Shadow Slave

"Be careful of what you wish for."

Sunny considered these words despite feeling that thinking about them too hard was, perhaps, not too wise. The aura of madness radiating from the carvings was just too intense to ignore.

The sight of the thousands of runes carved into the underside of his makeshift raft was more than a little bit ominous. However, he was not very concerned about how urgent and demented they looked.

What really made him wary were the symbols themselves. There were familiar runes, and unfamiliar symbols, too... although Sunny had extensively studied the various known languages of the Dream Realm, he could easily admit that there might have been writing systems that he had never seen. Even if it was a little strange that they were not only completely unknown to him, but also bore no passing resemblance to any of the ones he had brushed against before.

However, how could there be the letters of human language here? That was what really disturbed him.

'...Have someone from the Evacuation Army entered this Nightmare already?'

But no, that made no sense. The chances of an Awakened from his world entering the same Nightmare, finding the exact same piece of flotsam, and carving words from a dozen different languages - some of which even a researcher like Sunny had never stumbled upon, let alone mastered - into the wood before disappearing without a trace were infinitely small. Not to mention that the markings did not seem fresh. They seemed like they had been made a long, long time ago.

So... what the hell was the meaning of this? In fact, what the hell was the meaning of this entire Nightmare? There had been no vision of reversed time when Sunny entered it. There were apparently millions of challengers who had entered it before him. There was no desert, no pyramid. Instead, there were the seven suns and a seemingly boundless expanse of water that sparkled under their light. None of it made any sense at all. Even his shadows looked perplexed.

With a quiet groan, Sunny rubbed his temples and glanced at the Sin of Solace.

"What do you think about all this?"

The pale apparition looked at him with a smile.

of you, so

own words, Sunny sighed and turned

"...Bastard."

Sin of Solace

a while, trying not to look at the runes. Then, he studied

of things that I don't know. So, let's

was floating on a piece of wood in the middle of a vast body of water. However, that body itself was strange - it was seemingly as large as an ocean, with no land in sight, but composed of clear freshwater. All that

uniform current... if Sunny disregarded the unimaginable scope, then wouldn't that make this place

know of any

Stifled Scream. There was also a hint of a dreadful secret being hidden in its estuary. Coincidentally - or maybe not - an estuary of some sort was also mentioned in the description of the Shroud of Graceless Dusk. According to it, the sybils had reached the

was the estuary of the Great River, where a dreadful secret was hidden, then... The Great River and the Tomb of Ariel were obviously connected. But how? Why would the Spell send Sunny into

staring at

'Ah. My head hurts.'

explain why the vision of Ariel's Tomb had been interrupted and why he had not seen the usual reversal of time at the start of the Nightmare. Probably? However, he still had no idea what being on the Great River meant, and what the Nightmare had to

thought suddenly

in the past if

would be really awkward if the current of the Great River took him so far into the past that he appeared in the prehistoric time of the waking world, where there were no Nightmare Creatures, but plenty of dinosaurs instead. Then again, this river was supposed to exist

the waking world - had ended up inside of it. Maybe they had entered, entered, and would enter the Nightmare at various points in time before Sunny was

troublesome thought, though... Because it meant that in all

the whole thing. In fact, it's most likely that I

descriptions mentioning the Great