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...

about, Nephis continued after a short

of true darkness remains below them. This is the place that Nether made his home.

for

the remains of the army he had led to wage war on Storm God. They lived in the great hollows within the peaks. There were also his children, the Stone Saints,

Sunny frowned.

Nether waged war on Storm God? On

appeared

enough so that he assembled an army and stormed the divine realm.

paused for

beings just to keep him company... or 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 before

silent for a

one of these

sigh escaped from her

the Underworld, all of them abandoned and discarded, just like me. Some of them were the results of Nether's failed attempts 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

while. The expression on

Eventually, she spoke softly:

Sleeper, after all. Even with the Echo I gained in the Nightmare Desert, out there in the 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

that he had visited after she returned to the waking world. He also thought about his

Nephis smiled.