Shadow Slave

What right did that creepy daemon have to call anyone an abomination? That eerie thing had eight hands! With seven fingers on each one!

‘And it doesn’t even make sense!’

Why eight hands? Because spiders, who wove silk, had eight legs?

What about Weaver’s legs?! The great and terrible Demon of Fate had those too, presumably! Add those to the eight hands, and you get ten limbs!

That would make Weaver more like a crab — or a lobster — not a spider.

Where did that creepy lobster get the nerve to call Sunny an abomination?!

Sunny grimaced and rubbed his face.

‘What am I even thinking about?’

He was simply reeling from reading the description of the Weave. That one sounded like a personal message to him more than any other, answering the question he had just asked himself.

However, like all the answers the Spell gave, it only gave birth to a greater swarm of questions.

‘There is a lot to ponder on here.’

Sunny closed his eyes for a moment.

First of all — and most importantly — was the identity of who Weaver was talking to, as well as the general content of their conversation. It was a conversation between the Demon of Fate and the Demon of Oblivion — the most mysterious and least known of all the daemons.

More than that, shockingly, the description of the Weave suggested that it was Oblivion who had first broached the subject of changing fate, not Weaver.

‘Can I even trust anything Weaver said?’

Weaver was known to be a consummate liar... however, somehow, Sunny felt like the nebulous daemon had been sincere in this conversation.

In fact, the whole tone of the conversation was unlike the Weaver Sunny had come to know. It almost felt like the version of the Demon of Fate shown in this description was much... younger and less burdened than all other versions Sunny had witnessed. Still, Sunny had always felt that Weaver’s true ambition was to break fate. And how could he not? After all, the Nightmare Spell — Weaver’s greatest masterpiece — had always rewarded its carriers for defying fate as much as they could. The more your actions in the Nightmare changed the fated outcome, the greater its evaluation was.

It was startling to find out that the idea of going against fate — as well as the general blueprint of how to achieve it — had actually come from...

‘Wait. Who was it again?’

Sunny frowned and seemed confused for a moment.

Right! From the Demon of Oblivion. It was Oblivion who seemed to have given Weaver the initial motivation to struggle against fate.

Or perhaps it was not so simple.

Sunny had to admit that he knew close to nothing about Oblivion. And if he was truly honest, he would have to admit that despite inheriting their Lineage and chasing their ghost for more than a decade, he knew very little about Weaver as well.

What was the relationship between these two daemons? What had Oblivion been scheming, and how had she died?

He didn’t know.

And then, there was a peculiar detail about the description of the Weave — although Sunny was not sure if it carried any meaning. Throughout the entire conversation, the Spell had never once called Weaver by name. It had only described the nebulous daemon as the Demon of Fate. Was that because Weaver had not earned their name yet, back when that conversation happened?

Or was it pure coincidence? The Spell was quite liberal in its descriptions, so it could very well have been.

Or was there a different reason Sunny did not yet understand?

In fact, Sunny failed to understand a lot of things about the mystifying conversation between Weaver and Oblivion.

‘Where do I even start?’

There was the way Weaver had described fate. In hindsight, it was sort of obvious, but Sunny had never considered it before — the fact that not only mortals, but even the gods had been powerless in the face of fate... were subject to fate. That alone was not the truly explosive piece of information, though.

What truly stunned him was that, according to Weaver, even the Void Beings — even the eternal Void itself — were subject to fate. Why wouldn’t they be, though? The gods themselves were Void Beings, so if they were affected by fate, then the rest of their kin would be, too.

Which framed fate as something that existed on a plane of its own — a higher plane than any other. An absolute above the absolute.

There had been a time when Sunny thought of fate as one of the universal laws of existence. These laws, however, were created by the gods. Beyond the framework of laws that composed existence, there was the everlasting Void and the alien, unfathomable undercurrents that ruled it. And beyond that, apparently, there was fate.

Not only that, but Weaver had also described fate as a force that existed beyond and above time. Therefore...

Sunny felt a headache.

Therefore, from the cosmic perspective of fate, the future could never be changed. Because the future was never a vague expanse of potentials and possibilities — it was not something that was yet to happen. Instead, it had already happened... had always happened, and was therefore set in stone. It was a fact.

Since fate existed above time and fused the past, the present, and the future into a single, eternal, immutable fact — or perhaps a process that was both endless and instantaneous, but irrespectively finished and complete — it naturally couldn’t be changed.

...Only it could.

Weaver... and Oblivion?... had set the scheme to break fate in motion, while Sunny and Cassie completed it. The vast tapestry of fate was in shambles, and the future, which had been set in stone like a fact, was now as unknown and unknowable as it was meant to be. Someone went and broke the whole damn stone.

Which created a paradox.

If fate was truly like a serpent eating its own tail, knowing no distinction between cause and effect, between the past and the future... if it was indeed an absolute law above all absolute laws, axiomatic and immutable, then how the hell could it have become infinitely malleable and incomplete?

‘One hell of a paradox, indeed.’

And Sunny was the confluence of endlessly improbable eventualities that had made that paradox possible — a person who had inherited an Aspect of a god, a Lineage of a daemon, and a unique connection to fate. Sunny was not a stranger to improbable events due to being Fated, but seen in that light, his strange existence really took the cake.

Was that what Oblivion had meant? That only a Fated being could cause the impossible confluence of events capable of changing fate, meaning that only fate could destroy fate — and not only that, that the seeds of its destruction had always been hidden in its very nature?

Sunny was not sure that he was qualified to know the answer to that question. All of it was more than a little bit above his pay grade — even as a demigod, all he felt toward this cosmic kind of understanding was sheer terror.

The universe was already vast enough, and mysteries hidden beyond its veil were not for the likes of him to glean.