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

sorcery was not synonymous with the Spell, and that there

witnessed inside the Echo of Saint, which had remnants of a much more primitive weave hiding beneath the usual pattern of ethereal strings

to notice, but Sunny didn't know which of the daemons had copied which — whether Weaver perfected the sorcery created by their brother, or whether the youngest

all of them involved some kind of a weave. However, that conclusion would have been wrong… Sunny knew this because of the third type of magic he had

the white altar of the Sanctuary of Noctis before leaving for the Night Temple, and

of soul essence, with a single String of Fate placed into the pristine light as it folded on itself endlessly and formed a neverending

had used to

might have been completely unique,

was he supposed to search for something that

had encountered. Or rather, several different ones, all united by the same method of creation:

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

stone arch on the last

where he had encountered sorcerous runes was the Night Temple… there, they had been either inscribed by someone

it used by the Prince of the

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