Shadow Slave

The being that used to be Song of the Fallen abandoned the dark memory, still painted in grim shades by the feelings of powerlessness and apprehension captured in it.

It was a little sad and a little uncomfortable, to witness someone as fearsome as the Lord of Shadows feeling so stumped and restrained.

The Lord of Shadows... his memories were odd and eerie, permeated by a staggering vastness of his consciousness and an alien kind of perception that very few beings shared. She vaguely remembered being strained by sharing his senses, and even now, it was too easy to get lost in them.

The Lord of Shadows was vast and powerful, but even he had been restrained by the quiet, insidious conquest of the Dreamspawn.

‘This man, Yutra... he was the first.’

But he had not been the last.

Knowing what to look for now, she extended the tendrils of her Will toward countless memories — those that belonged to her, and those that did not — assembling them into a narrative of what had followed the eerie interrogation.

The world... was changing at a startling speed, guided by its ruinous star toward the inevitable final clash against the Nightmare. They were all so terribly busy, having to put out countless fires that ignited all across the Dream Realm and the waking world each day — all the while planning and building for the quickly approaching, frightening future. One world was already being swallowed by the other. Even if the process was only just beginning, the consequences could already be felt. The distance between various areas, which had seemed impermeable, was changing. The powerful Nightmare Creatures that used to dwell in remote Death Zones were stirring, some of them already starting to migrate toward the human borders.

The waking world was not unscathed, either. The number of Nightmare Gates that opened across its desolate expanse was steadily increasing. The logistical infrastructure of humanity was slowly crumbling under the strain... but even that was not the most immediate concern.

The most impactful crisis was developing due to something that nobody had expected. It was the fact that the average temperature across the planet had dropped by a couple of degrees compared to the previous years — that was the result of the cold from the frigid wastelands west of Ravenhearts seeping through the torn realm boundary.

The consequences were not disastrous yet, but they were a promise of the dire madness of the approaching years.

That only made it more apparent how important it was to safely resettle as many people as possible — all of them, ideally — into the Dream Realm before the collapse began.

However, that titanic undertaking itself was plagued by numerous problems.

At the moment, the human territories in the Dream Realm were simply incapable of receiving that many settlers. They were all developing with astonishing speed, and yet that speed was not sufficient.

There was electricity in Bastion, and Ravenheart was on the verge of ushering in an agricultural revolution... however, the local infrastructure was barely managing to sustain hundreds of millions of people, having almost reached a bottleneck in scalability. It was far from being ready to sustain billions.

Now, more than ever, humanity needed as many Awakened with useful Utility Aspects. Myriad Awakened and Masters made the rapid development of the human civilization in the Dream Realm possible, while some of the Saints were like industries in and of themselves.

Saint Bliss would soon be responsible for feeding myriads of humans. Beastmaster single-handedly hastened the expansion of human civilization in the basin of the River of Tears manyfold. Nightwalker, whose return caused a worldwide sensation, was taking charge of all naval navigation in both the Stormsea and across the deadly oceans of Earth.

Saint Thane, the Dream Merchant, was on the verge of connecting disparate human enclaves in the Dream Realm through a new iteration of the Dreamscape, thus making nearly instant communication across vast distances possible — granted, there were many entities in the Dream Realm that could intrude upon the shared dreams of Awakened, so this connection was far from safe yet.

Even with more than a million Awakened serving the Human Domain, there were never enough hands to handle all the demanding tasks of building a new home for humanity. Therefore, countless mundane people were working tirelessly for the shared goal, as well — their contributions were no less important, and perhaps even more so.

There were far more mundane people than there were Awakened, after all. That meant that they had to be responsible for completing the lion’s share of the work. That also meant that there were far more exceptional individuals among them, and even if their strength was not on par with those chosen by the Nightmare Spell, their minds were just as brilliant.

Mundane people could step up and take responsibility for the endless task of building and feeding the growing human civilization of the Dream Realm... but, sadly, they could not carry the many military burdens of the Human Domain.

Even if the civil war between the Domains was over, war continued to rage on all sides. If humans wanted to live in the Dream Realm, the Dream Realm had to be subjugated. The vast territories taken by the Awakened of previous generations had to be tamed, while new territories had to be explored, cleansed, and conquered.

United and inspired by Changing Star, humanity worked feverishly to ensure its own survival. Song of the Fallen was Changing Star’s right-hand woman, and therefore quite possibly the busiest person in existence.

However, soon after the interrogation of Awakened Yutra, a new duty was added to her list of important responsibilities.

It was the task of liberating enthralled humans from the clutches of the Dreamspawn.

The abandoned factory in the outskirts of NQSC became a temporary quarantine facility where those proven to be Asterion’s thralls were brought by the agents of the Shadow Clan and kept until she could purify their minds. The work was slow and exhausting, and worse of all, none of them knew for sure if it was making a difference or added up to nothing but a drop in the ocean.

Song of the Fallen was not the only Awakened who possessed powers that could affect or cure the thralls. There were myriad unique Aspects out there, after all — there were also an endless sea of Memories and people capable of weaving sorcery, so she could have found and recruited a team of helpers to assist her in the task.

However, the very nature of their enemy prevented her from doing so. Everyone who encountered the thralls ran the risk of becoming enraptured by the Dreamspawn themselves, after all, so only those who could resist his influence could be allowed to face them. And there was no other person except Cassia who could both eliminate Asterion’s malignant influence and stay free of it.

So, her time and soul essence became the bottleneck in their struggle against the spread of the Hunger Domain.

Cassia’s efforts were not the only steps Changing Star and the Lord of Shadows were undertaking to combat Asterion’s silent conquest, of course.