened.

As soon as he was sure Morgan was composed, he lit the torches once again, this time with a truly brilliant flame. The flames were bright and chased away the ambient darkness in the temple, giving everyone a clearcut and distinct black shadow.

The Lord of Shadows took out two seething obsidian balls and held them out. They continued to change shape, expanding and contracting, as if trying to break free. Morgan seemed curious as to what he was doing, but all of her reactions were muted as she tried to suppress the storm in her heart.

Sunny had actually secretly been preparing something from the beginning. Something to really send home that the Shadow Clan had its secret methods and knowledge to Valor's saints. So, he took it upon himself to create a really special memory.

Sunny summoned Weaver's Needle and made a string out of shadow essence. Threading it through the needle, he used it to pierce the formless masses of shadows and tie them together, before tying one of the masses to Morgan's shadow, and the other to his own.

The enchantments he had woven into the masses weren't perfect, in fact they were barely holding together and bursting at the seams. This was why they looked formless and continued to move as he tried to suppress them. 

But as he connected the masses to Morgan's shadow, the spell's influence began to spread to them. It was an idea he had from the spell's ability to form memories after defeating nightmare creatures.

The two masses he had created were designed to be incomplete works that the spell would perfect into memories upon their destruction. So, as he made the last loop through his own shadow, he stopped keeping the masses in the general shape of a ball.

They exploded violently, throwing shadows across the room, but Sunny smiled. 'It worked.'

Because of the relationship between souls and shadows, Sunny tying the incomplete memories to his and Morgan's shadows had effectively tied them to their souls. This meant that upon their destruction, the spell would consider them as memories that had been earned upon the defeat of a nightmare creature, and reconstruct them in a more complete form.

'I still need to refine the process, but this is good enough for now.' The effect he had wanted to achieve was performed more perfectly than he could have imagined.

Because Sunny had tied the two memories together, they had the unique property of being considered as two parts of a bigger whole, with one half belonging to Morgan and the other belonging to him, forming a connection between them.

All of the words he had said as the Lord of Shadows were constructed based on the description of Token of Death's Union, so despite him not knowing all of the details, there was no doubt everything he said was grounded in some truth.

This was why he had confidence that the spell would take this opportunity and use the incomplete memories he had created as the basis of an actual bond between the domains of life and death.

Sunny chuckled to himself, 'What a brilliant performance.'