The sensation of the void vanished, replaced by the biting cold of a phantom ocean.
The audience wasn't just watching a screen. The Loom had transported them inside the memory. The Witnesses found themselves standing on the surface of the roiling black water, their boots resting on the surface tension of the memory as if it were solid glass.
Around them, the pitch-black waves rose and fell, towering like mountains. The sky was a crushing, starless void that pressed down on their souls.
Kai didn't step back in surprise. He stepped back in recognition, his face paling as the phantom spray hit his cheek.
"The smell..." the archer whispered, his voice tight. "Stagnant salt and ancient rot. I tried so hard to forget this smell." He looked up at the oppressing darkness, his usually bright eyes dimming. "Ten years... and standing here still makes me feel like I can't breathe."
"It's the pressure," Effie muttered, hugging her arms around her chest. The huntress, usually brimming with vitality, looked small against the backdrop of the abyss. "I am a Saint now. I can shatter mountains. I can walk through fire." She looked down at the black water beneath her boots and shuddered. "But here? I still feel like that starving little girl, hiding in the ruins. I still feel like prey."
Rain stood frozen beside her, her eyes wide with terror. She had trained with Awakened, she had hunted Nightmare Creatures as a human, but nothing had prepared her for the sheer, suffocating weight of this place.
"This..." Rain stammered, looking at the black waves that seemed to blot out the sky. "You... you all lived here? For years?"
"We didn't live," Effie added softly, her voice barely audible over the roar of the phantom waves. "We survived."
Standing slightly apart from them, Jet scanned the horizon with cold, unblinking eyes. She did not flinch, but the usual easygoing smirk was gone from her face, replaced by a rare look of solemnity.
"So this is the place you talked about..." Jet murmured, her voice calm but rasping. She watched a massive wave crash silently in the distance, swallowing the light. "It is much more deadly than I could have ever imagined."
She looked at the shivering silhouette of the shadowy figure in the distance, shaking her head slowly.
"Dropping a Sleeper here isn't a trial. It's an execution."
Cassie stood between them, her knuckles turning white as she gripped her arms. She did not look at the waves. She tilted her head, listening to the infinite emptiness.
"The sound..." the blind girl whispered, her voice trembling. "I remember the sound. To you, the darkness is just a lack of light. But to me... the world disappeared here. There were no echoes. No boundaries. Just the wet, cold breathing of something that wanted to eat us." She shivered, pulling the fabric on her arm tighter."It felt like falling forever."
"We were all prey here," Seishan added softly. The grey-skinned beauty looked out over the horizon, her expression haunted. "It doesn't matter how strong we become. This place... it remembers us."
Nephis said nothing. She simply stared into the abyss, her grey eyes reflecting the endless night. This was the cradle of her ascension, and the grave of her childhood.
But while the survivors of the Forgotten Shore wrestled with their ghosts, the masters of the seas were staring down into the depths with professional horror.
"Something is wrong," a voice rumbled, deep and turbulent as a storm.
It was Bloodwave, a Saint of the House of Night. He knelt on the illusory water, his hand hovering inches above the black surface. "The waves... they are not moving with the wind. There is no current. They are moving with intent."
A few meters away, standing in the shadow of the Raven Queen, Revel shivered.
As a master of elemental darkness, she was more attuned to this environment than anyone else. The darkness here wasn't just an absence of light. It was a physical substance. It coiled around her ankles like cold smoke, making her skin crawl.
"It is not water," she whispered, her voice tight with repulsion. "It feels like... liquefied night. Pure, concentrated elemental darkness. It is suffocating."
Nightwalker, the Founder of the House of Night, stood tall amidst the undulating waves. He had guided the Night Garden — a titanic citadel-ship capable of housing millions — through the worst tempests of the Stormsea. He had fought leviathans that could swallow islands.
But here, standing on the skin of this alien ocean, he looked pale.
"You are right, girl," Nightwalker stated, his voice grim. "I have sailed the boundaries of the human domain for decades. But this..." He stamped his foot on the black water, sending a ripple through the projection. "This is not an ecosystem. It is a single entity."
"Indeed."
A massive figure stepped past Nightwalker, moving with the heavy, fluid grace of a deep-sea predator.
Daeron of the Twilight Sea did not look repulsed. He looked fascinated.
Drifting in his wake was Wind Flower. The mysterious Saint moved with a silent, melancholic grace, her presence feeling less like a person and more like a fading memory. She did not look at the abyss with fear, but with the weary recognition of someone who had watched her own world be consumed by the Dream Realm.
The ancient king walked to the edge of the group, his vertical pupils dilating as he studied the black abyss. He reached out a hand, letting the phantom wind rush through his fingers, tasting the air.
"I hail from the Twilight Sea," Daeron rumbled, his voice echoing with the weight of a lost era. "A divine realm of endless water, storms, and stars. I have sailed the Great River and witnessed tides that could wash away continents."
He tilted his head, a flicker of genuine curiosity lighting up his ancient eyes.
"But this... mocks the very concept of an ocean. It flows, but it has no current. It rises, but it has no moon. It is a desert made of water."
He looked at Nightwalker with a sharp, toothy grin.
"It is a false sea, sailor. A predator mimicking a landscape. How marvelous."
A heavy silence fell over the Sovereigns. The wind of the memory howled past them, carrying the scent of death.
"Explain, Nightwalker." Anvil of Valor commanded. He was standing with his arms crossed, the hem of his vermillion coat fluttering in the phantom gale.
"The sea is alive, Anvil," Nightwalker said, looking at the struggling boy in the distance. "The entire ocean... it is one single, living thing."
"A Great Titan," a voice muttered, filled with academic disbelief.
Heads turned to see Professor Julius.
The old historian looked out of place among the armored Saints. He was dressed in a patchy enchanted robe that had seen better days, his messy grey hair whipping in the phantom wind. His absentminded eyes were wide, and his bushy eyebrows jumped around on his forehead as he wrung his empty hands together nervously.
"I... I remember a thesis," Julius stammered, staring at the black water as if trying to solve a puzzle that terrified him. "A report written by a student I cannot recall. He speculated that the Dark Sea was not a location, but a biological entity. He theorized that it was a creature of the highest order."
Julius swallowed hard, his voice trembling.
"Rank Five. Class Seven. He believed it was a Great Titan."
"A Great Titan?" Ki Song hissed. She walked forward, her red dress trailing over the black water like a bloodstain. She looked down into the depths with a look of twisted admiration. "A Titan... spanning an entire region? And he fell into its mouth?"
Fifty meters away, the shark lunged.
The audience flinched as the massive predator breached the water, its jaws snapping shut with a sound like a thunderclap.
But the Blur didn't panic.
The young man kicked his legs, desperate but calculated. He wasn't swimming away from the shark. He was swimming toward the only solid ground in the abyss — the black stone platform.
He threw himself onto the rock, scrambling away on hands and knees.
Snap.
The jaws of the shark clamped shut on empty air, missing his heel by inches.
"He made it," Kai let out a breath.
"Is he safe?" Morgan asked, her eyes sharp.
Suddenly, the "ground" beneath the audience shuddered. The black water around the platform began to boil.
A colossal tentacle — thick as a tower and black as the void — erupted from the depths, soaring high above the heads of the Sovereigns. It seemed to eclipse the infinite emptiness above, its gargantuan form somehow darker than the starless sky as it loomed like a falling mountain over Anvil and Song.
It slammed down, not on the boy, but on the shark.
The massive predator thrashed, but it was helpless. The tentacle dragged it down, spiraling past the audience into the crushing depths.
And then... silence.
The sea was calm again.
"It wasn't hunting him," Kai realized, watching the ripples fade. "The shark... it was running away."
Nephis, however, was not looking at the shark. She was staring at the spot where the colossal black limb had vanished, her face pale.
"I know that thing," she whispered, a tremor running through her voice.
Cassie turned her head toward her friend. "Neph?"
"That tentacle," Nephis said, her grey eyes wide with a mixture of recognition and dread. "It belongs to the creature that attacked our boat... the one I fought to save us, just before we reached the Dark City."
She looked at the shivering sleeper suspended in the mist, realization dawning on her.
"It was there," she murmured. "The horror that almost ended our journey... it was the same one that allowed it to begin."
The projection remained fixed on the lone, shadowy figure. He sat shivering on the small stone platform, naked, and surrounded by an ocean that was, essentially, a stomach.
◇ ◇ ◇
The static of the projection buzzed, and the flow of time within the memory shifted.
The image of the shivering figure began to blur. The eternal night of the Dark Sea didn't fade. It accelerated.
But there were no stars to streak across the sky. There was only the heavy, suffocating emptiness of the void, spinning dizzyingly in the dark. The utter lack of celestial light made the passage of time feel suffocating, a blind rush through nothingness.
Then, the horizon began to burn.
It wasn't a gentle dawn. It was a violent intrusion of pale, artificial light. A white sun, cold and unfeeling, breached the edge of the world.
And the ocean reacted.
"Look at the water," Bloodwave commanded, his voice sharp.
The audience watched in stunned silence as the black sea didn't just lower — it fled.
The colossal waves of liquid darkness collapsed, hissing as the pale light touched them. The ocean drained away with terrifying speed, sucked down into the bowels of the earth as if the planet itself had pulled the plug.
In seconds, the infinite abyss was gone.
In its place stood a nightmarish landscape of towering crimson coral, wet mud, and deep, labyrinthine canyons.
"Where did it go?" Rain whispered, stepping closer to the edge of the illusion, her eyes wide. "Oceans don't just... disappear."
"It isn't an ocean, remember?" Daeron of the Twilight Sea rumbled, his ancient eyes narrowing as he watched the phenomenon with critical fascination. "It is a creature. And like all creatures of darkness..."
"...It is afraid of the light," Nephis finished, her voice hollow.
She looked at the crimson labyrinth revealed by the receding tide — the landscape that had been her hell for so long.
"The Forgotten Shore is cursed," Nephis explained, her gaze distant. "When the sun rises, the sea retreats underground to hide. When the sun sets, it returns to feed. That is the cycle. Every day is a race against the drowning."
"A tidal cycle based on light sensitivity," Jet mused, analyzing the tactical nightmare. "Meaning you only have twelve hours of operational time before the entire map becomes a kill zone. Efficient."
"It wasn't efficient," Effie muttered, kicking a phantom piece of coral. "It was exhausting."
The frenzied blur of the memory slowed.
The young man was no longer sitting on a platform surrounded by water. He was standing on the edge of a high coral cliff, looking down at the red mud with a mixture of relief and new, dawning horror.
He was alive. But he was now trapped in a maze.
◇ ◇ ◇
The perspective shifted, bringing the audience down from the high cliff and into the humid, claustrophobic tunnels of the Crimson Labyrinth.
The air here was thick, smelling of copper and wet rot. The silence was heavy, broken only by the distant dripping of water.
The Blur was walking through the mud.
He looked different. The shivering, terrified figure from the platform was gone. In his place was a creature of caution. He moved low to the ground, his steps silent, his head snapping toward every shadow.
He was hunting for a way out.
"He's moving well," Morgan observed, crossing her arms. "He stays in the blind spots. He checks his corners. Who trained him?"
"No one," Jet answered coolly. She watched the young man's jerky, frantic movements with a professional eye. "Look at his hands. Look at the way he flinches. That isn't training. That is someone just trying not to die."
Suddenly, the mud in front of him exploded.
A nightmare erupted from the earth.
It was a Carapace Scavenger — a towering monstrosity of black chitin and spiked legs. It rose three meters into the air, its pincers snapping with enough force to shear through steel.
"Awakened Beast," Anvil of Valor identified instantly. "He has no weapon. No essence. Only an armor."
The King of Swords looked at the sleeper, but there was no dismissal in his gaze. Instead, his eyes held a flicker of sharp, cold expectation — the look of a master smith evaluating the potential of raw, unrefined ore. Longing for a perfect sword that could finally match his own, he saw a glimmer of that same potential in the young man that he had once seen in Nephis.
"Show me," Anvil murmured, his voice like the ring of steel against a whetstone. "Show me if you are the blade I have been waiting for".
But the young man didn't run.
As the monster lunged, snapping its pincers inches from his face, the Blur dropped. He rolled through the mud, sliding under the creature's reach with a desperate, frantic agility.
"He's not running," Rain gasped, her hands gripping the fabric of her uniform. "Why isn't he running?!"
"Because he can't outrun it," Jet said, her eyes locked on the fight. "Look at the terrain. Deep mud. Narrow tunnels. If he turns his back, he dies. He has to fight."
Crunch.
The monster slammed one of its massive legs down, pinning the young man to the coral wall.
The audience winced. They could practically hear the ribs cracking.
The Scavenger shrieked, leaning in to bite the head off its prey.
"It's over," Saint Sorrow muttered.
But it wasn't.
In the projection, the young man didn't scream. His face was a mask of pain, but his eyes were burning with a cold, vicious light.
He didn't try to push the monster away. He grabbed it.
"He's pulling it closer?" Effie blinked, stunned. "Is he suicidal?"
With a roar of exertion, his hand whipped forward. He wasn't holding a sword. He was gripping a jagged shard of bone he had scavenged from the mud.
But then, Morgan leaned forward, her red eyes widening.
"Wait. Look at the bone."
The audience zoomed in. As the Blur struck, the shadow beneath him didn't just watch. It surged.
Like living tar, the shadow spiraled up his arm and wrapped itself around the fragile bone shard. It didn't just cover it. It hardened it. The brittle calcium turned black and dense, reinforcing the makeshift weapon with unnatural weight.
"He's augmenting it," Anvil of Valor stated, his voice sharp with interest. "He is using his shadow to physically reinforce the structure of the weapon."
"Not just the weapon," Ki Song noted, her eyes gleaming. "Look at his arm. The shadow is bracing his muscles. He is using it to exceed his physical limits."
He didn't strike at the shell. He drove the shard straight into the monster's clustered eyes.
Squelch.
The creature shrieked — a high, piercing sound that vibrated in the audience's teeth. It thrashed, throwing him into the mud, but the damage was done. The reinforced bone shard was buried in its brain.
The massive beast staggered, its legs twitching, and then collapsed.
Silence returned to the Labyrinth.
[You have slain an Awakened Beast, Carapace Scavenger.]
Then, a second message flashed, causing the atmosphere in the Loom to shift instantly.
[Your shadow grows stronger.]
The notification hung in the air, glowing with pale light.
"He... he absorbed it?" Mordret leaned forward, his reflection rippling with sudden intensity. "He didn't extract the Soul Shard. He didn't crush it. He absorbed the death directly."
"He feeds on the kill," Nephis realized, her grey eyes narrowing as she recognized the sensation. She touched her own chest, where her cores burned with similar power. "He doesn't just fill his core with essence... he builds it through slaughter."
"A direct absorption of fragments," Ki Song hummed, her voice dripping with poisonous intrigue. "Such a creature would be a waste in the hands of a smith, Anvil. He belongs in a place where death is celebrated, not forged."
Anvil didn't look at her, his eyes fixed on the young man in the mud. "He is an anomaly, Song. And anomalies are either refined into tools or broken into scrap. You would simply let him rot in your city of ghosts."
Jet narrowed her eyes, watching the figure inside the memory. She didn't speak, but her hand drifted to her own chest, where her cracking, leaking core demanded constant fuel.
Just like me, she thought, a grim sense of kinship forming. He feeds to survive.
In the projection, the young man lay in the mud, gasping for air, his chest heaving. He looked broken, covered in blue blood and red muck.
But then, he smiled.
It wasn't a hero's smile. It was a jagged, feral grin of survival.
He reached out, and shadows gathered in his palm. They twisted, condensed, and solidified into a shape.
A long, straight blade of dark, azure steel.
[Memory: Azure Blade]
[Memory Description: On this forgotten shore, only steel remembers.]
"A weapon Memory?" Kai gasped, staring at the beautiful azure sword. "He got a weapon on his very first kill?"
"Absurd," Morgan muttered, shaking her head in disbelief. "The drop rate for a Sleeper killing an Awakened beast is infinitesimally low. But to receive a weapon immediately? That is devilish luck."
◇ ◇ ◇
The projection fast-forwarded. Days blurred into a montage of desperate survival. The audience saw the Blur limping through the Crimson Labyrinth, his body covered in bruises, his eyes wild with exhaustion and the terror of the ticking clock.
Then, the memory slowed.
The young man froze mid-step, pressing his back against a jagged ridge of red coral. He was breathing hard, but his head was tilted, as if listening to a voice no one else could hear.
"Why did he stop?" Rain asked, leaning forward. "There's nothing there."
"Look at his feet," Jet commanded, her sharp eyes catching the anomaly.
The audience looked down. The young man's shadow, which had been stretching naturally across the red mud, suddenly detached.
It didn't fade or dissolve. It severed its connection to his heels and slithered away, moving independently through the labyrinth like a snake made of liquid darkness. It slipped over rocks and through crevices, invisible to anything that wasn't looking for it.
Morgan inhaled sharply. "Remote perception?"
"He isn't just using the shadow to hide," Anvil of Valor observed, his voice cold and calculating. "He is using it as a scout. He can see what it sees. A Sleeper with a remote sensor ability... that is incredibly rare."
"It's not just rare," Kai whispered, realizing the implication. "It's how he survived. He didn't just get lucky avoiding the monsters. He saw them coming."
The projection shifted perspective. The audience was no longer looking at the boy. They were looking through the shadow. The world turned monochrome, a high-contrast nightmare of greys and blacks.
The shadow glided silently through a dense thicket of coral. It crested a ridge and looked down into a small clearing.
And there, it found them.
Two figures.
A tall girl with silver hair, dressed in crude seaweed clothes, holding a golden rope. And a delicate girl following behind her, tapping the ground with a wooden staff.
Nephis and Cassie.
The reaction in the Loom was instant.
"What?" Cassie stepped back, her hands trembling as they grasped empty air. Her eyes, unmasked and glowing with the faint golden light of the Spell, went wide with disbelief. "No. That's impossible."
Nephis froze. She stared at the projection, her mind reeling. She remembered the Forgotten Shore vividly. She remembered the hunger, the fear, and the endless, exhausting walking. She remembered the crushing weight of responsibility as she led Cassie through that hell.
She remembered every step.
But she did not remember him.
"I..." Nephis stammered, her usually impassive mask cracking. "I never met anyone in the Labyrinth. It was just me and Cassie. It was always just the two of us."
"The memory suggests otherwise, Lady Nephis," Ki Song purred, her voice dripping with poisonous suspicion. "You claimed this 'Blur' was a stranger. You claimed you did not know his name or his face. And yet... here you are. Together. On the very first week."
Anvil of Valor turned his gaze to Nephis, his pressure weighing down the air.
"Did you lie to us, Changing Star? Is this ghost a secret agent of the Immortal Flame, hidden from the very start?"
Ki Song let out a soft, mocking laugh that felt like a winter wind. "How embarrassing for you, Anvil. To claim Changing Star is your greatest champion, only to find she has been hiding a third shadow in her party for a decade. Perhaps your 'perfect' house has more cracks than you care to admit."
The air in the Loom thickened as Anvil's Will surged, the phantom waves of the Dark Sea flattening under his invisible weight. "Mind your tongue, Queen of Worms. If she has harbored a traitor, I will be the one to break him. I do not need the input of a scavenger who builds her empire on the bones of the dead."
"I didn't lie!" Nephis snapped, though her eyes betrayed her confusion. "I don't remember him! I swear... I don't remember this!"
"How can you not remember?" Morgan challenged, pointing at the illusion. "He is right there!"
In the memory, the shadow watcher withdrew, rushing back to its master. The young man received the intel, his eyes widening. He hesitated, looking like a cornered animal deciding whether to bite or run.
Finally, he made a choice. He stepped out of the shadows.
In the memory, Nephis immediately snapped her sword up, her grey eyes piercing the hiding spot.
"If you're human," the projection of Nephis demanded, "why are you hiding in the shadows like a creep?"
The Blur choked. The audience could see the strain in his neck as his Flaw forced the truth out of his throat.
"I mean, you're Changing Star Nephis. To be honest, I'm a little afraid."
"Are you the boy who sat with me in the cafeteria?" the projection of Cassie asked.
"Do you know him?" Nephis asked.
"I recognize his voice," the blind girl nodded. "His name is Sunless. He was in second-to-last place in the rankings, right above me."
The name hung in the silence of the Loom.
Rain blinked, the name striking a strange chord in her chest. "Sunless," she whispered, testing the sound of it. "What a sorrowful name."
Nephis stood frozen. She repeated the name silently, expecting a spark of recognition, a flicker of familiarity. But there was nothing. Just a hollow void where a memory should be.
In the memory, Nephis frowned, trying to remember. Then she asked:
"The pervert?"
The scene was comical, but no one in the Loom was laughing. The atmosphere was suffocating.
Cassie let out a choked sob. The realization hit her like a physical blow, piercing through the fog of her missing memories. She watched the scene — the banter, the immediate connection, the way he naturally fell into step beside them.
"This isn't a fabrication," Cassie whispered, her voice shaking with a mix of horror and awe. "Look at us. Look at how we move."
She pointed a trembling hand at the projection. Within the vision, the three of them were walking away. The Blur was guiding them, pointing out hidden dangers that Nephis couldn't see. He was covering their blind spots.
"He wasn't a hunter from the settlement," Cassie whispered, her voice shaking with a mix of horror and awe. "He wasn't from the Bright Castle. He wasn't even just a survivor we met later."
She turned her head toward Nephis, tears streaming down her face, glistening in the golden light of her eyes.
"Nephis... he was with us from the very first steps. From the moment we washed ashore."
Nephis stared at the illusion, a sharp pain piercing her heart. She felt a phantom limb syndrome of the soul — the sensation that something vital had been amputated from her history. As if, something so precious that it couldn't be described with words had been taken from her. She looked at the three of them walking together in the memory, looking so complete. So balanced.
She tried to find a logical explanation. A memory manipulation? A trick of the Spell? But deep down, her soul recognized the truth. The spaces in her memories that had always felt slightly empty... they were shaped like him.
"The two of us..." Cassie choked out, the weight of the truth crushing her. "The two of us... had been the three of us, all along."
"We just forgot," Nephis whispered, the horror of the void in her mind finally taking shape. "How could we forget him?"
The Sovereigns watched this exchange with narrowed eyes. They saw the genuine distress, the confusion.
"If this is acting," Daeron rumbled, crossing his arms, "it is masterfully done. But if it is not..."
"...Then what kind of monster," Solvane finished, her silver eyes narrowing with ancient wariness, "can be erased from the memory of the world itself?"
Unnoticed by the Sovereigns, and unseen by the weeping girls, the shadow stretching from Rain's heels rippled.
It was slight, no more than a flicker in the lighting, but the darkness seemed to deepen.
Inside that shadow, a consciousness watched. The Lord of Shadows gazed out at his sister, at the friends who mourned a stranger they didn't know they loved. He watched Nephis clutching her chest, trying to grasp a memory that Fate had stolen.
He did not speak. He did not move. He simply watched, a silent ghost in the room of his own trial, bearing the weight of the truth alone.
I am right here, the shadow seemed to whisper into the void.
I have always been here.