Shadow Slave

Nephis looked into the darkness as she spoke in an even voice:

"It happened after the Demon of Destiny had his falling out with the Goddess of the Black Skies... I think. But before Hope escaped her chains, and the daemons rose in rebellion against the gods. In the darkness... in the true darkness that fills the halls and caverns of the Underworld. Below the Hollow Mountains."

She sighed.

"When I opened my eyes, I was a woman made of stone. A crude, clumsy, and defective precursor of the Stone Saints. I was laying on a mountain of abandoned statues just like me, all of them broken, discarded, and forsaken. Everything around me was enveloped by cold darkness, with not a spark of light or hint of warmth anywhere. There was just me, my broken siblings, and the lonesome silence."

Sunny shifted slightly.

"True darkness?"

Nephis slowly nodded.

"Yes... those mountains are called hollow, but in fact, they are full of darkness. Their hollows are like great reservoirs of it - it is where darkness lives, and where it comes from. True darkness is very much like this river, in fact. Legends say that a terrible creature was slain by the gods once, at the dawn of time, and that its blood seeped into the earth. This is what true darkness is - the dark creature's blood."

Sunny shivered. That dark creature... to be the source of all true darkness, of the entire element of darkness, it had to be something far greater than an Unholy Titan.

It must have been one of the unknown, then. A being of the Void...

of what he was thinking about, Nephis continued

Hollow Mountains are a scar left by the death of that creature. And so, most of true darkness remains below them. This is the place that

lingered for a

war on Storm God. They lived in the great hollows within the peaks. There were also his children, the Stone Saints, who lived below the mountains, in the heart of the Underworld. And there were also creatures who lived even lower, near the very bottom of the dark abyss. That is where the pile of

Sunny frowned.

Nether waged war on Storm God? On his own, before the

appeared on

so that he assembled an army and stormed the divine realm. Of course, he lost. Most of his army was decimated, and he secluded himself in the Underworld, becoming its ruler and losing himself in the

paused for

maybe it was his defiant, prideful way of challenging the gods. After all, only the gods could create living things. Despite that... somehow, Nether succeeded. But he failed many times

a moment, and then

one of

escaped from her

to create the Stone Saints. Some of them were outcasts and derelicts for whom there was no place in the world above anymore. All of them were pitiful and

darkness for a while. The expression on her

Eventually, she spoke softly:

darkness, my strength was pitiful. Ah, it was such a... blow. I never realized how much pride I took in being strong before that Nightmare. I had always relied on my strength... I had always told myself that I had to be strong. If only I was strong like my father... if only I was strong, stronger, the strongest... then I wouldn't break apart. And the people around me

silent, remembering Neph's nightmare that he had visited after she returned to the

Nephis smiled.