Shadow Slave

There were hours left until they were going to be taken to the arena again. Sunny stared at the walls of the dungeon intently, as though hoping to glean some secrets from the ancient stones.

But what could he see? They were just old stones. There was nothing interesting on their surface, and neither was there anything interesting beneath it.

After a while, Sunny took a deep breath and sat down again, trying to make himself as comfortable as possible in the narrow cage. Then, he shut down his senses, pushing away the presence of countless abominations surrounding him, the stench of the prison, the pain in his exhausted body… everything that distracted him from thinking.

'What do I know about sorcery?'

That was a daunting question.

Even the word itself was deceptive. Humans of his world used it to describe any Aspect capable of dealing direct damage to the opponents, as opposed to augmenting the Awakened's combat ability — especially those that could do so from range. But that wasn't what Sunny was after.

No, what he was interested in was not the type of abilities that existed within the familiar framework of supernatural powers, but the very means used to create that framework, or at least those that existed outside the realm of Aspects.

That, to him, was true sorcery.

'But there are different kinds of such sorcery, as well… what are the ones that I've witnessed?'

familiar with the best — the spellweave, which he believed to be Weaver's own sorcery. The Spell itself was created from it, as well as all the magical items that the Spell gifted to the Awakened — Memories and Echoes. This was the magic that all

synonymous with the Spell, and that there

pattern of ethereal strings before he turned her into a

to the Prince of the Underworld, Weaver's younger sibling. The similarity between them was hard not to notice, but Sunny didn't know which of the daemons had copied which — whether

of them involved some kind of a weave. However, that conclusion would have been wrong… Sunny knew this because

taken from the white altar of the Sanctuary of Noctis before

hiding beneath its surface… instead, it was full of blinding radiance, as if encompassing a boundless ocean of soul essence, with a single String of Fate placed into the pristine

even be called sorcery. In any case, the obsidian knife — and later, the wooden one he had used to kill Solvane — proved that one didn't have to base their magic on a weave of some sort. This

might have been completely

How was he supposed

was another type of sorcery that he had encountered. Or rather, several different ones, all united by the same

ruined cathedral of the Dark City, in a small cell where a corpse wearing Weaver's mask had been chained within a broken circle. That circle was carved into the stone floor, surrounded by countless symbols that Sunny had

the last level of the Ebony Tower

runes was the Night Temple… there, they had been either inscribed by someone from clan Valor, or at least found and repurposed by

types of creating sorcery. One was the spellweave, as well as a version of it used by the Prince of the Underworld. The other was the divine miracles of Sun God, which

based on the inscription of runes, and seemed to have been mostly used by humans — here in the Kingdom of Hope