Shadow Slave

Somewhere far away, in a realm being consumed by Corruption...

A blind woman fell to her knees, breathing heavily.

A slender rapier hovered over her shoulder like a stinger, its long blade slick with blood.

The woman was covered in blood as well, her garments tattered and torn. Around her, countless corpses were strewn on the ground, most killed with one swift, precise blow. Some, however, were torn apart or crushed viciously, mauled and mutilated in a myriad of ghastly ways.

There were thousands of them... tens of thousands, stretching toward the horizon like a morbid carpet.

But the land was still seething with Corruption.

Everything here had been twisted and changed, becoming a perverse parody of itself. The trees were reaching forward with branches that gaped with countless maws, their leaves as sharp as blades. The riverbeds swelled with torrents of virulent rot. The blades of grass slithered like tendrils, greedily absorbing the blood of the battle. The corpses bloomed with beautiful, harrowing flowers. The air was full of acid-like pollen.

The soil itself was seeping with black, oily liquid, long vines sprouting from it and reaching toward the blind woman like snakes.

In the distance, more abominable beasts were rushing in her direction.

The woman drew a hoarse breath and rose shakily.

“Come out, come out... I remember you...”

Before the vines could envelop her, a deafening roar shattered the world. Then, a pillar of incandescent flame plummeted from the sky, incinerating the twisting vines, the blades of grass, the clouds of pollen, and the branches of the frenzied trees.

A radiant dragon with scales of pure ivory landed with a thunderous boom in front of the woman, shielding her from danger. Another billowing torrent of flame escaped from its maw, and it lunged forward, assaulting the world of Corruption.

He was the Ivory Lord, Sevirax — a memory of him, at least.

As the great dragon tore a path through the mass of Corruption, the woman advanced forward with unsteady steps.

She had only walked for a few minutes before her champion was brought down.

In the end, even the descendant of Sun God could not resist the hungry abundance of the abominable world. His flames were swallowed by the black liquid, his talons were shattered by the impenetrable hide of mutated beasts, his mighty body was enveloped by vines and pushed to the ground. A swarm of hideous insects crawled into his ghastly wounds, and the trapped dragon let out a chilling, haunting wail of pure agony.

He was defeated... only, unlike the rest of her champions, he did not die.

Because he was immortal.

Cassie raised a hand to grasp the hilt of the Quiet Dancer and lowered her head in exhaustion.

She dismissed the memory of Sevirax.

She was so spent, so tired... so utterly exhausted.

She was all but devoid of essence, as well. But she had not reached her goal yet.

She needed to manifest another champion, but her choices had grown limited.

So, instead, she slowly pulled her blindfold up, revealing the radiant azure depths of her sole remaining eye.

The world of Corruption reflected in it, teeming with harrowing abominations. Something else reflected in it, as well.

She sighed deeply.

“It’s... time. I can’t keep going any longer.”

There was a moment of silence.

Then, the hidden reflection escaped from her eye and took the form of a tall man with raven-black hair and strange, mirror-like eyes.

He regarded the sea of Corruption surrounding them, then looked at Cassie with an indecipherable expression. Eventually, he said in an aloof tone:

”You always bring me to the most peculiar places.”

With that, the King of Nothing turned to face the encroaching tide of abominations and raised a hand, summoning a somber spear.

“Rest a while, Lady Cassia. And remember the deal we made. After this, I will leave you.”

***

The Fifth Nightmare was an insidious trial. It was a deadly gauntlet, and if that was not enough, it was laden with countless fatal traps.

The first of the traps was the process of the unmaking. It was the Spell’s way of giving its carriers a path to attaining Apotheosis — of reaching the state of mind needed to become a god, at least.

Eurys of the Nine had said once that Apotheosis could not be achieved swiftly. There was truth to his words.

One needed to live, to experience, to expand their perspective above the mundane first if they wanted to touch upon the divine. Few ever did, and those few needed hundreds of years of gradual growth and learning — thousands of years, sometimes.

But who had thousands of years to spare in a world that teetered on the brink of apocalypse?

And so, in the Fifth Nightmare, time was folded in on itself. Time here had little meaning.

The first part of the trial, which each of the challengers had to face alone, was meant to unmake them as humans and rebuild them in the image of deities. The process was quite simple... it forced them to face their own Domain.

Cassie was not sure what the others had experienced, but she could infer it from her own unmaking. Sunny had most likely been forced to experience the lives and deaths of all the shades populating his soul. Nephis had most likely been forced to experience all the lives and desires of countless people whom she had inspired... the infinite ocean of them.

Even with the new Supremes taking control of the human territories in the Dream Realm, there were still countless souls who worshiped Changing Star in the waking world, after all.

An eternity of emotions, of aspirations, of fears, of joy, of heartbreak — all folded into a single moment.

That was enough to destroy anyone. Or to change them, at least.

The unmaking itself was a trial that hid deadly traps.

The most obvious one was the threat of one’s consciousness being destroyed by eternity. Of losing oneself entirely and dissolving in the endless torrent of lives and experiences forced upon them. One had to possess an incredibly strong will, an impossibly firm sense of self, an absolute resolve to stay true to their goals in order to survive that terrifying ordeal.

Even if they did, at the end of it all, they would not be the same — so by design. They would hardly remember who they had been... who they had wanted to be. Their previous self — that of a mortal human — would be made pale and faint in the face of eternity, dwarfed by the vast immensity of accumulated experience and the great scope of consciousness worthy of a deity. For Cassie, however, that ordeal had not been too difficult to endure.

At the start of the Nightmare, she had been forced to live the lives of everyone she remembered. That was a dire test, but while it was different from her past trials — remembering something was different from truly experiencing it, after all — it was not entirely unfamiliar.

So, she managed to maintain her sense of self rather well.

There was another hidden danger in the process of the unmaking, though, at least for her.

It was the threat of Corruption.

Cassie remembered countless Nightmare Creatures, after all. So, she had to endure their appalling lives too.

She suspected that many Sovereigns had endured the same. In fact, she believed that learning how to resist Corruption — to an extent, at least — was an integral part of Apotheosis.

Cassie’s own ability to resist was not that formidable, but she could cheat the process. And so, she destroyed herself countless times and rebuilt herself countless times, erasing those memories that were too dangerous for her to contain within herself. At the end of it all, she emerged relatively unscathed.

She had been tempted to erase far more of her memories, in fact, to alleviate the burden... but, in the end, she decided to keep most of them.

That was because while possessing too vast a Domain could become one’s undoing in the Fifth Nightmare, completely destroying their self and obliterating them, possessing too weak a Domain was a danger in and of itself.

There was a purpose to the change, after all. Escaping the unmaking too easily would make conquering the Nightmare all but impossible.

Still. In the end, Cassie had survived.

The second part of the Fifth Nightmare was a mystery. Cassie had an inkling of what the conflict they had to resolve was, but she was not sure just yet. She did, however, have a feeling that they had not entered the final trial at the same time.

Cassie herself appeared in the young and untamed world of the shared Nightmare in the later years of the Age of Gods. It took her a long time to regain her senses, gather her shattered mind, and compose herself. By then, she learned of the first trap of this trial — the threat of being swallowed by the world.

Those whose consciousness was vast enough to become a deity, but had not undergone Apotheosis yet, faced a unique danger — the danger of allowing themselves to be enthralled by the world and fusing with it, achieving the opposite of what they strived for. Of losing their personhood and becoming elemental forces instead of Spirits.

That was an insidious peril, indeed.

But for Cassie, who had always struggled to maintain her personhood in the tide of foreign senses, that trap did not pose much danger, either.

And so, she ventured on a journey.

A journey to find something that had been long lost and did not exist in the real world anymore, but could still be found in this Nightmare.