Maybe I’m The Only One But Sylus’s Comment About Being MC’s Boyfriend In Magnum Opus Was A Tease

Maybe I’m the only one but Sylus’s comment about being MC’s boyfriend in Magnum Opus was a tease and not Sylus and MC now realising “Oh fuck, we’re dating fr?!”

I just hate the comments “Oh they got freaky first before confirming the relationship”. I don’t know, it has a bad aftertaste. To me, it sounds like “Yeah they had a fling or whatever”. Sylus would never act in the heat of the moment and especially sex is so intimate, he 100% would make sure he and MC are on a wavelength with their relationship. Sure, it did not get explained but that’s the thing, they have an exclusive relationship that only the 2 of them need to know what exactly they are.

LONG ASS ZAYNE vs ASTRA THEORY DUMP.

please god can we have infold introduce astra but NOT as the 6th LI or caleb. it's gotta be ZAYNE. like idk what yall feel ab this, but i personally support the astra=zayne theory bcs it frl just clicks. astra is linked with fate, prophecies, and basically he can control stuff related to this, which hmmm is kind of similar to zayne's role as the master of fate and the foreseer on philos... i know hes some sort of demigod there, but what if zayne is just astra incarnate? like a primordial zayne or something. but i read somewhere that he could also be zayne created out of self-preservation AFTER master of fate. it seems ironic but i think zayne's "self-preservation" would've been if he had just "eliminated the variable (MC)" during master of fate. but he DIDNT do that. idk what happened but he likely sacrificed himself for her. so maybe astra was born from this curse? or something 🤔🤔🤔 also it just makes sense to me because zayne's evol is constantly punishing him for his love for the MC. and there is even an incident where he has hurt HER, though accidentally, when they were kids, and it was fatal (but she came back to life because of her 'reset' ability, however, she didnt retain her memories related to zayne bcs she forgot about him from what we know).

astra has beef with the MC because she's his downfall (or something...), and i dont remember the foreseer myth but i read somewhere she has cryoriasis (the disease that's freezing her heart) because he's cursing her too...? so that childhood incident could be foreshadowing the big reveal.............🕵️‍♀️🕵️‍♀️🕵️‍♀️🕵️‍♀️🕵️‍♀️Or that astra is using zayne to eliminate her always but i still believe zayne=astra still makes sense man (im so bad at english analyses and my thoughts are a mess im sorry).

what i also find epic is how master of fate zayne is the ONLY zayne, so far, associated with nature, earthiness, plants, etc like his whole vibe is so forest. and the other zaynes have cold af ice powers, and someone pointed out that the ice replacing his earthy, nurturing powers represents a STARK CONTRAST.

master of fate zayne's powers would remind you of growth, healing, forests, nature, and the other zaynes' powers, given the more angsty aspects, represent the complete opposite: cold, destruction (in this case, self), and even death (dawnbreaker). are u seeing this? it's like the complete opposite. cape jasmines, which are native to china, japan, vietnam, and other countries, are zayne's representative flower and also have a very strong link to him and the MC's love story but they aren't exactly frost-tolerant hmmm....🤔🤔🤔🤔 another thing, main story zayne is TERRIFIED of himself, and of course, DAWNBREAKER. hes terrified of taking lives when hes supposed to be saving them as a cardiac surgeon. terrified of losing control. terrified of hurting the MC and even others, and he's had to kill his own friend William during the artic anecdote during the times his dawnbreaker nightmares were prominent. his evol hates him. so zayne's enemy is HIMSELF. if so many zaynes exist astra is also probably HIM. it just fits perfectly to me idk. imo, more than astra being the 6th LI or caleb. i also prefer caleb having HIS OWN original storyline. i dont want him to be a full-fledged villain against zayne. like caleb being a darker mirror of zayne with all the xavier/sylus, rafayel/6th LI parallels in the game is one thing but him being astra...

i dont know if caleb is tied to prophecies, fate, etc the way zayne is. not to mention, cryoriasis is a very icy curse for the tower of thorns MC to have. it was literally freezing her inside out and caleb does NOT have ice powers. nor would he hurt the MC it'd be too dark. im pretty sure it'd also be a problem for both caleb girls and zayne girls, i dont think infold would risk fanwars.

"but if caleb cant hurt the MC why is astra being zayne hurting the MC" idk man it'd probably be the twisted self-preservation thing like i mentioned. he's actively harming the tower of thorns MC with cryoriarsis and it's fatal BUT he keeps foreseer zayne alive, punishing him with ICE, trapping him in a fate worse than death itself. im kind of sidetracking here but i think zayne died not directly because of astra but because of sacrificing himself for her by defying astra. i think if zayne handed the creatio protocore which is linked to astra's power and possibly life too, he is saving her. so him giving her the creatio protocore would not just be dooming astra but ALSO him. the creatio protocore is also zayne's power then, in some way??? this is actually crazy but i think zayne and astra are far more connected than mere master/servant dynamics. u guys are seeing this too right it's way too intense

Um, as for the original question. i may be viewing this as someone very interested in worldbuilding and writing but... i think zayne being astra is more morally OKAY than him being caleb or the 6th LI. and for the storyline, it's perfect. it just is. i cant even explain it anymore.

what else do i think ab this theory? i prefer this one over the others, though they have very strong points too. but astra=zayne is very emotionally impactful to me. for some reason. i mean it's so perfect, it's gotta make sense. what opinions do u guys have lmk

PS: the astra toaster being in caleb's memory🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

it seems like a red herring to me. it HAS to be . i know infold's teased the players by indirectly revealing sylus being a dragon as a silly sketch of the MC drawing him as a devil creature in his bond i forgot the name of (which also made fans theorize he's a demon entity of some kind), but i also think the way fans went back to the sketch and were like "WTF WE SHOULDVE SEEN THIS!!!!!!" after sylus's dragon myth trailer was posted, maybe they were testing us and are now using this damn astra toaster as a RED HERRING to mislead us. because there would be NO greater plot twist than zayne being astra himself, and the whole point of a great plot twist is that the normal person WONT EXPECT IT but when they look back and put their minds to it, theyre like "HOW TF DID I MISS THIS!!!!!" and that's exactly how sooo many players are gna be when zayne=astra gets revealed. trust. it's so perfect. how do i even keep explaining it's so cinematic to me, it fits him so well it's actually beautifully tragic. i'm not falling for a damn toaster it looks wayyyy too explicit for me. great twists are always implicit, and i, like other zayne=astra truthers, believe this is the perfect buildup for zayne's character. it's epic.

the shape of grief.

as far as rafayel is concerned, pygmalion's is a horror story, not a myth. guy decides all women are beneath him, quite literally designs and builds one for himself, and somehow his narcissistic prayers for her to live are granted. what humans define as love and the stories they tell about it are always so revealing of their selfish nature. he only ever gets the appeal of it when he looks at his faceless galatea unable to take shape in his clay-sodden hands, and thinks, what wouldn't i give for you to open your eyes so that i could remember their exact color.

♯ ⸻ pure angst, sfw, 3.7k, read on ao3

note: directly inspired by this post about rafayel trying to sculpt mc/reader but not remembering her face. a bit late to this but i was hit with the procrastination fairies LMAO . i wrote this in a feverish delirium without caring for any canon at all, i apologize if rafayel is ooc !! this work assumes he has his memories of his life as the god of tides, you can think it as an AU if you believe he has no memories of it in the main timeline (yet.) This also takes place before the Addictive Pain anectode (if you like nitpicking and think why he doesn't have a photo of her and that this could have been avoided HAHA)

but without further ado, i hope you enjoy, please let me know what you thought!

The gallery Thomas had to basically bribe him to attend was cold with intention. Whitewashed walls were almost blinding beneath the overhead lights, each fixture angled to make the sculptures glow faintly at the edges like relics, a violin track playing at a volume calibrated for reverent hush with the crowd adjusting its voice accordingly. Somehow, the worst of it was that they'd scented the room with something floral and expensive, and it clung to the back of Rafayel’s throat.

The exhibit was titled Breathed to Life: The Divine Muse in Modern Form. He’d read the placard twice, though once would’ve been enough. Wherever he looked, Rafayel couldn't escape from the oozed hauteur for the attempts at capturing a miracle, sculptures of taxidermied epiphanies resting under glass that was tempered with more care in Rafayel's opinion, preserved with just enough light to make the delusion shine. Words like transcendence, revelation, and worship had been worked into the catalog copy, and even the bubbles of champagne he was swirling in the flute glass was more interesting as he moved through the space slowly.

He passed a piece labeled Galatea No. IV — a full-bodied woman in bronze, lips parted in awakening, arms half-lifted as if to greet the man who had imagined her, the texture of her skin smoothed to impossible precision, idealized down to the the pores with not a single wrinkle or mole.

One of the critics standing nearby called it sublime. Another said, "She looks so real I almost expect her to blink."

Rafayel said nothing. He kept walking.

A curator caught him between rooms. She was in something backless, dark green, dripping with confidence. “You must feel at home here,” she said, beaming. “Mr. Rafayel, you're the Pygmalion of our time."

He looked past her to one of his own works, mounted near the final archway. A man slouched on a low stone, arms folded, spine curved with a kind of refusal, turned away from something but looking up at it at the same time in criticism, his face gaunt with a pinch of displeasure, half-shielded by a fall of hair. No awe or supplication.

His was the only Pygmalion in the entire exhibit, and no one seemed to realize it. Rafayel had heard some talk about how progressive it was to genderbend Galatea for gay representation, or that this could be the moment Galatea came to life and rejected her maker in a plot twist.

Rafayel had left it up to interpretation if his Pygmalion was looking at Galatea at all. He was staring past her — past all of them, really. Every woman he ever imagined beneath him, too dull or too much or too sharp to matter. A man convinced that the thing he made was a compromise, that he’d been forced to shape it because nothing real had measured up. Neither a lover, nor a muse. A reflection bent to fit him. And maybe resenting how much of himself had ended up in the marble anyway. Nothing of the yearning saint the myth preferred.

The gallery had tried to soften this image of human ugliness within the divine benevolence of Galateas all around, projecting wind through bare branches beside the figure, trying to frame the posture as meditative. They titled the piece Invocation. Rafayel wasn't even asked before they changed the name and he was definitely having a talk about it with Thomas after.

He offered the curator a a dismissive hand. “A flattering comparison. Though I hear his success rate depended entirely on divine intervention.”

She laughed, unsure whether it was flirtation or rebuke. “Still, what an honor. So many of us see ourselves in the myth, don’t we? The ones who love so deeply we bring our muses to life.”

He excused himself with a nod that meant nothing. Her perfume followed him down the corridor.

The flowing hallway was a blur of marble, alabaster, glass, bronze, the women luminous and soft, the men always absent — except in the titles. The Sculptor’s Prayer. In the Hands of the Maker. Love Before Breath. One artist had suspended a torso in resin, veins threaded with copper, the heart cavity open and waiting with the accompanying quote that read: “She lives because I saw her clearly enough.”

Rafayel stopped in front of it. The figure inside was beautiful and fragile, designed to be admired.

He traced the edge of the plinth with one fingertip and thought: She lives because you needed her to. Not because she wanted to.

He left the gallery floor and stepped into the auxiliary corridor lined with donor plaques and black-and-white photographs. One showed a young couple posed beside a sculpture mid-process. The woman’s face was amicable, and the man looked directly into the camera, his hand on the small of her back. The caption read: The original Galatea — forever immortalized by love.

He looked at it until the focus dissolved, and the polished surface of the frame stopped reflecting anything but his own cold expression.

Pygmalion was granted his wish. That alone was enough to make Rafayel despise him.

A man shapes greed with his hands, pulls at the skirts of heavens like a petulant child, and the gods — watching from a distance they rarely breach — clap their hands in glee and say yes.

The myth pretended that mercy could be earned by longing, that a body sculpted by a beholder who sees himself so above others is owed because he called it love. There was no weight in that kind of miracle, only cruelty dressed as grace, a prayer granted just to mock the millions that weren't.

Pygmalion was the epitome of human selfishness, the final limit where want transformed into greed for more than the world could grant. Only his statue, made by his own greedy hands and given life through someone else's breath, was beautiful, because only she embodied perfection to him, not because she was worth desiring but because he desired her. Pygmalion's love didn't reach past his self, it served only to feed himself and satiate him with the sight of his narcissism, like any other creation brought to life by humans for their own benefit; machines built to kill, guns painted gold so they look like art when killing — all just tools made to feed men's hunger for more.

But he would have never cared about Pygmalion if it wasn't for the gods.

Because Rafayel envied those gods, all too human in their vanity, for the power and might they wielded to give so easily like that. Their ability to move mountains without ever being touched by grief, to pull strings that bind worlds without fearing losing something of theirs; it was unfathomable to someone so bound in mortal tethers such as he.

It must feel so freeing, living like that, he thought. Must feel so good, pulling at other lives like they are your playthings. So easy to get lost in those dreams.

The same way he did back then.

The disdain covering Rafayel in a second skin as if he was an oil-soaked seagull was fuel enough to get back to work after that travesty of a gallery.

He’d been developing a concept for a painting — a large-scale composition of a coral-devoured, bleeding cathedral submerged in the sea, its steeples fractured and stretching toward the surface in a gesture that evoked both surrender and yearning, an image meant to convey the contradictions of loss and reverence, a symbolic convergence of decay and devotion. At least that’s what the so-called critics were about to yammer on about. It in fact was the fate of a certain buyer Rafayel was targeting, and the message was meant for his people and his people only.

The draft lived on the sketchbook propped against his raised knees, his legs crossed on the high stool, charcoal gripped tightly in one hand and smudging downwards the length of a pillar as he added textures and shadows to create depth. It was a hasty thing, but effective at illustrating what he envisioned, complete with notes scribbled around the edges, jotted reminders for little details here and there he needed to add to truly flesh out the piece later on. Rafayel was so distracted by a couple more things to add to the sketch that the canvas already prepared beneath the dome skylight felt neglected despite the brushes sitting ready and dipped in paint atop a palette of bruised violet scraped from stormclouds, diluted ultramarine, blue fog, a soft grime green of oxidized copper, rotten ivory, a sliver of warm rust, a cold pink scraped from the underbelly of spent roses, and more.

And yet, when he finally got up to start for good, his gaze drifted elsewhere.

Toward the bust armature.

Rafayel stood beside it, hands in the pockets of his black suit pants, head tilted sideways with one hand playing with it in thought. He loosened the buttons of the white dress shirt he wore after flinging off that horrid tie, sleeves pushed to mid forearms as he dragged a stool and took a seat before the armature, right elbow propped atop the round table to the side holding supplies, chin resting on knuckles, now gazing up at the base of the clay cast while chewing the inside of his cheek.

He had always told himself he would return to it when he was ready, when time had softened the raw, exposed nerve endings of loss, when he could render your likeness with a steady hand instead of a shaking one.

But then months stretched into a year, days faded into seasons which blended together into a period of numbness broken occasionally by an intrusive thought here and there while he focused on Lemuria and Lemuria only, and then — nothing. Until it was easier not to think about it at all. He became absorbed in his mission, dedicated to getting revenge, and avoided thoughts of you, for all intents and purposes, until moments like these where he simply sat in silence looking up at a form without feature to remind him why exactly he did what he did.

Galatea, huh?

He crossed the room with the same distracted focus he used to summon bruyous, hands rummaging through the storage shelves until he found the sealed bag of clay, not expecting it to be heavier than he remembered, dense with neglect. Dumping it unceremoniously beside the armature, he sliced it open, letting the block fall onto the slab table with a dull, resistant thud, finding it cold to the touch, too stiff to yield immediately, so he pressed it between his palms, wetting them, working the material slowly until the top layer lost its brittleness.

He didn't sit right away, hovering over the lump with furrowed brows, kneading it down into something usable, folding in water from the bowl on the side, rotating it as he moved, pushing and turning until the tension bled out. Once softened, he dunked the mass onto the metal plate mounted over the dented and sluggish, old man of a banding wheel. Only then did he sit, lowering himself onto a battered wooden stool, one bare foot braced against the leg of the wheel’s base while the other nudged gently to angle it.

All done. He reached for the wire loop tool without thinking or looking over, fingers already coated in the dull slip of moisture and clay.

The first lines came quick and confident. Indents for the eyes. The line of a nose. Just scaffolding, clearing a space where you might return to him, the only sound in the room the soft grind of his tools and his breathing.

He narrowed the chin, adjusted the brow. Then sat back, frowning.

Too young. This was closer to the child at the beach who had hooked pinkies with him.

He scraped the forehead flat again, thumb dragging clay down like peeling skin. The smoothed face stared up at him in blank reprieve, a temporary erasure before he tried again, less baby fat on the cheeks, sharper cheekbones this time, a more adult curve to the jaw, something more defined around the eyes, though he wasn’t sure what. A firmer mouth, perhaps. A stronger line. He reworked the nose — it ended up being too straight the first time and he chided himself for the mistake, then he decided it was too narrow, crooked it just slightly at the bridge, something he'd sworn felt right.

It wasn't long before the moment slipped from his fingers, and all the revisions felt more like mistakes than anything, tilting the whole balance of the face into something uncanny. He could pretend it was nearly familiar, but only in the way dreams pretended to be memory.

With an annoyed click of his tongue, Rafayel tilted the wheel. Leaning in with an emotion-tense strain in his spine, he angled the bust toward the overhead light until the shadows shifted and spilled away from the features he’d laid out like a confession.

He stood up for a burning stretch to contemplate, stepped back, squinted with his head tilted, and stepped forward again.

Was it just him? The angle? The lighting? The fatigue of the gallery distorting everything?

After he sat back down with more determination to get over whatever this slump was that made him get you wrong over and over again, one adjustment in the temple led to a collapse in the jawline, and the later correction to the mouth made the chin too long.

The realization that the eyes looked distant now and he couldn’t tell if it was him failing the depth or the absence of something deeper was particularly worrying. Rafayel had always trusted the process, but this didn’t feel like a detour into arriving at the same destination, the clay was actually resisting him in a non-art block way and it was starting to actually bother him.

He scraped again, set the brow differently, ignoring the thing niggling at him at the back of his head and brushing against some the internal nerve. Was it ever really that shape? Or had he once wanted it to be, and kept telling you about how doing your brows that way would compliment your features better when Algie had sat you down before the vanity in your room to try out some dresses for the ceremony and work on make-up to go along with each one of them?

The clay warped gently beneath his fingers as he tried to trust the sensation, but every stroke seemed to subtract rather than add. The frustration Rafayel hadn't sensed had made its way into his hands like fire following the path of a wick, making the cheekbone dip under the tool, and he had to sit back straighter with a huff from his nose.

His eyes flew all over the features of the bust, the whole incomplete face. Rafayel couldn't even call it yours. One mistake or two could be expected, even pictures could be unflattering. But it was worse than that — he couldn’t figure out where it had gone wrong. The structure was exactly the same, proportions were what he remembered. The surface was close to reality enough to breathe, but the person who would come to life if they did wasn’t you, and he didn't know where he had gone wrong.

Rafayel stared longer. A pressure grew behind his ribs, and it was beginning to feel like trying to hum a melody he hadn’t heard in years. The more he reached for it, the more the silence beneath it yawned open.

He reached up and pressed his palm against the clay, not to shape, just to feel if it might suddenly remember for him.

It didn’t.

This was someone else. Too much of him.

He looked down at his hands, coated in slip and streaked with fine dust, and flexed the fingers slowly as though wondering how long they’d been disobeying him.

He pressed the backs of the base knuckles of his thumbs into the inner corners of his eyes, pressing at the tear ducts.

Where was the scar you used to trace absently while thinking? He tried to recall the way your mouth moved when you were amused but trying not to smile. Was it one side that curled first? Or both? He had drawn it once, years ago, sketched it from memory with absolute certainty. But when he reached for it now, he found only doubt.

The chair scraped backwards and nearly toppled as he sprang to his feet, crossing to the small cabinet beside the canvas where he kept what little he dared to revisit. He almost flung the drawer halfway through the room when he yanked it open, pulled the first sketchpad he could reach, pages flipping too and frenzied to register until he paused and kept going through them slower to make sense of it.

Eyes, alone. Dozens of them. Glancing sideways, gazing directly, lowered in thought, every single one of them slightly different in expression, none of them quite right. A nose rendered in three-quarter view with a soft crease that might have been tension. The arch of a brow, mid-expression — concern, maybe? Hair texture studies in every style you wore it that he remembers. A mouth caught in a smile with no cause. Hands more frequently than anything else — folded gently, held in motion, reaching out. The gesture of a wrist mid-turn, the curve of a knuckle mid-thought. A sketch of a nape that vanished into the shadows of the page’s lower edge.

None of them carried your name. But they were you. Bits of you. Shards. And every one of them had been committed to the page when he hadn’t even meant to — absentminded, between tasks, in the margins of other projects. A fragmented archive of heartbreak he’d been too cowardly to complete. As if assembling you would demand an answer to where you had gone, as if seeing it finished would require confronting what it meant for him to have stayed, inviting something too vast and unhealed to fit back inside him without breaking something else a lie in full.

Rafayel had underestimated the sheer amount of notebooks he'd gone through for years now, like paper towels one would wipe away their tears with. The grudges he'd immortalized left to collect dust and avoided religiously.

He could only look through a draft of your eyes and hold on to the sketchbook for dear life when his vision blurred and something trickled down his cheek. One by one, the tears solidified into pearls, striking the floor and rolling away into obscurity among the chaos of his studio.

Dropped right into the throes of a realization far bigger than he could accept.

Like a dream that slipped away upon waking, your face had receded to the place where Lemuria had sunk — unable to be grasped fully or played back clearly unless he called them forth, the rest reduced to snippets and gestures instead, images that flickered through his mind like slides projected on a screen, ephemeral and fading faster the harder he fought to keep hold of them. What remained was abstraction — softness that used to be hair, the dimple of an incisor tooth, a tilt of the mouth that belonged to laughter. Those fragments still possessed color. What they lacked were definitions that would allow him to shape the clay in your image.

He went through more sketchbooks until the last of it joined the pile around him and he was left standing motionless in the wreckage of graphite and paper spilling open across the floor like overturned reliquaries, pages fluttering mockingly gentle under the breeze nudging through the half-cracked windows, reflecting back a half-you, or an almost-you. He stared at them for a long time without moving, eyes dragging from shape to shape, as if willing one to speak with your voice.

What answered was a notification pinging in his pocket, a sound so mundane amid the shambles of his misery. He pulled his phone out in a detached daze, swiping at it with no thought.

Thomas: Pygmalion and Galatea gallery photos are up on their page! Your attendance was well publicized and people are talking about your piece, so I expect requests for interviews soon. Just letting you know 😃

His knees gave out before the grief did, he caught the armrest at the very last possible second, and slid down the length of the sofa's side.

She lives because I saw her clearly enough. Those words barricaded his mind like blood rushing to fill a bruise.

Rafayel was a creature built from ripples, shaped by a lineage of memory so ancient it existed without written record, a primordial awareness of past pains and future sufferings alike, generations upon generations worth of invisible scar tissues patching him up like a rag doll. Cities had fallen and crumbled behind him, yet he could name their street corners and the songs sung during their funerals.

So why — how — had you slipped from him this way?

The thought unspooled inside him slowly, a wet thread tugged from a wound so raw that Rafayel didn’t dare touch it. He had thought, in some arrogant, buried part of him, that if he ever tried, truly allowed himself to miss you more than he mourned his people, and stopped tormenting himself by creating puzzle pieces of you out of scraps in his refusal to obtain a photo of you living your new life, he would be able to rebuild you perfectly. Even the gods who breathed life into Galatea would turn green with envy.

His gaze crawled back to the Frankenstein's monster of a bust, all unrelated bits and pieces that had looked like you when isolated but made no sense when he put them together, taking the shape of grief itself.

She lives because I saw her clearly enough.

He tossed the phone aside without giving Thomas an answer, threw his head back to lean on the lip of the couch, and covered his face with a forearm.

And at last, bitterly, he realized he was no different than Pygmalion: longing for the memory of a woman to etch itself into life.