Shadow Slave

The giant underground chamber was circular in shape and as immense as the grand hall of the Bright Castle. Its walls were built out of the same grey stone slabs as the mighty walls of the Dark City, but unlike them, the walls of the chamber were covered with whispering streams of cold, nebulous black water.

In the center of it, a vast mountain of human bones rose from the ground, reaching almost halfway to the distant ceiling. Thousands… no, hundreds of thousands of people must have perished to create it.

With a harrowing realization, Sunny finally understood where the people who built the ancient city and the impregnable wall surrounding it had disappeared to.

They were all here, piled onto each other in this vile monument of death. This horrid dark chamber was their final resting place.

An old memory suddenly surfaced in his mind.

Back beneath the branches of the Soul Tree, Cassie had seen a vision of a bloodsoaked hill formed from countless corpses. On top of it, a tiny black seed was floating in a pool of blood.

Was there a similar mountain of bones hiding under the soil of the Ashen Barrow? Was that how the Soul Devourer had been born?

Sunny shifted his gaze, only now noticing the veins of crimson coral growing from the harrowing hill of white bones, almost like muscle tissue of some colossal creature. Following the coral pillars up, he finally saw that the dome of the immense chamber was broken, with pale sunlight streaming through the breach and falling on the ghastly visage below.

A giant stone hand was reaching down through the broken dome, its palm open, as though trying to caress the mountain formed from the bones of those people who had once populated this dark, forsaken land.

Looking at the stone hand, Sunny suddenly realized where they were.

The vast underground chamber was situated directly underneath the headless statue of the graceful woman who had once saved them from drowning in the black waters of the cursed sea.

One of her hands was raised toward the heavens, as if trying to embrace them. The other had broken off and fell down thousands of years ago, lying in the mud at the base of the giant statue.

…Reaching into the depths of hell, that was the hand Sunny was looking at right now.

was also their way out

"Doofus! Wake up!"

back to reality by Effie's yell, he shuddered and looked

about was the breach in the dome of the underground chamber. With Kai's Aspect Ability and the help of the

Dead that she had mentioned? From Effie's colorful description, Sunny had expected to see

exact words were "a big fat

he couldn't see

Unless…

His eyes narrowed.

the mountain of

***

moved, everything suddenly

first, Sunny thought that the unknown creature was sleeping inside the ghastly hill of bones. But then

mountain itself was the

Lord

of each other

Sunny was paralyzed by

bastard?! That is what

then, the disparate pieces of information clicked in his mind, assembling into a vivid chain of cause and

didn't I realize

mountain of bones, the horde of immortal skeletons, the Lord of the Dead…

front of him was

a fifth step in the evolution of Nightmare Creatures, and the name of that