Shadow Slave

It took Sunny almost two weeks to approach the southern boundary of the Chained Isles. The further from the Red Colosseum he went, the less presence the Warmongers had there.

With Solvane's militant order occupying the western reaches of the Kingdom of Hope and the followers of Sun God in control of its center, engaged in a centuries-old conflict with each other, the south remained desolate and neglected. That made Sunny's life a bit easier, but also caused him to lower his guard a little.

He still had to remain vigilant, though, because there were more and more unsightly horrors hiding in the deep shadows of the Dark Side as he traveled away from human settlements.

On one of these days, Sunny found himself clinging to the underside of a small floating island as he waited for the arrival of night. He had already rested and dined on several tubes of synthpaste, so for now, there was nothing much for him to do.

As had been his habit for the past week or so, he summoned one of the Memories from the Colosseum and studied its weave, trying to peer into the secrets of the complicated pattern of ethereal strings.

Armed with his innate intuition and the ability to compare different Memories to each other, he was making torturously slow progress in his understanding of sorcery… or at least of this type of it. Weaver's sorcery seemed elegant, strange, and marvelous… but also inhumanly complex and elaborate.

Sunny doubted that he would be able to comprehend its foundational principles any time soon. And even if he did, his human mind was simply unable to encompass the whole of the infinitely convoluted patterns, let alone create one from scratch.

Maybe if he had a powerful supercomputer instead of a brain… in any case, he was not going to be creating his own Memories just yet, or maybe ever.

that he

that already existed. He had reproduced the simplest and most common of

too. Creating anything meaningful was going to take a while, though… but that was not what Sunny

sorcerous repertoire from one trick... to no less than two tricks. He was experimenting with his Memories in

dagger in one hand and a small

won in the arena. Its enchantment was rather straightforward — it made the weapon utterly noiseless. It didn't

chosen these two Memories for the experiment because, at the core, their enchantments were very similar. One was that of

dagger. Not because that would be very useful, but

days, Sunny was close to memorizing the staggering complexity of the pattern of strings entirely. Since the bell had only

but that ember was brighter, and the pattern itself was much larger and

he had found it, the long and narrow needle was enveloped in a faint, weak golden shine that only

Weaver. Rather, it had been just a random needle that the Demon of Fate

fingers, it was capable

that created the enchantment of the silent dagger. He was hoping to replace some of the existing strings with his own, shift others around, and remove some

went well. Sunny was on the verge of getting excited… but then, the same thing that happened with all his previous