Shadow Slave

In the end, the time storm never appeared. Sunny and Nephis spent a night on the Chain Breaker, resting and recovering. By the time they woke up, Nephis had replenished enough essence to heal most of his wounds, restoring a few more incarnations to a functional state.

She also had enough essence to assume her Transcendent form, so if they wanted to, they could fly across the dark expanse of still water without the need for the Chain Breaker. However, that would cause her untold agony, so Sunny assumed the form of the Onyx Serpent once more.

Nephis placed the Chain Breaker in her Soul Sea, and they swam downstream, heading for the waters where Fallen Grace — the city of Dusk, which had been the last human settlement in the Nightmare — was supposed to be.

The journey took them a considerable time to complete. By the time they reached their destination, all of Sunny’s incarnations could be manifested again. Saint had recovered from her wounds, as well, and Slayer was mostly healed — only Serpent was still being mended in the nurturing darkness of his soul, having been wounded too terribly.

The Shadow Legion, too, was steadily regaining its strength. Sunny judged that he would be back to the peak of his power by the time they reached Verge, or perhaps even sooner than that.

In all the time they had been moving downstream, they had not met a single Nightmare Creature. They had not met anyone at all, really, and had not seen anything rising above the dark water.

The Great River was still and dead.

And Fallen Grace was nowhere to be found. Sunny and Nephis spent a long time — no less than an entire day — searching the waters for signs of the last human city. However, they did not discover anything.

It was as if Fallen Grace had been caught by the currents and fell over the edge of the Great River, shattering into a million pieces after the impact against the distant floor of the Tomb of Ariel.

Perhaps it had.

The same thing that had happened to Weave might have happened to Fallen Grace… only Fallen Grace was situated much closer to the Edge, so its ruins could have easily fallen into the dark abyss of the great pyramid.

In the end, Sunny and Nephis had to abandon the search.

He rested his enormous onyx body on the dark water, a different incarnation looking from its head on the vast expanse of the Great River.

Sunny sighed.

“You know, I hoped to find someone alive here. Not even Daeron and his Saints… I wanted to find the River People.”

He looked down, a deeper darkness obscuring his eyes.

“Because they are different from us. We come from the Divine Realms, but the River People… they were descendants of people from a mortal realm whom the sybils had brought here to save them from the end of the world. From the Doom War. So even if a single city remained, it would have meant that someone survived. That someone avoided the damn calamity that the gods and the daemons brought upon existence.”

That someone had avoided doom.

Sunny grimaced and looked into the distance.

“But I guess it was too much to hope for, wasn’t it?”

Weave was gone, and Fallen Grace was gone as well. Twilight had only existed in the Nightmare, so… only Verge remained. Verge was not a city of humans, though — it had been, once, but by now, it had long turned into a city of abominations.

Sunny was tired of only finding death and destruction in the Dream Realm. He had seen so much of it that the spirit of exploration that had once burned in his chest was almost extinguished.

Leaving the empty waters where Fallen Grace, the beautiful city of eternal dusk, had thrived once, they turned away from the Edge and plotted a course to their next stop…

To Aletheia’s Island.

Sunny and Nephis had been on the way to their destination when he slowed down gradually and then came to a halt. The colossal onyx serpent raised its long neck above the water, looking into the distance with a fierce glint in its black eyes.

“What is it?”

Nephis looked at his human incarnation, frowning slightly.

But Sunny could not answer immediately, because he himself was not sure.

“I… don’t know. Something is wrong… something is wrong with the River.”

Neph’s frown deepened, and she looked in the same direction he was looking.

Sunny cautiously swam forward. Soon enough, they saw the first signs of the anomaly he had sensed.

The Great River was growing shallow.

It was almost impossible to believe, but the endless depths below them were not so endless anymore. Sunny could already sense the vast emptiness somewhere far below, and as they moved further, the mass of water only grew thinner.

Eventually, inexplicably, it was only barely deep enough for him to move in the massive Shell of the Onyx Serpent. Even then, the plain of the Great River had grown uneven — it was deeper in some places, and feebler in others.

In some places, the water was entirely gone, and circular chasms appeared on its surface, full of empty darkness.

There were more and more of these holes, until the Great River simply ceased, and the still water in front of them opened into a vast, echoing emptiness.

It was like the edge of the world… of this world. An edge that was not meant to be here, in the very middle of the Great River.

‘How is this possible?’

The great abyss in front of them was not empty, either. Something was hovering in the heart of it, something massive and cold, utterly devoid of life.

Sunny and Nephis glanced at each other. Then, without having to say anything, they both took to the sky.

Nephis had summoned her radiant wings, while Sunny manifested a pair of raven-black ones.

He also dismissed the Onyx Serpent Shell, taking that incarnation with him in the form of a shadow.

It took them no more than a few minutes to reach the center of the vast chasm and see what was floating there, suspended in nothingness.

It was a strange, irregularly shaped mass of solid matter, full of jagged edges and sharp lines. The mass was enormous, easily dwarfing the largest island Sunny had seen on the Great River, and utterly devoid of life.

There were no people, naturally… but there were also no trees, no grass, no water, no flowers. Not even moss.

Sunny and Nephis landed on the strange island, feeling uneasy.

“What is this place?”

Sunny frowned, studying the chaotic shape of the great island. It inclined downward on one end, while the other was raised sharply, as if a mountain rose there from the hard ground.

And speaking of the ground…

Kneeling, Sunny studied it intently for a short while.

There was no soil, and the ground itself was jagged and uneven. It was also slightly translucent and crystalline, resembling… nothing Sunny had even seen before.

But even without having seen anything like it, Sunny could still tell what they were standing on.

“Do you recognize its nature?”

Nephis remained silent for a few moments, then shook her head.

“No, what is it?”

Letting out a sigh, Sunny straightened and looked up.

“It’s a soul shard… what is left of it. A fragment of a soul shard, really.”

Sunny hesitated for a moment, then pointed up.

“It’s a fragment of the sun… of a sun, really. Someone must have destroyed one of the seven suns of the Great River, and so, its fragments fell down.”

So, they were standing on a fragment of a dead sun.