Shadow Slave

She escaped the memory of the moonlit night, feeling haunted by it.

Noctis, the Blessed of the Moon... there were other memories of him in the dark sea of her shattered self, as well.

There, a memory showed Noctis teaching her to steer the Chain Breaker.

There, a memory showed her Noctis donning a black mantle and a wooden mask.

There were memories of the One in the North, as well.

And the rest...

She absorbed those memories greedily, slowly rebuilding the foundation of who she had been.

The Forgotten Shore, the Kingdom of Hope, the Tomb of Ariel... her childhood home in NQSC, the secluded manor of the Immortal Flame clan, the opulent compound of the Great Clan Valor...

And so much more.

The eerie years she had spent having forgotten most of herself, moving through life like a blind person lost in fog.

As the rough contours of whom Song of the Fallen had been slowly took form, she was overcome by a subtle anxiety.

Nothing in those memories explained how she ended up shattered into a million memories, drifting in the dark space between seconds. Nothing hinted at what had happened to her, and what purpose she pursued in clinging desperately to the ghost of her actual self.

‘The past is the past, and the future is no more. But the present... what about the present?’

Disturbed, she slowed down for a short while, then extended her tendrils to more recent memories.

She wanted to know what was happening now, not what had happened back then... but the answer was elusive. So much so that she feared that only completing the whole picture would allow her to find out the truth.

She did find a hint, though...

peculiarly enough, the best hint she had found was not hidden in her own memories. Instead, it was hidden in the memories of a different being, which nevertheless seemed to constitute a vast part of her life.

That being felt peculiarly familiar, somehow. ‘Ah, it’s him...”

The cruel boy who had wanted to leave her to die.

Only, naturally, he was not a boy anymore... Even if he was still just as cruel, if not more so.

The Lord of Shadows.

Sensing a scent of an answer, she delved into the memories she had shared with — or possibly stolen from — him.

‘Show me...’

Where were you when the Dreamspawn came?

***

The world where Sunny had been born did not welcome him anymore.

In fact, it rejected him ferociously.

It was a little discomforting, but then again — if he was honest with himself — Earth had never treated him nicely. If anything, it had always been a cruel and uncaring mother, leaving him to fend for himself while surrounded by cold winds and hungry wolves.

Metaphorically speaking, naturally, since not even the wolves had survived its poisoned expanse. Now, Nightmare Creatures ruled its ruined wilderness, while people survived in vast cities like NQSC... the fortunate lived quite nicely, but the unlucky wretches like him did not. So, he could not bring himself to miss Earth.

He still had to visit occasionally, though. The reasons for his visits were rarely benign, and today was no exception.

Things were not going well for the Human Domain as of late.

It was only a month or so since Sunny returned from the Eternal City, but a lot had happened since. Problems were piling up, and even with seven bodies, he was struggling to address them all — especially because he had to maintain secrecy and hide his existence.

‘How does this even make sense?’

Before, it used to take roughly a month for a trade caravan to travel between the Weeping Goddess and Ravenheart. But now, a day had been added to that time.

That was not because the merchants had become lazy, and neither was it because some powerful Nightmare Creature had forced them to change routes. Rather, it was because the distance between Ravenheart and the former Citadel of Clan Sorrow had changed.

Which was quite disconcerting.

The Dream Realm had always been full of bizarre occurrences, but if its geography was shifting, there was only one explanation. It meant that more of the waking world was seeping through the realm boundary, plunging into the nightmare — the pieces of his homeworld were being swallowed by the realm of the Forgotten God, forcing them to rethink the timeline of total resettlement.

As if they did not have other problems to deal with.

..The greatest and most eerie of those problems was, naturally, the name of Asterion, the Dreamspawn, spreading across both worlds like a plague.

That quiet and seemingly innocuous plague made all other issues troubling the Human Domain seem trivial in comparison.

Sunny’s expression darkened as he thought about the Dreamspawn.

He did want to find the correct words to describe how uneasy that man made him feel.

It all happened just like Cassie had predicted it would, back after he escaped Mirage City. The name of the Dreamspawn spread like a virus, infecting anyone and everyone who heard or beheld it. Those infected by the knowledge of Asterion became carriers of the disease, helping it spread further.

Some only showed mild symptoms, blurting out the eerie name without even realizing what they were saying from time to time. In some, the disease seemed to progress much further, affecting the very way they thought and influencing their actions.

There were half a dozen small cults proselytizing the name Asterion, like the Church of the Moon that was gaining popularity in the former territories of the Sword Domain. There were also secular organizations like private clubs and black market gangs doing the same.

The cumulative power of these sleeper agents was not at all great... in fact, it was negligible and nothing short of pathetic. If Sunny and Nephis wanted to, they could have wiped them all out in a day.

But that was the damnedest thing.

For the first time in his life, Sunny had met an enemy that made all his strength meaningless. It was not that he and Nephis were weaker than Asterion — they were not, by far — it was just that Asterion attacked in a way that made using strength to repel him impossible.

They could not wipe out thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people. Although, possibly... they should have. Because if they did not, the number of people who had been infected by the knowledge of Dreamspawn would soon reach millions, and hundreds of millions after that.

Until every single person in the world — both worlds, rather — was infected by the name of Asterion.

What were they going to do then?

Entering an abandoned underground factory in the outskirts of NQSC, Sunny uttered a curse.

‘Hell if I know...”

His usually light tone was dark and heavy.