Shadow Slave

There were hours left until they were going to be taken to the arena again. Sunny stared at the walls of the dungeon intently, as though hoping to glean some secrets from the ancient stones.

But what could he see? They were just old stones. There was nothing interesting on their surface, and neither was there anything interesting beneath it.

After a while, Sunny took a deep breath and sat down again, trying to make himself as comfortable as possible in the narrow cage. Then, he shut down his senses, pushing away the presence of countless abominations surrounding him, the stench of the prison, the pain in his exhausted body… everything that distracted him from thinking.

'What do I know about sorcery?'

That was a daunting question.

Even the word itself was deceptive. Humans of his world used it to describe any Aspect capable of dealing direct damage to the opponents, as opposed to augmenting the Awakened's combat ability — especially those that could do so from range. But that wasn't what Sunny was after.

No, what he was interested in was not the type of abilities that existed within the familiar framework of supernatural powers, but the very means used to create that framework, or at least those that existed outside the realm of Aspects.

That, to him, was true sorcery.

'But there are different kinds of such sorcery, as well… what are the ones that I've witnessed?'

Three came to mind. The first one he was familiar with the best — the spellweave, which he believed to be Weaver's own sorcery. The Spell itself was created from it, as well as all the magical items that the Spell gifted to the Awakened — Memories and Echoes. This was the magic that all humans knew, and most believed to be the only kind there is.

Sunny, however, had already learned that sorcery was not synonymous with the Spell, and that there were ways of creating magic different from spellweave.

The first of them he had witnessed inside the Echo of Saint, which had remnants of a much more primitive weave hiding beneath the usual pattern of ethereal strings before he turned her into a Shadow. Later, he encountered the same type of alien weave within the walls of the Ebony Tower.

This type of Sorcery belonged to the Prince of the Underworld, Weaver's younger sibling. The similarity between them was hard not to notice, but Sunny didn't know which of the daemons had copied which — whether Weaver perfected the sorcery created by their brother, or whether the youngest child of the Unknown had based the method of his craft on the eldest's invention.

Judging by these two types of sorcery, it was easy to imagine that all of them involved some kind of a weave. However, that conclusion would have been wrong… Sunny knew this because of the third type of magic he had encountered.

The miraculous creation of Sun God — the obsidian knife he had taken from the white altar of the Sanctuary of Noctis before leaving for the Night Temple, and was now resting, inaccessible, on the bottom of the Covetous Coffer.

The black knife had no weave hiding beneath its surface… instead, it was full of blinding radiance, as if encompassing a boundless ocean of soul essence, with a single String of Fate placed into the pristine light as it folded on itself endlessly and formed a neverending circle.

That was the sorcery of Sun God… if a deific miracle could even be called sorcery. In any case, the obsidian knife — and later, the wooden one he had used to kill Solvane — proved that one didn't have to base their magic on a weave of some sort. This was just the unique way Weaver cast his, and their brother followed.

So… Hope's sorcery might have been completely unique, too.

Trapped in the iron cage, Sunny frowned. How was he supposed to search for something that could have looked like anything?

Come to think of it… there was another type of sorcery that he had encountered. Or rather, several different ones, all united by the same method of creation: runic magic.

The first time he had seen it was underneath the ruined cathedral of the Dark City, in a small cell where a corpse wearing Weaver's mask had been chained within a broken circle. That circle was carved into the stone floor, surrounded by countless symbols that Sunny had not recognized.

The Gateway within the Crimson Spire was surrounded by a circle of runes, too… as well as the stone arch on the last level of the Ebony Tower and the one connected to it, situated in the beautiful white gazebo on the Ivory Island.

Another place where he had encountered sorcerous runes was the Night Temple… there, they had been either inscribed by someone from clan Valor, or at least found and repurposed by them.

So, basically, he was familiar with three general types of creating sorcery. One was the spellweave, as well as a version of it used by the Prince of the Underworld. The other was the divine miracles of Sun God, which he couldn't even begin to understand.

And the last one was based on the inscription of runes, and seemed to have been mostly used by humans — here in the Kingdom of Hope and on the neighboring Forgotten Shore.

'Huh…'

There was a small discrepancy, however.

'Why was the portal in the Ebony Tower created with runic magic instead of the primitive spellweave, like everything else in there?'

Was it, perhaps, because the connecting portal on the Ivory Island had been? The Prince of the Underworld had built the tower in the Sky Below long after Hope had built hers, after all. In fact, he had done so after his sister was already imprisoned, to harvest the divine flames that had destroyed her domain. It would have made sense for him to use runic magic to invade an already existing system of portals that had been based on it.

So… was Hope, perhaps, the source of runic magic? Or at least a user of it?

Sunny sighed, feeling spent and tired, then closed his eyes.

He had to sleep at least a little, to allow his body and mind some rest before tomorrow's battles.

Especially now that he had not only to survive them, but also do so while searching for any sign of hidden runes throughout the arena…