Shadow Slave

1015 The Fall of Falcon Scott (33)

The deeper Bloodwave descended into the vast, boundless, dark abyss of the ocean, the more disturbed Sunny felt — and he had already been deeply uncomfortable before taking the plunge into the shallows. There was nothing but emptiness and oppressive darkness both above and below them, stretching endlessly into the unknown.

Even though Sunny could see through the water, unlike how it had been in the impenetrable darkness of the cursed sea of the Forgotten Shore, he was still distressed. The depths of the ocean were not a place meant for humans... they were its opposite. Coming here voluntarily was nothing but pure madness.

'I might have misunderstood the Nightwalkers. They are all lunatics...'

He shifted slightly and glanced at Naeve, who was holding tightly to the fin of the monstrous killer whale. The currents battered them, and the pressure was slowly growing unbearable. The scion of the House of Night was not exactly calm, but his unease was caused by the prospect of fighting a Corrupted Terror, not the watery abyss itself.

Strangely, Sunny's feelings were reversed. The Terror of LO49 was a harrowing foe, indeed, but he had faced plenty of those. The ocean, on the other hand, was an alien, unfamiliar, and fundamentally hostile space. It was abysmal in the purest sense of the word.

Grimacing, Sunny pulled himself closer to Bloodwave's fin and waited.

He did not know what exact means the Saint was using to track the hidden Terror. There was some pattern to his movements, but Sunny wasn't sure what it was. Sometimes, it felt as though the great predator was choosing the direction at random, but one thing remained constant — they were always moving deeper into the darkness.

Naeve had not spoken to him again, but there was also no reason to. Sunny briefly considered summoning the Extraordinary Rock to relay his thoughts, but then discarded that idea. He had nothing useful to say, and making too much noise could attract unwanted attention.

knew what horrors hid in the dark

residual trauma caused by brushing against a Nightmare Gate. He gritted his

almost missed the moment when the Terror finally revealed

in the depths of the lightless abyss, an eerily beautiful creature floated

enormous body of the giant killer whale and

or a white lotus. Its pallid petals flowed and danced slowly in the darkness, some stretching for hundreds of meters into the empty abyss, some swirling around

sight of it was both breathtakingly beautiful and deeply terrifying. The wide ribbons of white looked both like the petals of a flower... and like the long tentacles of an ethereal creature, too alien to be

they got closer, however, Sunny discovered that they were neither petals nor pale flesh... instead, he thought that he was looking at long stretches of white, flowing cloth. He did

what Sunny was preoccupied with

them. Drowned bodies surrounded it like a morbid barrier — humans, Nightmare Creatures, and things he could not name. They floated silently around the Terror, unmoving, their empty eyes staring blindly into the darkness. Some had cloth

beauty of it all only made the visage more appalling. There was a powerful presence emanating from

that presence overwhelm him, making it impossible to look away from the Terror, but also unbearable to witness

another presence, though. Suddenly, the darkness around them seemed to become tinted red, and he felt a deep fury rising from within him. Sunny recognized that fury as something

Bloodwave.

was incensed, and whatever fear they might have felt was

seemed as though the cloth petals