Shadow Slave

Sunny stumbled on that particular idea while lamenting how unreasonable the situation he had found himself in was.

No, really… it wasn’t enough that he had to fight a minor god. That malevolent deity just had to be an undying one on top of that — a Sacred foe who literally could not be killed, because he was not a living thing to begin with.

Shadow God had taken his death, and therefore, stole away his life as well.

The concept of a living being was a complicated one in the world of the Nightmare Spell. Take Sunny, for example… technically, he was dead. But in the broader sense, he was still a living being. So was Jet, who could be considered one despite being physically and functionally a magically reanimated corpse.

There were all manner of Nightmare Creatures out there, as well — wraiths, ghosts, and specters of all kinds; golems and automatons, walking suits of malevolent armor… and things that could not even be described, let alone understood.

But all of them would still count as living beings, and for one simple reason — because they could be killed. They had shadows, and they had souls.

The Deathless were neither dead nor alive, though. They had lost their shadows, and no matter how Sunny looked, he could not determine if they had souls either. So, by all accounts, those cursed by Shadow God were not living beings.

They weren’t ideas or concepts, either, because what constituted them was solid matter.

What were they, then?

Well, by method of elimination, the answer was simple…

They were things.

There were all kinds of ways to challenge that statement, but for Sunny, it sounded good enough. The Deathless were things — they were no different from items. Cursed things that were controlled by malevolent wills, but items nevertheless.

So, then, what kind of Memory could help Sunny deal with a Sacred thing that had been cursed by Shadow God?

He had been considering that question feverishly while at the same time wielding his Will to push back the oppressive authority of the Sacred thing in question. He even asked himself what kind of Memory he could have created to get himself out of this situation, if he was good enough at weaving to create Memories on the fly.

And then, it suddenly hit him…

If the Deathless were things, if they were no different from items… Then did he really need to make a Memory to survive the battle against the Wandering Archon?

…What if he made the Archon into a Memory, instead?

The question was so preposterous that Sunny instantly threw it out of his head, concentrating on finding an actual solution. However, once the idea rooted itself in his mind, it refused to go, and a few moments later, he found himself coming back to the same question.

‘I have finally lost it… I have. Haven’t I?’

But what if he hadn’t?

Technically… nothing was stopping Sunny from turning a Deathless into a Memory. A Memory was simply an item enchanted with the rudimentary spellweave, after all, which allowed it to be disassembled into soul essence and stored in its master’s soul, as well as summoned back to be reconstituted as matter.

The Deathless had neither a shadow nor a soul — they weren’t living beings and were things instead. So if Sunny could just create a rudimentary spellweave, anchor it in a sufficiently pure soul shard, and attach it to the black bones of one of them…

Then, theoretically, he could dismiss the Deathless as he would a Memory, and keep it stored in his soul in a disassembled state. It was just that attaching a spellweave to a moving, sinister, murderous skeleton was not exactly something that could be accomplished easily. And normally, there would be no reason to — after all, it was not like turning one of the Deathless into a Memory would give Sunny control over it. It would only allow him to dismiss and summon the skeleton like he would a Memory, and nothing more.

Once the Deathless was summoned back, it would immediately attack Sunny once again. It would probably destroy the spellweave rooted inside of its bones, as well.

But…

‘Ah, to hell with it! I am going to try!’

Sunny was already in quite a desperate situation, and he neither wanted nor planned to control the Archon. All he wanted to do was get rid of him so that the Shadow Legion could escape, and Sunny himself could survive.

He was sure… almost sure that if he did manage to dismantle the Deathless Spirit and draw him into his Soul Sea, the thing was not going to destroy his soul from within. That was because, unlike shades and Shadows, a Memory was not an actual thing when dismissed — not the items it became when summoned.

Rather, it was an idea of that thing… a blueprint used to reassemble it from essence. So, the Archon would cease to exist as a thing within Sunny’s Soul Sea. Most likely.

‘I guess we’ll see!’

Steeling himself, Sunny sent one of his incarnations away from the Wolf and summoned two things. One was Weaver’s Needle, and the other was a Sacred soul shard stored in the replica of the Nameless Temple.

Sacred Shards were not at all simple to come by. Sunny had procured a few in Ariel’s Game, and a few more were unearthed by the forces of the Human Domain here and there in the Dream Realm. However, most of them were gone now — he had used some to survive the Death Game, while the rest became anchors for the defensive arrays he and Cassie created to protect key Citadels of humanity.

The one Sunny summoned was the last in his possession.

‘Now, how the hell do I even do it?’

As six incarnations of Sunny were empowering the Wolf in its battle against the Archon, his battered soul drowning in agony, he tried to calm himself down and think things through clearly.

‘Come on, come on…’

The Deathless Spirit’s staff brushed across a tall white dune no more than a few hundred meters away from him, erasing it from existence and making Ariel’s Hell shudder. Sunny crouched low to maintain his balance and gritted his teeth.

In theory, it was simple.

Weaving took a lot of time and concentration, so it was not something that could be done in the midst of a battle — at least not by him, and he was the best and only weaver in existence. Memories could not be woven or unraveled on the fly…

But that only held true for proper Memories.

A rudimentary one, no different from the very first one Sunny had ever created, could be created quite easily. All he had to do was weave the fundamental enchantments that the Nightmare Spell used as the basis of all Memories, and then connect them to the item that was supposed to become a Memory.

No, not even all of the rudimentary enchantments. Sunny did not care if the Archon could passively mend himself while stored in his soul — in fact, he would very much prefer if the damn Deathless couldn’t. He did not need the Memory of the Wandering Archon to possess a title and a description, either.

All he needed was to imbue that thing with the quality that allowed it to be dismissed or summoned, as well as make himself the being in control of when that happened. So…

First of all, he needed to weave strings out of shadow essence.

He needed to anchor them in the Sacred Shard and create the rudimentary enchantment of summoning.

Then… he somehow needed to embed the shard and the weave into the Archon. While staying alive, no less.

Well, as alive as someone who was technically dead could be.

‘..Nothing to it.’

Smiling weakly, Sunny began weaving ethereal black strings out of his essence. Usually, he would weave a considerable length of the shadow string before beginning to weave it into a sorcerous pattern. But right now, there was no time for that — so, Sunny wove faster than he had ever before, his six hands moving in rapid harmony.

As soon as there was any length of the string at all, he immediately threaded it through Weaver’s Needle and anchored it in the soul shard, then continued to create more while beginning to shape the familiar pattern of the summoning enchantment. Sunny had created this particular pattern so many times that he could weave it with his eyes closed…

Weaving it while simultaneously battling a deity, though, was proving to be a challenge.

Most of Sunny’s mind was preoccupied with the battle. He assisted the Wolf while at the same time straining all of his being to resist the boundless Will of the Archon — that was already almost beyond his limit, so he hardly had mental capacity for weaving, as well.

And yet, he had to manage somehow.

So, he did.