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?'

as all the magical items that the Spell gifted to the Awakened — Memories and Echoes. This was the magic that all humans knew, and most

learned that sorcery was not synonymous with the Spell, and that there were ways of creating

which had remnants of a much more primitive weave hiding beneath the usual pattern of ethereal strings before he turned her into a Shadow. Later, he encountered the same type of alien weave within the walls of

them was hard not to notice, but Sunny didn't know which of the daemons had copied which — whether Weaver perfected the sorcery

two types of sorcery, it was easy to imagine that all of them involved some kind of a weave. However, that conclusion would have been wrong… Sunny knew

from the white altar of the Sanctuary of

its surface… instead, it was full of blinding radiance, as if encompassing a boundless ocean of soul essence, with a

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

Hope's sorcery might have

frowned. How was he supposed to search for something that

of sorcery that he had encountered. Or rather, several different ones, all united by

he had seen it was underneath the 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,

as the stone arch on the last level of the Ebony Tower and the one connected to it, situated in the beautiful white gazebo on

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

basically, he was familiar with three general 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

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