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.

didn't mean that he

he had already proven his ability to copy those that already existed. He had reproduced the simplest and most common of them — the pattern responsible for storing Memories in his

time and preparation, he would be able to copy other enchantments of the familiar weaves, too. Creating anything meaningful was going to take

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

was holding a slim dagger in one hand and a small silver bell in the

in the arena. Its enchantment was rather straightforward — it made the weapon utterly noiseless. It

was that of sound amplification, while the

a very noisy dagger. Not because that would be very useful, but to prove that he was capable of

was close to memorizing the staggering complexity of the pattern of strings entirely. Since the bell had only one enchantment, it was easy to isolate it from the parts of the pattern that were

bit different. It also only had a single enchantment and a single ember anchoring the pattern, but that ember was brighter, and the pattern itself was much larger and more intricate.

then sighed, and raised Weaver's needle. Just like on the day he had found it, the long and narrow needle was enveloped in a faint, weak golden shine that only he could see… thousands of years ago, or maybe sometime in the future, it had absorbed some of Weaver's deific blood, along with

to Weaver. Rather, it had been just a random needle that the Demon of Fate found in the Ebony Tower and made use of to sew a

magical properties. Just like Sunny's fingers, it was capable of interacting

the needle, and carefully thrust it into the sorcerous pattern 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

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