"…Again?"
The words barely made it past his clenched teeth.
The priestess's room was still dark, per usual. Under normal circumstances, Sunny would've been able to make out the geometric patterns on the carved walls. Unfortunately, he was in too much pain to do so.
He lay on his back, staring upward. About two weeks have passed since he had slipped into the Dark City like a stray dog. He left the cohort, and really, was that the right choice?
He swallowed. The cut across his abdomen burned.
No. "Burned" was simply too simple to describe it. It felt as though something inside him had been replaced with molten lava.
The Forsaken Knight had been obscured in True Darkness. Sunny hadn't even realized it was there until the bastard nearly slashed him in two! If not for Blood Weave, he would've died right then and there.
Really, he should be dead. He knew that with certainty.
And he may have silently thanked Blood Weave.
Sunny attempted to shift on the mattress, only for blinding-white pain to explode inside his body.
His body refused any sort of simple motion. His arms trembled and his vision blurred. He couldn't focus at all.
'Curses.'
He fell back against the bed with a thud. His breaths were slowly transitioning to something even. After a while, he relaxed his broken body.
The Knight did not leave the cathedral. So even if Sunny hates the vile thing, there's a boon in its existence. It remained below, pacing its domain with tireless devotion, guarding the sanctum and whatever secrets it holds.
And now, it guards him as well.
In a way, it was almost funny. A bodyguard who tried to murder its charge.
Sunny let out a thin huff of laughter that hurt more than the wound, then cursed after.
The room he found himself in was beautiful in a desolate sort of way. Engraved stone walls with pale, scavenged furniture. It had no windows, so no light from outside could peer through. Fortunately, Sunny could see in the dark. And darkness was the only thing that held true here.
Darkness suited him. Sometimes, even, he felt safe in the darkness.
And with that feeling of safety in the darkness, stacked atop his fatigue and wounds, he closed his eyes.
He had only meant to rest them. Just for a moment.
When he opened them again, he was drenched in sweat. His heart was beating so loud and fast. It was racing, and he could've sworn it might've burst out of his chest a moment.
Sunny stared at the ceiling, and he could tell something was wrong.
He knew it before the thought even formed. So, slowly and carefully, he retraced the last few moments.
He had been awake.
In… pain? Ah yes, the dark knight from below had slashed him. He escaped, crawling with one hand and both his knees, as he used one hand to keep his intestines from spilling out.
A day or so later, he climbed up, as he wasn't fool enough to fall asleep outside in the dark city. He found this room, climbed on the bed and relaxed.
And then—
There had been something!
He couldn't focus on any images or voices. There was no shape he could hold onto and yet…
There had been a sensation. The feeling—the sense of something vast and close at hand.
As though something enormous had leaned down and touched him in the dark.
His fingers twitched against the blanket. He felt heavily uneasy, and the reason was quite obvious.
'I… I-I dreamed?!"
Of course, such a thing was a phenomenon.
Awakened humans—in this case, Sleepers—did not dream in the Dream Realm. Sleep here was a void. A clean cut between the moment you fall unconscious to the moment you wake up.
Dreaming meant interference. Something was wrong, and he'd been affected.
Or he will be.
Sunny's breath grew heavy. This was just like his time with Nephis and Cassie at the Soul Devouring Tree. It was happening again!
He tried to sit up and regretted it immediately. Agony flared through his abdomen like a blade being twisted in his wound. His muscles failed him and the room tilted. All he felt was the sensation of falling backward on the bed. For a terrible second, he thought he would vomit.
"…Fantastic."
He lay there, his chest rising and falling unevenly, and stared into the dark. The only difference now was that he remembered.
He could recall it perfectly now. Two weeks and three days since he arrived in the dark city. And along those days, something strange had touched his mind. No, perhaps his senses, or even his existence.
But what was it? And why did it remind him of [Enthralled]?
Enthralled… Enthralled… Enthralled.
Sunny opened his eyes, closed them again, and decided to focus on the details.
From what he could recall about the Soul Devouring Tree, and his time there… Cassie and the Puppeteer's Shroud were the only reasons they had escaped its suffocating influence at all.
This feeling… was it the same kind of snare? Was he under a mindhex?
'No.'
That was the answer he found himself with. There was nothing here to hex him.
The Tree was far away, located on the Ashen Barrow. Neither its roots nor sweet lulling fruit could reach this place.
And yet… something was wrong.
If it wasn't an external influence, then…
What was he missing?
His fingers curled slowly against the blanket. He was getting closer and closer to an answer…
He retraced again. The sensation of the dream. Vast and close at hand. Leaning down into the dark as though peering at him. Maybe, even, he was peering at it, and not it at him.
Maybe he was the one looking into the darkness.
It wasn't invasive. Hell, it wasn't even threatening. It felt as though it was calling to him.
A step closer…
Sunny's eyes began to slowly widen.
Attributes. What had Cassie said, back then?
It was… five? Yes! It was "five."
His pulse began to go erratic.
He knew Enthralled was gone—they all did. They felt its claws withdraw the moment they left its proximity. He had counted his Attributes afterward, just to be sure, and it was four.
Four.
So why did five still feel so important?
The number echoed in his skull like a silver struck bell.
Five.
Slowly, Sunny summoned his runes.
Even before he had reached the Dark City, this feeling was a lingering one. A faint shift in his awareness that he'd feel mid-battle. Something out there, distant and waiting. He had dismissed it as paranoia and exhaustion, a natural consequence of fighting horrors no Sleeper had business contending with.
But when he crossed into the Dark City… it had grown.
No.
It had roared.
The pressure in his lungs had thickened drastically. It had coiled inside his chest like a snake trapping a man, gnawing at him. It had screamed with no voice, writhing within his very being as though suffocating.
And tonight, again, it had forced him to dream.
A step closer…
Sunny's eyes widen further.
Five… five…
The moment he had left the Soul Devouring Tree, he had felt it. A flicker. A glimpse of something extra in his runes. An additional line among the Attributes.
He had seen it.
And then he had forgotten it. The rune was utterly swallowed by fog.
His lips parted slightly. The word was on the tip of his tongue.
'Regre…'
The syllable was useless to him, as he had no idea where it ended.
Just what was it?!
His heart pounded harder now. The runes shimmer faintly, reacting to his rising agitation.
A step closer…
Cassie's memory surfaced in his mind. He could recall it clearer now.
"You have to remember, Sunny… it's five!"
Her words rang with a strange clarity, as though she had spoken it just now.
His gaze dropped fully onto the list before him. And there it lay—
Attributes: [Fated], [Mark of Divinity], [Child of Shadows], [Blood Weave], [Regressor].
Ah.
The world seemed to tilt.
…It was still five.
The fifth Attribute did not flicker nor blur. It wasn't a figment of his splitting sanity. It sat there, solid and undeniable, it wasn't a lie.
[Regressor].
Sunny stared at it, and as he did, a cold sensation ran down his spine.
Regressor.
He's arrived at his answer.
The meaning struck him like a blade.
Memory—Time—Return.
The fog that had clung to his thoughts since his very First Nightmare shattered violently. The perpetual pressure in his skull eased its grip, before letting go entirely.
Fragments of memory aligned. A sense of déjà vu that had haunted him since awakening from his first nightmare. The instinctive knowledge that something or someone was important. And more than that, the subtle familiarity with the horrors he should have faced for the first time.
But it wasn't the first time. It was the second.
Sunny sucked in a deep breath. The pain in his abdomen couldn't compare to the realization dawning on him.
Something within him had remembered now. The reason he had felt drawn to the ruined cathedral. The reason the Dark City felt like an inevitable conclusion.
And the reason he knew, something awaited him below.
Sunny's fingers trembled. Cassie had said something was within him, yet neither of them could see it.
And yet, it had been there all along. [Regressor].
A bitter laugh threatened to rise in his throat.
Of course… of course…
The Attribute did not explain everything. It had no description to give him. Even looking at it now, all it has to say is '???'.
His mind was still frustratingly blank of concrete memories. No clear scenes of another timeline flooded back to him. Currently, he held no memories of the future.
But the certainty was there, for the fog was lifted.
Though it's an absurd idea, it's one he's already accepted. He had walked this path before—and considering the attribute exists at all, he failed.
And the next moment—
The entirety of the room trembled.
Sunny froze, then quickly clutched the bed. 'Damnation!'
Another tremor followed, far stronger than the last. It was coming from beneath the cathedral.
From below.
His gaze snapped toward the floor, as though he could see through the layers of ancient stone into the abyss beneath—where a certain black door awaited.
The tremors intensified, rolling through the Dark City like distant thunder. Loose pebbles danced across the floor as the whole room groaned in protest.
Sunny's heart pounded in sync with the shaking.
Something knew. After all, the trembling—though small—had begun the moment he took the first step to realizing the truth of his fifth attribute.
With the shaking, a strange sensation rippled through his body. It was familiar, yet not. Two strings of the same instrument had been touched at once.
Two threads of the same fate.
[Regressor].
The fifth Attribute was almost singing to him now.
And deep below, in the suffocating dark of the hidden chamber, there lay a corpse.
And it writhed… it writhed in delight.
Deep below the ruined cathedral, away from the nameless goddess's gaze, lay a secret passage. Here, the air was heavy and unmoving. The pale, ghostly flames of the torches cast their cold light upon the black steel door and the small room beyond it, sealing the space away from the world above.
At the center of the chamber, the corpse lay chained within its circle.
For a long moment—no, for over a thousand years since it was placed here—nothing happened.
Then, after so very long, the corpse twitched.
The movement was faint, as though the onyx body itself had not been the one to perform it. Iron chains rattled against the stone from the movement, their echoes dull and lifeless. Dust slid from the ancient links, but the corpse remained dead all the same.
Yet… it was beginning to move.
One twitch after another. The body began to writhe in short, uneven spasms, pulled by a will that did not belong to it. Whatever lingered here had long since abandoned the vessel it wore. But it appears that something else has taken its place.
The mask remained still.
Its ferocious features, frozen in an eternal snarl, stared into nothing. Black lacquered wood drank in the pale torchlight, revealing neither crack nor flaw. Three twisted horns cast long shadows across the stone. And though no one could see it, those shadows were extending outward.
And in those hollow chasms of its eyes, something stirred.
A call flowed outward, threading itself through the unseen tapestry of fate. It carried neither sound nor word, only longing. A yearning for a presence the world had forgotten, yet which it remembered with perfect clarity.
Lost from Light.
Once, it had been with the mask.
And now, back so many years in the past, it went unheard.
The corpse convulsed violently. The chains screamed as they were pulled taut. From deep within the circle, a faint radiance seeped upward, gathering around the mask like a tide.
Its divinity completely overflowed…
It was a raw wave, spilling forth from an unknown source bound within the mask. From the [Key] that resided there still, untouched by time, waiting. The torches themselves shuddered, their ghostly flames almost growing in intensity, as though agitated.
Inside the mask's empty gaze, a golden light ignited.
It was the pure flame of divinity. The chamber quaked as the overflow surged higher and higher, filling the hidden depths beneath the cathedral with a presence that could no longer be contained.
If the one it sought could not hear the call…
Then the call would become a summons.
A soundless roar tore through the chamber, completely incomprehensible, racing along the floor of the cathedral. Fate itself rippled, disturbed by a hand that had forcefully sent something back to the beginning.
"Hail Weaver.
Demon of Fate.
Firstborn of the -unknown-."
And though no one would hear it, somewhere beyond the grave, the Demon of Fate laughed.
…And this laugh aloud… and terrible one…
Somewhere on the edge of the Dark City, four sleepers stood amidst cooling corpses.
Two of them had slender figures.
One possessed silver hair that shimmered even beneath the endless void of a sky, grey eyes completely calm. A long sword rested in her grip, its blade still dark with the black ichor of abominations. Her white cape fluttered behind her in the restless wind.
Beside her stood a blonde young woman with pale blue eyes—empty and unfocused, yet somehow more perceptive than anyone else's sight. Her hand rested lightly over the hilt of an estoc, posture serene.
A young man with brown hair and a gentle, handsome face adjusted his grip on his jade Jian. His green eyes carried a trace of friendly humor, but his posture betrayed discipline and refinement. Everything about him spoke of nobility and training.
And then there was Athena.
Tall and athletic. Beautiful in a wild way. Hazel eyes gleamed with vitality, and her brown hair tied back in a simple braid. Lean muscle rolled beneath dewy olive skin with each movement.
Nephis. Cassie. Caster. Effie.
They had just repelled an attack on the settlement and followed it back to the supposed source, only to find nothing.
Ten Awakened abominations, as well as two fallen ones.
All of them were breathing heavily.
"Well! That's a job well done, I'll say."
Effie stretched her arms over her head and cracked her neck loudly. From an outsider's perspective, one would think she hadn't taken a single hit—just another hunt, another day.
Nephis knew better. Effie's shoulders were tight, and her breathing was just a little too out of touch. She was exhausted.
The Fallen creatures were to blame for that. They had appeared after the Awakened were already engaged. Without coordination, the fight could have turned disastrous.
Nephis allowed herself a brief glance at Caster.
She was wary of him. Always.
It did not show in her expression, nor in her posture—she stood straight and composed, the embodiment of calm. But internally, she never relaxed around him.
His aspect had made the battle easier. That, indeed, was undeniable.
He had moved like a blur, cutting through multiple openings that Nephis and Effie created. While the abominations focused on the more obvious threats, Caster struck from impossible angles, swift and lethal.
And Cassie, despite not fighting directly, was far from useless.
It had been her warning—her sudden, sharp intake of breath—that alerted them to the two Fallen approaching from behind.
Nephis's gaze shifted to her runes.
Soul Fragments: [486/2000].
She was progressing quickly.
With the cohort hunting relentlessly, and other members of the settlement joining them, the coming months would only accelerate that growth.
But her thoughts weren't on the fragments.
Caster approached calmly.
"Lady Nephis, are you alright? The sudden onslaught was an unwelcome surprise."
She turned and answered in an even tone: "I'm fine. We did well in repelling them."
He nodded before glancing toward Effie—who was already eyeing the corpses with unconcealed enthusiasm—or gluttony—and then to Cassie, who stood quietly with her head slightly tilted.
Caster had noticed the shift in her personality, and honestly, overall happiness.
Ever since Sunny left, she'd been acting different.
The bastard. Caster had helped hide Harper's body—for appearances' sake—only for him to vanish shortly after. An inconvenience, though not a major one, it was big.
Nephis had forbidden anyone from searching for him, unless she gives the order.
From that alone, Caster had drawn conclusions. Something must've happened between the two of them.
Had it not, Sunless would still be here. And useful.
Caster couldn't say much for the boy's combat prowess—though surviving the Dark Sea alongside Nephis implied at least competence. At the very least, he had been a capable scout.
But two weeks alone?
In the Dark City?
Unlikely.
Caster's jaw tightened faintly. Though he did not show it, he was displeased.
For now, the most reasonable assumption was simple.
Sunless was dead.
He turned away, gazing toward the distant dead plains where Nightmare Creatures wandered like dark specks against a ruined horizon.
It seems Effie was already at work.
Cassie turned slightly toward her, listening to the wet sounds of tearing flesh. Effie used a tool when needed, but more often than not, her hands sufficed to pry apart armored hides.
One by one, they moved toward the twelve corpses to extract shards and salvage meat.
All except Cassie, of course.
Nephis noticed it immediately. It appeared that Cassie was standing still with an uncertain expression on her face.
A faint crease marred her otherwise serene expression. Was it a vision? Did she see something?
Nephis had said nothing. She knelt by a Fallen corpse, white dreamblade carving cleanly through chitin. With steady precision, she retrieved the Soul Shard and absorbed it.
Warmth flooded her core.
Her heart, however, felt anything but steady.
She would not speak of it.
Regret lingered within her—not for telling the truth, but for the fracture it caused. The truth had been necessary. It had always been necessary. If he had discovered it on his own, the damage would've been far worse.
Within her, resentment flickered as well—so sharp and fleeting. He had refused to understand her. Refused to see that her path was the only viable one in this broken world.
And frustration weighed heavier than the two prior emotions.
Why hadn't she forced the conversation? Though Sunny walked away, she could've easily chased after him. Why hadn't she made him stay? Why hadn't she ensured he understood.
His choice had been foolish, after all. Fate bound them together.
They would meet again. Of that, she was certain.
And beneath the clash of regret, resentment, and frustration…
There was something a little quieter.
Acceptance.
Acceptance of what she would have to become. Acceptance of his decision and the distance she herself had carved between them.
But still… two weeks. Only two weeks have passed, and she already missed him.
Had he been here, they would have known of the attack long before it reached them. Cassie's senses were extraordinary—but Sunny's scouting was something else entirely. He slipped through the shadows of nightmare creatures and stabbed them in the back. He could see what they would all miss.
More than that—
She had trusted him.
In battle, they moved as one organism. It was like their instincts became one. Though two bodies, it was like they shared one mind.
Nephis doubted she could ever fight that way with Caster. Skilled though he was, he was not Sunny.
She hoped—
No.
She knew he was alive. Cassie likely knew it too. Effie seemed unconcerned. And Caster had expressed polite worry and even volunteered to search for him, though she was certain that concern had been partly performance.
She had denied it, though. Sunny left and that was his decision.
Still…
The separation felt so wrong.
Another shard dissolved into her soul.
And the next moment—
Cassie's eyes widened unlike ever before.
"GRAB ONTO SOMETHING!" She shouted at the top of her lungs.
There was no time for hesitation.
Nephis and Caster plunged their swords into the ground instantly. Effie reacted quickly, sweeping Cassie into one powerful arm while planting her feet with immense strength.
The world shook the very next second.
The Dark City trembled as if struck by an invisible hammer. All around them, stone was groaning in pain, and dust cascaded from the crumbling edges. The ground bucked violently beneath them.
Keeping one's footing required focus—even for a sleeper.
Caster's expression grew more focused. "Cassia! Is it a Nightmare Creature?!"
Effie barked over the roaring tremors, "Cassie?!"
"No!" Cassie shouted back.
The shaking intensified.
Nephis's mind raced.
'What could cause something of this magnitude?!'
No one in the settlement had ever spoken of quakes like this. Was it the landscape itself? Or something vast moving beneath it?
"Head back!" Nephis commanded.
"Gladly!" Effie replied, startlingly nonchalant despite the chaos. "Let's not meet whatever is causing this!"
The moment the tremors lessened enough to move, they ran.
Effie was the first to lean into a full sprint, carrying Cassie effortlessly. Nephis and Caster followed closely, keeping pace—though Caster was notably not using his Aspect.
The ground continued to rumble beneath their feet.
In Effie's grasp, Cassie began to suddenly tremble.
Effie leaned her head down a fraction. "What is it?"
Cassie's voice was distant. But with Effie's proximity to the young girl, she could hear it clearly.
Her voice was trembling with… fear.
"Disasters… Disasters… Disasters… all falls to ruin…"
Effie frowned.
And then Cassie whispered something else. So soft it was nearly lost to the quaking Forgotten Shores.
"Sunny…?"
The gates of the Bright Castle loomed ahead, white stone rising against the black starless sky of the Forgotten Shores.
Gunlang walked at the front.
Gold covered his body like liquid sunlight, the Transcendent Echo clinging to him in shifting plates of radiant metal. Around him marched his hunters: Gemma at his side, ten other seasoned Sleepers behind them, all bearing the marks of battle.
In their recent hunt, fifteen Awakened beasts and four monsters were slain.
A clean hunt indeed.
They had tracked them through a shattered plaza, cutting them down one by one. With Gemma's scouting and Gunlang's overwhelming force, the abominations had never stood a chance.
They were within the Dark City now, approaching the castle's gates.
Tessai should have held the fort well enough. They had not been gone long. And besides, if anything had occurred, Harus would be there to deal with it.
Gunlang stepped forward as the guards recognized them.
He raised a hand.
"Ah, my people!" His voice carried easily over the stones and wind. He clenched his fist, golden armor tightening with the motion. "The hunt was pleasant. Your lord returns unscathed."
A few guards straightened instinctively, and one even smiled.
Beside him, Gemma caught a few glances and cracked his neck with a settling sound.
"Just another job well done," he muttered.
And perhaps… the dead gods had heard him.
For the next moment—
The world shook.
At first, it was subtle. A mere tremor beneath their boots.
Then the Bright Castle lurched violently.
Its white stone began to groan, and the gates rattled in their frames.
No—
Not just the castle.
The Dark City itself trembled.
No, that was still wrong. It was larger than that.
The shaking rolled outward, monstrous in its size, like a roar of something vast stirring beneath the bones of the land.
The entirety of the Forgotten Shores was… shaking?
Gunlang did not fall.
Using his will, the golden echo reacted and extended downward into sharp, spiked protrusions that pierced the stone beneath his feet, anchoring him in place. The liquid metal rippled but held firm. With a fully saturated soul core, a tremor alone could not unseat him.
Gemma, however, was not so fortunate.
The scout staggered, cursed, and promptly face-planted into a nearby wall as the ground buckled beneath him.
The shaking intensified. Gunlang spared him a glance. Truly, it was terrible, he could not blame the man for losing balance.
"Hold fast!" Gunlang commanded, his voice loud enough to cut through the rumble. "Grab hold of something! Do not scatter!"
The hunters scrambled, bracing themselves against the castle walls, spearing weapons into the cracks of stone, anchoring however they could.
But even as he issued orders, Gunlang's mind raced.
What is this phenomenon?
The Dark Sea?
No. They were too far inland. And yet…
The tremor gave him a sense of dread.
It was too deep, so deep in fact, that the Bright Castle seemed to tilt a moment.
And too unified in its assault.
It was not a localized collapse. Truly, he had hoped it'd be a simple massive beast charging through the ruins. At least with that, it could be taken care of. Had some enormous abomination been the cause for this, with Gunlang's hunters and his own transcendent echo, it could be killed.
But no. The entirety of the Forgotten Shores? That alone said this:
That whatever it is, is far beyond Gunlang's abilities to handle it alone.
And suddenly, Gunlang's eyes narrowed. He felt it then.
His Echo…
The golden armor, normally obedient and regal, began to ripple erratically. Its surface shimmered unevenly, spikes flexing and retracting without his commands. The gold pulsed against his skin like something disturbed.
It did not detach. Thank the heavens for that.
But it did react.
Why?
Gunlang slowly turned his head toward the heart of the Dark City.
His expression hardened, for only one explanation could form in his mind.
Some massive calamity had awakened.
At the peak of the Crimson Spire, where jagged coral pierced the starless sky, something began to wake up.
For a long time, the Nameless Sun had suffered in solitude, longing for all things that were lost. longing for warmth.
Only when even that longing withered away—when the ache itself finally died—was the Crimson Terror on the Forgotten Shore born.
High above the dead land, one eye opened. And it felt something that it never had before.
Desire.
The crimson coral that encrusted the spire trembled.
Then it began to move.
The first motion was subtle, the second was rageful. The coral shifted in great waves, spreading, twisting, writhing in agony. Growth surged outward in violent pulses, tendrils burrowing into ancient ruin.
An overwhelming wave of divinity swept across the Forgotten Shore.
Unleashed.
Unbound.
The Crimson Terror felt it.
And it turned. It turned toward the Dark City.
And it began to move.
—
Far below, in the catacombs beneath the Dark City, something else reacted.
In a cavern choked in dust and rot, a massive skeleton sat slumped upon a throne of broken stone. Its ribcage was large enough to house a house within it—many houses, considering it carried multiple ribcages. A single key hung from it, swaying gently in the stillness.
The wave of divinity reached it.
The empty sockets flared with crimson light.
Slowly, the colossal skull tilted upward.
It felt it.
Drunk on the scent of that overwhelming light, the ancient thing stirred with hunger. Through the tunnels and mines, bones rattled.
Skeletons long buried clawed their way free from soil. Dozens—hundreds—an army of a Fallen-Tyrant rising once more. They marched through the darkness in a silent tide, all commanded by their tyrant.
The Dark City. The Source of this crushing wave of divinity.
The massive skeleton also began to move. It shifted, fingers digging into earth.
It began to crawl through the very foundations of the Forgotten Shore, dragging its enormous frame through the soil.
The Lord of the Dead was on the move.
—
But even these were not the most dreadful threats.
In the North, deep within a crimson labyrinth, something vast turned in its sleep. Coral walls trembled as a Disaster writhed, scales scraping against the ground.
In the West, beneath a horizon stained by eternal dusk, a low growl rolled across the plains—a sound so deep it seemed to bend the air. A slumbering calamity shifted, claws carving trenches through a dream.
In the East, coils upon coils tightened in the dark.
Seven heads stirred.
Seven throats hissed in unison.
A hydra's breath slipped through the cracks, venom and black flame simmering as it lifted one crowned head, then another, tasting the divinity in the air.
In the South, something opened its eyes in silence.
It gave no roar or tremor like its other four calamities in kind.
It only gave a silence so absolute that the world went silent with it.
Four horizons.
Four calamities.
The Disaster of the North. The Disaster of the East. The Disaster of the South. The Disaster of the West.
And at the heart of it all—
A pale, black haired boy finally rose from his bed.
Sunless's eyes widened.
The world had changed in mere moments.
Before him, the air was no longer empty. The phenomena was visible to the naked eye.
Woven threads.
Countless threads of divinity stretched across the Dark City like a celestial web, trembling violently. With eyes of blood—with the gaze of a daemon—he saw them clearly.
He saw where they converged, he saw where they touched.
And below him still, something ignited.
A golden light flared to life beneath the cathedral's foundation. It pulsed with a loud, yearning radiance.
Something was calling him with want.
And to the south—no, beneath—another light flickered into existence.
It pulsed from the direction of the Lord of the Dead.
And his intuition, alongside [Fated], screamed out. In that direction held a key.
He didn't know how he knew.
He had no time to question it.
And he needed it with all his being.
The threads of fate tightened around him, humming with anticipation. Disasters stirred at every edge of the Forgotten Shore. All ancient horrors moving toward the same center.
Toward the mask.
No, toward him.
Sunless inhaled slowly. He'd never felt a more potent sense of dread.
In the very center of a collapsing fate, beneath a sky that held no stars, yet no longer felt distant, he rose and took a single step forward.
And began to make his move as well.