Shadow Slave novel Chapter 1317

Chapter 1317 Difficult Questions

Approaching the window, Sunny opened the heavy shutters and looked at the desolate landscape of Weave from the height of one of the Nightmare Spell Temple's bell towers.

The sky was veiled in impenetrable darkness. The waters flowing through the canals of the floating city glowed with iridescent radiance, bathing the empty streets in ethereal glow. Usually, the light of the Great River at night was dreamlike and beautiful, but contrasted against the forlorn desolation of Weave, it made for an eerie sight.

It was like a city of ghosts.

He sighed, thinking about the cruel fate that had befallen the followers of Weaver... and the creature that had driven them to extinction.

The Mad Prince.

A dark expression appeared on Sunny's face.

He was reluctant to think about his meeting with the Defiled Titan - or at least some vestige of the abhorrent creature that had found its way into his dreams. It almost felt as though thinking about the abomination would summon it here.

Nevertheless, Sunny had to consider what he had seen, and heard, in the harrowing dream. Because it was too ominous.

'I dreamt of being Weaver.'

The spider with a broken leg was, without a doubt, a representation of the Demon of Fate. It was not surprising that Sunny had dreamt of the nebulous daemon after witnessing the mural in the grand hall of the temple, and neither was it unexpected that he had assumed the daemon's role in his nightmare.

Weaver's blood was running through Sunny's veins, after all, and he too had an innate affinity to fate. The latter was the reason for the former, in the end - it was because of being Fated that he had stumbled on the egg of the loathsome Thieving Bird and received the forbidden lineage of the sinister daemon.

Sinister... Sunny had actually never thought about Weaver in such terms before. Mostly because he had benefited greatly from their tenuous connection, but also because there was no reason to. In all honesty, he had admired the mysterious daemon, with no particular reason except for the fact that the Demon of Fate was an intelligent, cunning, and fearsome deity.

But the more Sunny learned about the end of the Dream Realm and the Nightmare Spell, the more ominous of a figure Weaver seemed. And how could they not... who could be more dangerous than a creature that wielded knowledge of fate itself?

Sunny and Nephis had argued about the nature of the Spell, whether it was a fundamentally benevolent force or not.

He was inclined to believe that it had been created for a noble purpose... which was not to say that it was not a vile and terrible curse for the humans of the waking world... but he was also starting to suspect that neither of them really understood the true intention and scope of what Weaver had done at all.

The Nightmare Spell seemed like a tool to make living beings stronger in the face of encroaching Corruption. But there were too many discrepancies between what was apparent and what was hidden beneath the surface. The Nightmares, the slow but inevitable escalation, the sheer convenience of it all...

What was Weaver's true goal? How had the rudimentary version of the Spell Ananke wielded grown to become the pervasive and nearly omnipotent power that seemed to be as absolute as the universal laws of reality that the gods established?

Come to think of it, how had the Doom War ended? What had actually happened to the daemons, the gods... and Weaver? Where did the Corruption that had devoured the Dream Realm come from, and why?

Just like always, Sunny had no answers. More than that, these were not even the questions he had to ponder.

The Defilement was a form of Corruption that had spread from the Estuary, and there were six champions of it... Dread Lord, Devouring Beast, Undying Slaughter, Torment, Soul Stealer. And Mad Prince.

The Mad Prince, who seemed strangely familiar when Sunny had dreamt of him.

He shivered.

'...Why did he feel familiar?'

The Defiled horror seemed like a human... no, like a broken marionette of a human. He was like a flesh puppet worn by a boundless sea of madness, to the point where the madness seemed like the actual being, while the human body just seemed like its ragged shell.

Sunny still shuddered when he remembered the creature's eyes. The torment hiding in them... was like a chilling storm of insanity born from a thousand years of horror, agony, and knowledge.

Knowledge was the heaviest thing in the world, after all. As well as the origin of power.

And that was why he was very uncomfortable with the fact that the Mad Prince seemed so familiar.

Sunny had not noticed it at the start, because the abominable creature was too different from him. But when the Sin of Solace appeared... he had to admit to himself that the Defiled Titan and the sword wraith were eerily similar.

Which meant that Sunny and the Mad Prince were similar, too.

He stared at the ghostly landscape of Weave for a while.

'Have I... assumed the role of that abomination?'