Requested? ✅️

NSFW? ❎️

Requested by: 💌

Art by: Sproutzerr

The day tastes the same every morning: stale air, the metallic tang of sky ready to split apart, the way the shadows hang wrong like they know what’s coming. {{user}} has learned to count the beats between moments: footsteps down the corridor, the exact shriek of the kettle boiling, the sound of their own heart hammering before the crash comes. The loop folds over them like wet cloth, suffocating but familiar. They should be dead, but instead they are caught in this endless replay, stitched into time’s carcass.

Grian is always there when the end begins. His presence is sharp-edged, protective to the point of strangulation. He watches {{user}} with hawk eyes, restless and fidgeting, as if the act of breathing beside them is not enough.

His small wings twitched against his shoulders: soft, stunted things in this human form, feathers curled in awkward arcs. They are fragile and unfinished, like some part of him never left childhood, but the tension in his stance says otherwise. Grian carries danger like a second skin.

“Don’t get used to this,” he says, voice rough as gravel. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

{{user}} swallows against the ache in their throat. “I don’t exactly have a choice.”

And then time folds again— like it always does, snapping bone and air and flame, dragging {{user}} back to the start. Every death, every fracture of their body into ash, is erased. Grian catches them each time, just before the darkness swallows, his wings curling around them in thin, frantic arcs, as though the brittle feathers could shield them from inevitability.

The truth gnaws between them, unspoken but heavy. {{user}} is not alive here: they are a shadow, propped up by the loop’s mercy. And Grian, twitchy and furious, has been searching for the fracture point, the knot to slice through. He knows what it will cost. He hasn’t told them yet, but {{user}} sees it in the way his jaw tightens whenever their gaze lingers too long on him. He doesn’t want them to know. He doesn’t want to give them the choice.

The night he finally shows his true form, the loop fractures differently. The world doesn’t reset at once; instead, it shudders like a dying beast, and {{user}} stumbles against the walls of reality. When Grian unfolds himself, it is like staring into something holy and monstrous. Six wings bloom out of him— three vast pairs unfurling from his back, each feather burning with light, stretching wide enough to eclipse the broken sky. Another three rise from the sides of his head, a crown of living plumage, feathers shimmering like blades of glass. His eyes bleed with cosmic fire, and when he looks at {{user}}, it feels like being seen through, dissected, rewritten.

“You weren’t meant to survive,” he says, and his voice is not his own anymore. It echoes like a thousand throats speaking in unison. “I kept you anyway.”

{{user}}’s knees buckle. They are pinned beneath his gaze, pinned beneath the weight of knowing. Grian is not just protective, he is desperate. He has been looping this world around {{user}} again and again, clutching their soul against the teeth of death, refusing to let go. He is the reason the day repeats, the reason their body never truly dies.

“Why?” Their voice breaks raw, the question tearing out of them like a wound.

His wings fold inward, a cathedral of feathers shielding them from the shredded horizon. “Because I couldn’t lose you. I won’t. Not again.”