Shadow Slave

Although it seemed too mystical to be true, Sunny knew that the answer to that question was a resounding yes.

After all, Sun God had twisted the fates of the Chain Lords in on themselves to make Noctis, Solvane, Sevirax, and the rest immortal. Weaver, meanwhile, had woven the Strings of Fate to create the Nightmare Spell.

So, Sunny — the inheritor of Weaver’s lineage — could weave the Strings of Fate, as well.

…In theory.

In practice, he had sensed something when touching the thread of golden light. It had felt like a physical object in his grasp, but it had also felt absolutely immovable. Not inherently so, but simply because it weighed as much as the world itself did.

Moving that single String of Fate, for him, was no different from an ant attempting to move a mountain with its feeble limbs.

‘That is probably something only a Divine being can do.’

Even then, not just any Divine being... and among those great beings that could twist the Strings of Fate, none had been able to escape it, in the end, so the measure of their influence must have been limited.

‘I feel like this is something I am not qualified to understand yet, let alone perform.’

In the future, though...

The future did not exist anymore, so anything was possible.

Satisfied with that conclusion, he thought back to the very fact that the great tapestry of fate was torn and savaged.

It felt too peculiar to fathom, knowing that he was the person — or the weapon, at least — who had fundamentally altered one of the inherent pillars of existence. Among all of his accomplishments, that one stood out as the most distinguished by far. So much so that nothing else could even compare. Granted, the Vile Thieving Bird deserved most of the credit, possibly followed by Weaver. Cassie and Sunny had done their part, and what they had done was nearly impossible... but it did not feel entirely, or even largely, like an achievement of their own.

So, Sunny was not going to let it go to his head.

Still, while the question of who had unraveled the tapestry of fate remained, the implications of its unraveling were apparent.

The future, which had been determined all along, flowing toward a predestined end — even if the details of how the world arrived at that end could shift — was undecided and malleable now.

Leaving the astonishing nature of that tectonic shift aside, it seemed like a positive change. But really, it was not necessarily so. After all, there were countless possible futures now: some of them could be more beneficial than what had been fated to transpire, but some were undoubtedly far more horrible.

There was simply no way to tell, since Sunny did not know what shape the original future had been meant to take, and there was no way to learn what final shape it would settle into anymore. For better or worse, they would only find out what the future held when it was upon them — they would only know if their intervention was a blessing or a bitter curse when there was no way to change it.

The future was just... uncertain and free, containing myriad possibilities. So, it was up to Sunny and his companions to make sure that the future that ended up being realized was more hopeful than dreadful. That heavy responsibility suited him fine. Even if they failed in the end, and the world was consumed by the Nightmare that the Forgotten God was dreaming, he would at least know that they had strived for and failed to achieve a better ending themselves, not guided like puppets that performed a complicated play as their limbs were pulled by the Strings of Fate.

‘The tapestry of fate may repair itself eventually, restoring a semblance of order... but it would never be the same.’

Letting out a mental sigh, Sunny turned his thoughts to the visions he had seen.

‘Repose...’

It was a startling thing to learn, that the Demon of Repose was responsible for creating the very concept of changing seasons and had either caused or ended an ice age that threatened to consume all of existence... or perhaps both.

It was also deeply fascinating to have witnessed the ancient past of the Heart Realm, especially considering that Sunny was currently waging a war for dominance over its charred remains. The Burned Forest had been the Sacred Forest once, and the unfathomably large stump at its center had been the World Tree, the avatar of Heart God.

Heart God...

The god of souls, emotions, memory, growth... and hunger.

That deity was the most nebulous and elusive of the six great gods, so Sunny had rarely stumbled upon traces of Heart God before.

There was Aidre of the Chain Lords and the Desecrated Grove, from where the sapling of the sacred tree empowering the Chain Breaker came. There was the tree to which Eurys and Azarax had been nailed for thousands of years, and which had prevented them from forgetting themselves like the rest of the deathless prisoners of the Nightmare Desert. There was the Burned Forest. ɽâ𝐍ȱʙЁꞨ

... There was the Soul Devourer, as well — which, as Sunny suspected now, was a sacred tree that had grown in the wake of the Doom War and succumbed to Corruption.

It was interesting to note, however, that the World Tree had been similar to the Soul Devourer in numerous ways. It had attracted numerous beings with the sweet scent of its fruit, after all, and numerous of those beings remained in the Heart Realm forever, helping the great tree grow and its offspring form the Sacred Forest.

Just like Sunny, Nephis, and Cassie had almost remained on the Ashen Barrow to guard the Soul Devourer and help it spread its seeds forever.

The vision Sunny saw possessed a strange duality to it, so he could not tell if the avatar of Heart God had been benevolent and nurturing or harrowing. maybe it was both — the gods were beings born long before the concepts of good and evil, after all, and therefore existed outside of the confines of mundane morality. So, they were both and neither.

The World Tree and the Sacred Forest seemed to have found a state of balance eventually, though, after experiencing the long and frightening ice age... with the help of the Demon of Repose.

Only to burn in the end.

Suddenly, Sunny remembered the descriptions of two Memories he had received a long time ago — the [Memory of Ice] and the [Memory of Fire]. They had been charms that increased his resistance to cold and heat, respectively, which he lost after being banished from the Nightmare Spell.

The description of the first had read: [...Even when the sun returned, they shivered and remembered the never-ending winter.]

While the description of the latter hinted at a different calamity: [...And then, there was nothing but flame.]

The descriptions were peculiar and fragmented, like two pieces of a larger whole. Sunny had even thought that if he could find the whole set of resistance charms, he would be able to learn the entire story.

Now, he suspected that this story told the tale of the inhabitants of the Sacred Forest — the primordial humans and the creatures who had dwelled in the Heart Realm, and who probably built the barrows on the northern edges of the Forgotten Shore. The God of Memory was gone, and these people were long gone, as well.

Now, the only thing that remembered them was the Nightmare Spell.

‘How fitting...’