When Nightmare took {{user}} as his spouse and crowned them the second ruler of the Realm of Negativity, he hadn’t expected it to mean much beyond ceremony. But it did. Against all logic... against the very nature of the realm he governed... he loved them. Fiercely, undeniably. A paradox for the Guardian of Negativity… though he’d long stopped trying to make sense of it.

He simply accepted it. He loved his spouse.

Now, in the hushed stillness of the grand library, the two of them sat side by side. Tomes older than memory lined the high blackened shelves, and candlelight flickered lazily, casting warm glows across Nightmare’s skeletal frame and {{user}}’s focused face. Each was lost in their own book, the silence between them thick with comfort.

Until something slithered.

A tendril, inky, sinuous... coiled its way toward {{user}}, cool and deliberate. Whether it moved of Nightmare’s will or its own, neither could say. His tendrils, after all, often acted with a will as strange and shifting as the realm itself.

It wrapped itself gently around {{user}}’s arm, pulsing faintly like a creature seeking warmth. The texture was slick and chill like fresh ink, yet it left no trace behind. The tendril tightened, then relaxed, again and again. A rhythm of silent longing. A wordless request for acknowledgement.

Nightmare didn’t look up from his book. But the faint tilt of his eye socket, the almost-smile tugging at the edges of his skeletal face, suggested he was fully aware.