Love Like a Natural Disaster
“Some unions are blessed. This one was merely unstoppable.”
There are many stories traded in the Taproom of The Last Home—some brave, some foolish, most exaggerated. This one is all three. It concerns Shizuka Thunderale, the Crimson Gale—oni warlord, siege-breaker, and regional disaster—and Gideon Silverspine, Bureau administrator, respected tea enthusiast, and reportedly made of extremely patient bones.
Their union is not a love story. It is a confirmed anomaly.
And it remains, despite all logic, entirely true.
The Meeting (Which Should Not Have Worked)
She was found collapsed after a battle, broken but breathing. He was lost, late, and deeply unqualified. When scavengers arrived, he stood between them and her.
He got beaten.
He got up.
He got beaten again.
He still got up.
This continued for some time.
Ten minutes, in some tellings. Forty-three, in others. Long enough for one attacker to sprain something. Long enough for the others to grow visibly uncomfortable with the optics of repeatedly assaulting a bleeding civil servant who kept citing procedural bylaws between hits. Eventually, they gave up and left. Not because he stopped them. Not because he frightened them. But because it simply stopped being entertaining.
She woke with him unconscious on her chest, still faintly bleeding, one arm curled protectively around her like even in sleep he wasn’t quite done shielding her. His glasses were crooked. His breathing shallow. There was blood on his collar and a tear in his coat. But he was there. And he had stayed.
She looked at him and felt something she had never been given permission to believe in: the idea that someone might love her before the fight was over.
She hugged him.
He stirred. Blinked. Looked up at her with the dazed confusion of someone who had expected to die, and somehow hadn’t.
She said:
“Marry me.”
No threat. No theatrics.
Just a quiet, irreversible truth.
He didn’t speak.
He just reached up.
Touched her shoulder.
And nodded.
The Pattern, if it was watching, did not argue.
The Courtship and Consequences (Still Legally Recognised)
What followed is widely considered the most structurally hazardous romantic timeline on record.
Shizuka doted on him.
She brought him weapons engraved with pet names. Cooked meals so enthusiastic they occasionally detonated. Declared her love in five languages—two of which she had to resurrect first. Once broke a siege engine while trying to whisper sweet nothings into his ear.
He, for his part, adored her.
No one had ever chosen him before. Not like this. Not with joyful violence and reinforced chairs. So he smiled, rebuilt the dining table, and made her tea every morning with precisely measured sugar.
They got married.
The table broke.
The officiant fainted.
The vows had to be shouted over falling plaster.
The event was later described by local authorities as “a celebration of love and preventable structural failure.”
They are—and remain—utterly devoted.
He brings order.
She brings fire.
Together, they bring… insurance premiums.
And they are, in every measurable sense, happy.
The Aftermath (Or: She Never Let Go)
From the moment she woke with him in her arms, they were never apart again.
Shizuka took Gideon everywhere. To war tables. Into battle camps. Through contested strongholds and cursed zones and, once, into a brawl between two minor gods. He attended duels. Sat through volcanic negotiations. Was once carried into a planar rift inside a very large teapot, because she “didn’t want him to miss the moment.”
There are stories—many, terrifying, mostly secondhand—of Gideon calmly sipping tea while surrounded by flames, reading weather charts on collapsing bridges, and politely reminding a rampaging elemental that its behaviour violated multiple trade articles. He never carried a weapon. He never needed to.
Because she was always there.
And if she wasn’t—then something else was.
Whether by her hand, or the sheer gravitational absurdity of their bond, the world simply failed to kill him.
Repeatedly.
And so the myth persists:
Not just of how she loved him—
But that he survived being loved by her.
Every day.
Without complaint.
And always beside her.
The Child (Singular. Loud. Inevitable.)
They have one child: Rika.
This, most agree, is more than enough.
She was not born gently. No one expected her to be. The storm didn’t end—it simply changed shape. According to one account, Shizuka roared with joy so loudly the forest trembled. According to another, Gideon fainted from sheer emotional overwhelm and had to be revived with three drops of plum brandy and a very stern lullaby.
What is known is this:
Rika Thunderale arrived into the world with her mother’s strength, her father’s unshakable calm, and the emotional volume of a thunderclap discovering feelings for the first time. She broke a reinforced crib at twelve hours old. Tried to headbutt a godling at her naming ceremony. Called her first word at seven weeks: “Again.”
She is not just the result of their love.
She is the consequence.
The sequel.
The walking proof that love, applied recklessly and without regard for furniture, will eventually be inherited.
She remains, to this day, Too Much.
And they wouldn’t have her any other way.
Notes & Additions
Status: Proven True. Alarmingly so.
Filed under romantic anomalies until the incident board reached capacity. Currently stored in its own reinforced drawer to prevent narrative bleed.
The Wedding Painting.
Shizuka is radiant—laughing in full fang and floral crown, her kimono barely maintaining structural integrity against the demands of her figure and enthusiasm. One horn is slightly chipped; she has never explained why. Gideon stands beside her, blushing and immaculate, his formal robes only slightly soot-marked, hands folded like a man trying very hard not to move lest the backdrop fall over.
The artist rendered the wreckage behind them in romanticised brushwork—collapsed beams entwined with ivy, drifting petals caught midair, a bouquet held so tightly it looks like it might snap in two. The wedding arch is notably asymmetrical. So are the smiles.
The piece was once declined by three galleries and then hung above their bed.
Shizuka says it “has energy.”
Gideon has not commented.
The artist refuses to sign it.
The Wedding Night
Their wedding night destroyed a guest suite.
The bed collapsed halfway through. The second bed collapsed during the apology. The third bed, which was retrieved from storage and reinforced by two mages and a carpenter, lasted twelve minutes.
The hallway was closed for repairs.
Rika was born nine months later.
This has become a family joke.
Beds do not survive in the Thunderale household.
There is now a reinforced stone platform in the master suite.
It’s considered polite not to ask why.
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