The illusory ashen sands of the Ashen Barrow were silent once more, though the air still vibrated with the terminal shriek of a future that had been violently unmade. Behind the departing bone boat, the massive bonfire the Blur had ignited roared with a vengeful, orange light, casting long, flickering shadows of the Witnesses across the grey dunes, except for one.
The starless void of the Dark Sea swallowed the small vessel of demon bone, leaving the legends of humanity standing in a graveyard of a reality that no longer belonged to them.
Nephis stood motionless, her grey eyes fixed on the spot where the boat had vanished into the pitch black waves. Internally, her soul felt like it was being ground between two tectonic plates of truth.
For years, she had walked the halls of the Ivory Tower feeling a phantom weight pressing against her back — a sense that someone should be standing there, a missing foundation that left her dangerously exposed like a sword without a sheath. She had whispered to the silence, asking who she had forgotten, wondering if she was merely descending into madness.
Watching the records of 'Sunless', she finally had her answer. The ghost she had been searching for was not a dream or a figment of a fractured mind.
He was real.
He was the scrawny, desperate youth who had toiled in silence while she sat under the onyx branches in a lobotomized, syrupy peace.
The dissonance was crushing.
Every instinct, sharpened by years of war and the poisonous whispers of the deceivers, told her to see him as a predator — a "Shadow" destined to devour her, the "Angel".
Yet, the memory of that sickening crack as his pommel shattered his own finger just to speak the names that would wake her echoed in her mind with a clarity that defied suspicion.
She looked at her own steady, strong hands, capable of incinerating armies, and felt a sudden, visceral shame. He had gnawed on his own flesh to keep her safe while she had done nothing, but exist in a blissful haze. The "traitor" she had feared was the only one who had truly been awake, bearing the weight of their world until his own strings nearly snapped.
The silence was finally broken not by a scream, but by a sound that made the Saints of Valor instinctively reach for their weapons.
Anvil of Valor let out a low, vibrant chuckle that swelled into a manic smirk.
He did not look like a man who had just witnessed his own beheading at the hands of his ward. He looked like an artist who had finally seen his masterpiece breathe.
"Flawless," Anvil murmured, his voice heavy with a terrifying kind of pride. He ignored the lethal glares of the surrounding Witnesses, his eyes locked onto the present-day Nephis with a predatory intensity.
To him, the vision of the Supreme Nephis standing over his broken form was not a warning — it was the ultimate confirmation.
She was indeed the flawless weapon he had longed for, a creature forged with enough spite and power to end even a Sovereign.
Beside him, Gilead, the Summer Knight, stood in a state of profound spiritual crisis.
The noble Saint, whose loyalty was a legend and who took his oaths with a religious fervor, looked as though he had been struck by a mortal blow.
His role model had always been Broken Sword. He had spent his life trying to embody the noble character and steadfast commitment he believed Nephis's father possessed. To see the daughter of Broken Sword commit the ultimate act of regicide and break her own unspoken oath of loyalty to the King was a defilement he could barely comprehend.
"I never imagined..." Gilead whispered, his voice hollow and brittle. "I never imagined that Broken Sword's legacy would culminate in this. To turn the fires of the Immortal Flame against your own King... it is a stain that no history can wash away."
While the other Valor Saints — Jest and Rivalen — shifted into positions of lethal wariness, eyeing Nephis as if she were a Great Devil manifested in their midst, Morgan of Valor did not look at her rival. She looked only at her father. She saw the manic smirk on Anvil's face and felt a cold, sharp spike of disappointment and resentment lance through her heart.
I followed every lesson, Morgan thought, her red eyes burning with a silent, bitter fury.
I stripped away my humanity to become the tool he demanded. And yet, I am still the failed blade in his eyes.
Watching her father celebrate the vision of his own executioner simply because she reached "perfection" was the final disillusionment. To her father, Morgan was just a spare part. Nephis was the only one who mattered because she was the only one who could truly hurt him.
Tyris, the Saint of Clan White Feather, stood nearby, her expression remaining entirely indifferent.
Across the dunes, the Song Saints — the Song Sisters — stood like a coordinated wall of ice. Ki Song's previous observation — that she was likely dead long before Anvil in that future — had turned their wariness into a silent promise of violence.
They watched Nephis with the calculating hunger of the graves they commanded, realizing that she was now an existential threat to the Song Clan.
Daeron of the Twilight Sea, however, looked at the silver-haired girl with a somber, deep curiosity in his vertical pupils.
"A star that burns with the weight of destiny," he rumbled, his voice like the shifting of the seabed. "I spent an eternity trying to find a path for my people to survive the impending doom. I sought a power that could alter the inevitable. Changing Star... perhaps if a Supreme born of such resolve had stood with us, the fate of the Twilight Sea would have been different."
"A truly spectacular performance," Noctis cackled, breaking the heavy tension as he leaned back against the phantom bark of the Soul Tree.
He clapped his hands together, his grey eyes dancing with a jagged, manic light. "Do you see it now, my friends? The commitment! To shatter his own bones, to cover himself in bite marks... that isn't just survival. That is art! He knew exactly what names to shout to buy your heart, Changing Star. A master of deceit knows that the most believable lies are written in blood."
Mordret stepped forward, his mirror-bright eyes reflecting the dying orange glow of the bonfire. A poisonous, delighted smile curled his lips as he looked at Nephis and Cassie.
"Don't let your emotions blind you to the logic," the Prince of Nothing purred. "Look at the situation. He was half dead and trapped on a cursed island. He needed labor to butcher that demon of steel and he needed a navigator, who could see the threads of the sea. He didn't save you out of loyalty. He kept the tools he required to build his exit. He is an opportunist, who only pulled you onto that boat, because he couldn't row it alone."
Nephis turned her head, her silver hair swaying like a shroud. Her white flames flickered violently, the heat of her anger causing the illusory ashen sand at her feet to glass.
"Enough," she snapped, her voice like the grinding of glaciers.
She looked directly at Mordret, her grey eyes hard and unforgiving. "You speak of logic because you have nothing else. You see an opportunist, because you cannot fathom a soul that acts for something greater than itself. Look at his hands in that memory, Mordret. Look at the ghastly marks and the ruin of his finger."
Shifting her icy gaze, which softened for a fraction of a second as she glanced toward the projection of the broken boy and then became colder again than the iciest winters, as she looked back at Mordret. "No one endures that level of raw, unadulterated agony for a performance when there are easier paths to betrayal. He could have left us there to rot the moment the boat was finished, but he broke himself to drag us out of that grave."
Cassie stepped forward beside Nephis, her golden hair dull but her presence radiating a sharp, cold rebuke. She turned her glowing blue eyes toward Noctis, her voice raspy with suppressed emotion.
"Your cynicism is just a mask for your own hollowness, Sorcerer," Cassie said, her words cutting through Noctis's mirth like a blade. "You call it 'treachery' because you are terrified of the alternative — that a person could care enough to destroy their own body for the sake of two girls he had only just met."
Her gaze lingered on the fading image of the shadowy figure desperately clutching his steering oar before snapping back to the ancient sorcerer with a sharp, cold rebuke. "His pain was real. The weight he bore was real. And that reality outweighs every one of your twisted theories."
The tension on the ashen sands was so thick it felt like a physical weight, but it was Professor Julius who finally broke the silence. The elderly scholar looked up at the golden runes of the Loom, which were still flickering with a nauseating, jagged rhythm.
"The interference..." Julius whispered, his voice thin with academic dread. "What could have caused Fate to bleed? To witness Lady Changing Star behead a Sovereign... it was as if the Spell itself was being forced to show us a secret it had already redacted."
Mordret turned his gaze toward the sky of the projection, looking at the place where a moon should be, though the Forgotten Shore offered only a starless void . "The Dreamspawn," he answered, his voice devoid of its usual playful cadence. "The abomination heard his name. Or at least, the echo of it."
Nightwalker, whose eyes usually held the calm of a deep ocean, shifted with a visible, dark unease. "He warns us even now," the Lord of the House of Night rumbled, his voice laced with the memory of a betrayal that had once ended his life in the Eternal City. "Do not utter his full name aloud, especially here, with so many powerful souls gathered. Merely knowing of him — in this state of systemic stress — risks attracting his gaze."
Nephis looked from Mordret to the Sovereigns, her white flames still flickering with the remnants of her anger. "If the Dreamspawn is so powerful, why does he not act while you are trapped within this Loom? If he is truly a threat to your Domains, this would be his moment to seize control of humanity."
Anvil of Valor let out a short, dismissive grunt. "He cannot act from where he is," he rumbled, the manic smirk still lingering on his lips as he evaluated Nephis. "Our Domains stand strong, and the distance is too great for even his awareness to bridge so easily."
"And where exactly is he?" Nephis demanded.
Ki Song looked at Nephis, her dead eyes reflecting the flickering orange glow of the bonfire the Blur had lit in the past. "On Earth's moon, Luna," she revealed softly. "He has been cut off and locked away there for a long time."
The revelation hit the witnesses like a thunderclap.
Chief Bethany stepped forward, her face pale. "Luna? But the moon... it is theorized to be the origin of the Nightmare Spell! Experts believe it contains the First Gate — a Category Six Gate connected to the Seed of the Sixth Nightmare. The path to godhood."
"That is why high-altitude flight is a death sentence and why no Obel Scale can be built to study it," Julius added, his voice hushed with dread. "The Dreamspawn is not just in exile. He is sitting at the epicenter of the world's corruption. Some say that gate leads to the very Seed of the Nightmare Spell itself."
Anvil's eyes narrowed. "It is a nest," he grunted.
"An Unholy nightmare creature has claimed it. The Dreamspawn is a fly sitting in the center of an Unholy web."
Noctis, the Blessed of the Moon, reacted with a sharp, predatory interest.
He looked at the Sovereigns, his manic grin returning. "Earth's moon? And an Unholy horror as a roommate? Oh, simply marvelous! I've always felt a connection to the celestial bodies, but that sounds like a party I'm truly sad to have missed."
Suddenly, the environment of the projection warped.
The ashen sands of the Barrow dissolved into a crushing, absolute darkness. The spiritual pressure in the room shifted instantly, the air turning cold and stagnant with the scent of salt and ancient decay.
The Witnesses found themselves standing once more on the restless surface of the starless Dark Sea.
The powerful Saints among them stiffened, their senses flaring as they felt a crushing, malevolent presence nearby — the unmistakable aura of a Corrupted Devil.
Jest let out a sharp, incredulous huff, his hand moving instinctively to his side. "Oh, wonderful. Another one," the Saint joked, though his eyes were hard. "Honestly, if I didn't know better, I'd say this kid has a magnetic personality for Great and Corrupted abominations. It's almost a talent at this point. I'm beginning to wonder if we should charge him for the sightseeing tour."
The projection solidified around the trio's bone boat. It looked pitifully small — a splinter of demon bone and steel gliding through a starless void. The shadowy figure sat at the steering oar, his indiscernible face turned west, guiding them through the tenebrous abyss.
Suddenly, the black waters boiled with a malevolent displacement.
Nephis's eyes widened, her face turning a ghostly pale that rivaled her own silver hair. The sight of the black, tower like limb rising from the water didn't just bring back a memory. It brought back the phantom sensation of her ribs being crushed and the absolute, freezing hopelessness of the abyss.
"That... thing," she breathed, her voice fracturing. "It followed us. From the very moment we touched this cursed water, it was there, waiting for the perfect moment to swallow us whole."
Massive, grotesque tentacles erupted from the sea, wrapping themselves around the hull with a shriek of bending metal. The vessel was violently jerked, and the moans of the Carapace Demon's armor being torn apart echoed through the Loom.
"Let Cassie go! Now!" the past-Nephis commanded, her silver sword lashing out.
But she was too late.
A tentacle twisted and coiled around her body, dragging her into the dark depths without even a scream, leaving only her sword stuck helplessly in the monster's flesh. The boat disintegrated, throwing the young man into the cold, black water.
The Witnesses watched the internal struggle of the shadowy figure as he surfaced. Far in the distance, a giant stone hand towered above the waves, offering safety.
His thoughts were a frantic, dark storm.
Why don't you think about yourself for a second? Admit it, she is nothing but a burden... Turn around and flee, now!
But then, a defiant thought resonated through the darkness, vibrating with the weight of absolute resolve.
Because I want to!
He chose to live as a human being instead of an animal. He dove back into the dark abyss.
Standing on the unforgiving Dark Sea, Cassie's lips trembled.
Her hands pressed against her chest as if she could feel the vibration of that single, defiant thought. "He hated me," she whispered, her voice thick with a decade of guilt. "I was a burden, a navigator who couldn't see, a liability... and he knew it. He argued with himself to let me die. But he didn't. He chose... he chose to be human."
The projection followed the Blur as he navigated the crushing pressure, his shadow sense guiding him to a smaller tentacle coiling around Cassie's torso. He slashed through the spongy flesh with the Midnight Shard, severing the limb in a cloud of dark blood.
Just as the barrier of tentacles threatened to crush them, a miniature sun ignited far below — an incandescent white radiance that threw the abyss into disarray.
The young man used the distraction to swim for the surface, his lungs screaming for air.
They reached the safety of the stone hand just as the first light of dawn began to bleed over the horizon. The shadowy figure hoisted the unconscious girl onto the dark rocks. For a long time, there was only the sound of waves crashing against the stone phalanx.
Then, a pale white hand grabbed onto the rocks at the base of the giant thumb.
The Witnesses recoiled in horror as the mutilated form of Nephis pulled herself onto the palm. She appeared like a broken marionette — her Starlight Legion armor was shattered and torn, revealing the carnage beneath. There was a horrifying, gaping wound on her torso, where nearly half of her right side had been carved away. Shards of broken ribs were visible through the gore, and viscera spilled over the edges of the wound.
Her femur, already cracked, shattered completely as she fell to her knees, splattering the cold stone with blood as bone pierced through muscle and skin. One of her eye sockets was crushed and empty, and her right arm hung only by a narrow strip of skin and a few tendons.
The shadowy figure — the Blur — stood paralyzed a few meters away.
Even though his face remained a flickering, indiscernible void, his posture radiated a soul crushing shock. He wanted to scream, but his voice was gone, replaced by a deep, physical pain tearing him from the inside as he stared at the ruin of the girl who had been his only constant in this hell.
He looked like a man watching his worst nightmare manifest in reality.
Rain let out a strangled, horrified gasp, her hands flying to her mouth to stifle a sob. She looked at the mangled, dying girl on the stone hand and then turned her wide, trembling eyes toward the present-day Nephis standing beside her — untouched, stoic, and radiating a quiet, Transcendent power.
The contrast was unbearable.
To Rain, it felt as though she were looking at a ghost that had clawed its way back from the deepest circle of hell.
"How are you even standing?" Rain whispered, her voice cracking. "How could anyone survive that?"
The Saints were submerged in a heavy, pressurized shock. To survive a direct encounter with a Corrupted Devil — especially a leviathan of the Dark Sea — was a feat for a Master . To see a Sleeper pull themselves out of those depths after being dragged into the abyss was a fundamental violation of the logic they lived by.
Kai's face was ashen, his fists clenched so hard, his nails dug into his hands, while Effie's jaw was set in a tight, grim line, her eyes filled with a raw, empathetic pain. Jet remained motionless, but her cold blue eyes were wide, reflecting a deep respect for the sheer tenacity required to remain conscious with such injuries.
Daeron of the Twilight Sea stood rigid, his vertical pupils narrowed to needle-thin slits. "I have seen leviathans swallow islands," he rumbled, his voice thick with a rare, genuine disbelief. "Nothing that goes into the gut of a dweller of the depths comes back. Yet she... she crawled back out."
Solvane, however, did not look away. A flicker of something resembling sacred respect crossed her ancient, weary face.
"She refuses to surrender," Solvane murmured, her eyes tracing the ruins of the girl's body. "The sword in her soul knows no capitulation. I despise the rot of her lineage, but her spirit... it is the spirit of a true conqueror. She would rather burn than break."
Anvil of Valor did not share their shock. His manic smirk only widened, his eyes igniting with a terrifying, predatory delight. He watched the gore and the broken bones not with pity, but with the pride of a smith, who had just seen his blade survive the ultimate furnace.
"Do you see it now?" Anvil whispered, his voice vibrating with a dark, triumphant energy. "The more you break her, the more she tempers. Just like her father. A weapon that can be reduced to viscera and still find the will to climb... that is the only kind of weapon that can kill a god."
Suddenly, two white flames ignited in the empty sockets of Nephis's eyes. The incandescent radiance filled her blood, turning it into liquid white fire that began to melt and reshape her flesh.
The Witnesses watched in awed, sickened horror as her muscles repaired themselves, her organs returned to their places, and her bones reassembled from the shards. With a terrible scream, she pressed her almost severed arm back to the stump until the mangled halves melted together.
Luster watched the display with a look of profound inadequacy.
As an Awakened, whose abilities were dedicated to soul healing and essence transfer, he knew better than anyone the limits of restoration. Comparing his own power to enhance essence regeneration to the sight of a Sleeper literally welding her own body back together with the heat of her soul made his own talents seem insignificant.
I am a battery, he thought, his shoulders sagging, but she... she is the sun.
When the light faded, there was nothing but pristine white skin visible through the wide gaps in her shattered armor. Nephis raised her head, looking at them, her pupils dilating. Then the last daughter of the Immortal Flame clan closed her eyes and fell to the ground, losing consciousness.
The memory fast-forwarded through two days of silent vigil on the stone hand.
On the third day, the projection sharpened as Nephis finally opened her eyes and rose. She flinched as her gaze fell on the young man, who was sitting at the top of the giant hand's index finger, grinning from ear to ear at her. Despite the static obscuring him, his relief was palpable, his "smile" a jagged, feral celebration of their survival.
"Why are you smiling?" she asked, her face returning to its calm, indifferent mask.
The shadowy figure gave her a mischievous wink and shrugged, pointing toward the horizon
Behind her, a dark expanse of land was rising above the slope of the colossal crater. And on it, a tall city wall built of grey polished stone towered over the giant chasm of the abyss. It looked ancient but still impenetrable, able to withstand the crushing pressure of the Dark Sea for a thousand more years.
"They made it..." Rain whispered with visible relief in her voice. "...they are safe now."
[RECORD: 02 - THE FORGOTTEN SHORE | PART 01 - END]
[INITIATING NEXT PART...]
[RECORD: 02 - THE FORGOTTEN SHORE | PART 02 - COMMENCING SOON]
Mordret watched the golden runes flare with the announcement, but his attention wasn't on the Spell. He looked into the void of the Loom, his silver, mirror-like eyes catching a reflection that had nothing to do with the Dark Sea or the stone hand.
"Oh my..." he whispered, a dangerous glint dancing in his gaze. "It seems like there is an unwanted visitor."
****
A few hours earlier.
The Brilliant Emporium Café was dark, the 'Closed' sign hanging in the window while the streets of Bastion quieted for the night. Sunny sat behind the counter, his eyes closed. To anyone passing by, he looked like an exhausted merchant dozing off.
In reality, his awareness was split.
Through his shadow avatar, "Happy," hidden in Rain's shadow, he was watching the Loom of Fate alongside the Sovereigns and Saints. Currently, the projection was showing the very beginning of the Forgotten Shore sequence — the moment he had hit the black water and found himself staring down a five-meter-tall dorsal fin.
Sunny watched his past self flail in the lightless abyss, his heart hammering in panic as the massive shark closed the distance. Back then, that creature had been a god of death, an executioner sent to end his life before it truly began. Now, Sunny looked at the beast with a cold, detached indifference. He could feel the weight of his own Transcendent soul, knowing that if he were there now, he wouldn't even need a sword to turn that "god" into chum.
He turned his focus back to the present.
The air in Bastion felt thin, stripped of the oppressive, sharp pressure that usually radiated from the Royal Castle.
Anvil of Valor was gone, trapped within the Spell's repair mechanism.
Finally, Sunny thought, standing up with a fluid, predator like grace.
He wouldn't have another chance like this. With the King and his most powerful Saints occupied, the security of Bastion — the seat of the Demon of Imagination — was at its lowest point in centuries.
He needed to explore what lay beneath the artificial mountain.
Leaving the Emporium, he moved through the city like a ghost. As he traversed the white stone streets, he passed the grand opera house where a troupe of Awakened actors was preparing a rendition of A Song of Light and Darkness.
In a different life, he might have bought a ticket and sat in the parterre as a decoy, blending into the crowd to mask the absence of his shadow. But tonight, there was no one left in the city powerful enough to demand such a performance.
He reached the shore of Mirror Lake.
The pale moon traveled across the starlit sky, its reflection a perfectly round silver disk resting on the silent, black water. It was a beautiful mirage, a fairy tale conjured from the imagination of a dead daemon.
Sunny walked toward the water and, without a splash, entered the circle of reflected moonlight.
The world changed instantly. The illusory warmth of the "pretty" Bastion was stripped away, replaced by the biting, restless wind of the ghost of reality — True Bastion.
Sunny took a deep breath of the cold air and looked up.
Above him was a broken sky.
The moon was viciously fractured into countless pieces, some as large as jagged continents, others as small as starlight vapor. They formed a heavenly river of shards that stretched beyond the horizon, illuminating the ruins of the great castle in a ghostly, haunting light.
The sight of the fractured heavens filled him with a deep, primal terror that even his Transcendent status couldn't fully suppress. He stood at the threshold of a Death Zone, a silent intruder in a Kingdom of Imagination that had long since become a graveyard.
****
And someplace else...
A gaunt man was sitting in the dust, wearing a tattered spacesuit. The visor of his helmet was cracked, and the oxygen in the tank attached to his back had long run out.
Nevertheless, the gaunt man was somehow still alive.
He had been motionless for a while, but now, he finally moved.
Raising his head, he looked at a beautiful blue disk floating in the great darkness above him.
He felt it — the collective awareness of the legends of humanity, the sharp spike in recognition that fed his Domain like a feast. He felt the echo of his name, shouted in a place where he couldn't peer into.
His cracked lips twisted into a slow, unnatural smile.
"How curious."
That was what he wanted to say...
But, of course, no sound escaped from his lips, since there was no air to transmit it.
The man tried to sigh, but failed for the same reason.
He shook his head slightly, his gaze lingering on the distant, blue world where his rivals were trapped.
Then, his lips moved again, forming a final, silent command.
"...time to move."