Shadow Slave

Drifting across the perfectly still surface of the water, the battered ketch slowly gained distance from the swirling wall of the dark mist. The raging winds died down, then disappeared altogether. A strange silence settled upon the world, as if they were caught in a gap between two moments.

Only the subtle ripples that spread through the radiant mirror of the frozen river's surface by the bow of the ketch showed that this hidden sanctuary was not entirely, and eternally, unchanging.

Sunny fell back and leaned tiredly on the side of the wooden boat. Breathing heavily, he looked at Nephis, then at Ananke. The silence was too sweet to break it with the sound of human voices. He was too exhausted to speak, as well... for a while, all three of them remained motionless, trying to recover from the torturous fury of the howling storm.

"We'll have to dive back into that hell, eventually."

The thought alone made Sunny shudder. Refusing to entertain it, he closed his eyes and slumped down, intending to rest for a few minutes.

Instead, he fell into the embrace of sleep almost immediately.

Perhaps because of Nightmare, or perhaps because even the Defiled Titans could not reach into the depths of the time storm, nothing visited him in his dreams.

...Sunny woke up with a start when a shadow fell on him. For a split second, he was afraid that they were back in the ruthless grinder of the time cataclysm, but it was only Nephis - she had walked to the bow of the ketch to look ahead, her face pale and her eyes sunken.

He stared at her for a few moments, then sighed and pulled himself upright.

"How long was I asleep?"

She lingered for a while.

"There's no way to tell."

Sunny frowned, confused by the odd answer. However, then he felt it himself... in the place where the deep discomfort of sensing the broken nature of time had been, there was now a strange emptiness. But it was not the familiar comfort of sensing the natural flow of time, either.

was the absolute

that he could not feel the passage of time at all. It was a truly bizarre sensation, one that could not be properly described with words. His heart was beating, and his chest rose and fell as he breathed - however,

been a moment, a minute, or a

Sunny grimaced.

'Damnation.'

What was happening now?

over, still reeling from the terrible strain of surviving

wanting to ask the priestess

His expression darkened.

she had the last time he saw her. Now, she resembled a girl of ten years of age, at most. Her ebony hair was short and

sitting on the helmsman's bench, her feet dangling above the deck. Noticing his gaze,

"Greetings, my Lord."

had grown

adorable... however, he did not feel uplifted by the cute sight. Instead, his heart

of the storm, would Ananke even be able to

at Nephis, who stood with

'We'll think of something.'

turned to the child priestess and

going

smiled sweetly, her azure eyes sparkling, two dimples appearing

storm, my Lord. Time is frozen still here. It is not dangerous... I think. It's

distracted from her words by a subtle movement in the water. The strange thing, though... was that

The surface of the Great River was perfectly clear and flat, turning into a giant mirror. The azure sky reflected in it seamlessly, suffused with bright sunlight. It was as though the entire world was

it was like a