Shadow Slave

The prison camp was proving to be an endless source of problems.

Still, after straightening out a few kinks, Sunny managed to maintain it in a presentable state. The prisoners were still frightened and miserable, but at least their lives were not in danger. Even when new batches of captives were delivered to the Forgotten Shore, things stayed civil.

The complicated task of separating the actual thralls from ordinary believers was progressing smoothly, as well. Every day, Revel carried the identified thralls to the waking world, where they were taken to the quarantine facility in the abandoned factory.

The people helping Cassie run the facility were all former thralls themselves. Coming into contact with the carriers of Asterion’s plague meant becoming infected by it, too, so neither the Fire Keepers nor the Shadow Clan agents could be assigned the task — and even the rehabilitated thralls who had volunteered to stay had to have their memories wiped routinely in order to stay free of the disease.

It wasn’t an ideal solution, but Sunny and Nephis were not in a position to pursue the ideal.

They were somberly anticipating Asterion’s retaliation — after all, it was unlikely that he would allow them to undo his efforts without delivering a counterattack.

But days passed, becoming weeks, and nothing happened.

Those days of eerie calm and building tension were more exhausting than open conflict.

The Dreamspawn refused to reveal himself. ..Which was not to say that he was doing nothing.

Despite all their efforts, his name continued to spread.

Sunny and Nephis had delivered a substantial attack to the plague and slowed down the rate at which it grew. By taking out the sleeper cells of Asterion’s followers, they prevented them from actively spreading the knowledge of him among the people.

However, the people themselves continued to spread it unwittingly. There were thralls that they had failed to discover, as well, and they were not staying idle.

By late summer, various measures Nephis had ordered her people to develop were taking shape. They could not create means of identifying subjects of Asterion’s Domain, since that would require them to learn who the hidden Supreme was and thus become infected by his mental plague. However, they could develop means of telling who was not a subject of the Longing Domain. And do it at scale.

Once the measures were ready to be used, hundreds of thralls were gradually revealed, isolated, and captured.

The Shadow Clan agents were busier than ever, and Mordret’s reputation continued to plummet as a result, slowly attaining a truly sinister hue.

Funnily enough, the tools that revealed the thralls of Asterion had discovered none of his vessels that had to be hiding among the people. That was probably because of the mysterious ritual that Mordret had performed in the Ebony Tower at the end of the Second Nightmare, making himself elusive to most forms of divination.

But he was definitely watching.

Sunny had almost expected Mordret to begin haunting every reflection on the lvory Island to express his dissatisfaction with being made a scapegoat, but the King of Nothing remained suspiciously quiet, hiding in the Hollow Mountains and retreating from the human world.

The only sign of his continuing existence was the fact that the population of Nightmare Creatures in the areas bordering the Hollow Mountains seemed to be slowly dwindling. There were no corpses or signs of battles to be found, but merchants and soldiers traveling through those lands had reported that they had to fight fewer and fewer skirmishes as time went by.

In any case, Mordret had chosen to remain quiet.

Then again, perhaps he simply couldn’t reach Sunny on the Forgotten Shore. There was no light there, after all — except for in the prison camp — and mirrors needed light to cast reflections.

Instead of feeling relieved, Sunny felt unnerved by the insidious bastard’s silence. The situation across the two worlds eventually reached a state of fragile equilibrium.

Sunny and Nephis could not stop the name Asterion from spreading, with more and more people becoming infected by it each day. However, they were quite successful at preventing the infection from bearing fruit by swiftly capturing those of the carriers who failed to resist it and became thralls. The population of the prison camp had reached a peak and plateaued, then slowly began to diminish as more and more thralls were transferred to the quarantine facility. There, Cassie worked without rest — or rather, as much as her reserves of essence allowed — to cure as many infected as possible.

Sunny had sent Luster to assist her, but now, he was almost starting to regret that decision.

Cassie seemed to be drowning in patients, working herself to the bone. At the same time, she continued to perform her various duties for the Human Domain, from serving as a mental connection between the members of the cohort to watching over the Fire Keepers, from working on the runic arrays to protect human cities to managing relationships with prominent Saints — and much more.

The abandoned factory in the outskirts of NQSC might have become her temporary base of operations, but the power of her mind reached far and wide, as if she was ina dozen places at the same time.

Of course, it took a toll.

The Human Domain, meanwhile, was gradually growing stronger. More territories were conquered as those lands that had already belonged to humans continued to develop. More people Awakened, and more Awakened defeated their Second Nightmares to become Masters. The number of Saints was also growing, albeit at a much slower rate.

The morale of humanity remained high, and was further bolstered by both the continuous victories of human armies and the achievements of those people who were building a new home for mankind in the deadly reaches of the Dream Realm.

Not everything was well, of course.

As much as the Dream Realm was developing, the situation in the waking world was slowly growing more dire. The cities of Earth were becoming less populous, and the remaining citizens were feeling both the anxiety of being left behind by the times and the fear of watching the world end in front of their eyes.

There were more Awakened, Masters, and Saints... but not all who challenged the Nightmares returned alive. In fact, the more people dared to challenge the Spell, the more casualties it reaped. And even if human armies were victorious, those victories did not come without a price. many people were mourning the loss of their loved ones, drowning in the depths of sorrow.

The anxiety, fear, and sorrow that people felt were like cracks in the Human Domain. And it was in these cracks that Asterion’s influence seeped like poison, claiming new victims each day.

Sunny was full of apprehension, waiting for the day the Dreamspawn would finally make his move.

...But when that day finally came, he still found himself unprepared.