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?'

one he was 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 humans knew, and most believed to be the only

however, had already learned that sorcery was not synonymous with the Spell, and that

of them he had witnessed inside the Echo of Saint, which had remnants of a much more primitive weave hiding beneath the usual pattern of ethereal strings before he turned her into a Shadow.

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 Weaver perfected the sorcery created by their brother, or whether the youngest child of the Unknown had based the method

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

knife he had taken from the white altar of the Sanctuary of Noctis before leaving for the Night Temple,

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 light

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 was just the unique

Hope's sorcery might have been completely unique,

iron cage, Sunny frowned. How was he supposed to search for something that could have looked

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

underneath the ruined cathedral of the Dark City, in a small cell where a corpse wearing Weaver's mask had been

a circle of runes, too… as well as the stone arch on the

Temple… there, they had been either inscribed by someone from clan Valor, or at least found

creating sorcery. One was the spellweave, as well as a version of it used

have been mostly used by humans — here in the Kingdom of Hope and on the neighboring