High above the bottomless void of the chained isles, two pristine white wings beat against the fierce gales of the Dream Realm. Cielle cut through the air with effortless grace, her wings catching the violent updrafts and turning them into flight. Sunny held onto her, his arms wrapped securely around her waist, his face pressed against her shoulder to shield his eyes from the biting wind.
He didn't look down. He made it a strict, personal rule never to look down when the ground was several miles beneath his boots. He was saving essence by not using shadow step yet it felt rather…. no, extremely embarrassing to be carried like this.
To their left and right, massive floating islands drifted through the bruised sky, held together by the ancient, groaning chains. The sheer scale of the place was enough to make a person of the waking world lose their mind.
"Bank left!" Sunny yelled over the roar of the wind, his voice muffled against her tunic.
He didn't need to explain why. Cielle had already seen it. Curled around a section of the chain directly in their flight path was a colossal, centipede-like abomination. Its carapace was the color of dried blood, and its thousands of scythe-like legs twitched rhythmically in its sleep.
Cielle angled her wings, diving sharply to the left. The sudden drop made Sunny's stomach perform a violent flip, but they seamlessly bypassed the sleeping horror, leaving it far behind in the mist.
They had been maintaining this grueling pace for two days.
They moved swiftly toward their destination, navigating the chaotic islands without stop. Because Cielle was well-versed in the harrowing lore of the Chained Isles, Sunny didn't have to waste breath explaining the dangers. They both knew the rules. They both knew how to read the subtle shifts in the clouds that warned of an island entering its ascent phase and much more.
They flew in long, exhausting stretches, only landing on barren, isolated rocks when Cielle's essence reserves dipped too low, forcing her to rest.
"How much further?" Cielle called back, her voice remarkably steady despite the strain of carrying them both.
Sunny squinted against the glare of the pale sky, checking the crude map burned into his memory. "Almost there! But the cluster ahead is shifting!"
He pointed toward the horizon. A massive web of islands was slowly, inexorably drifting upward. The chains connecting them groaned with a sound like dying titans, pulling taut. If they tried to fly through that airspace, the Crushing would catch them, and they would be flattened into bloody smears against the sky.
"We can't go over!" Sunny shouted. "We have to wait it out! Dive for the anchor island! Reckoning!"
Cielle didn't hesitate. Her wings tucked in slightly, and they dropped out of the sky like a falling star.
The wind screamed in Sunny's ears, tearing at his hair as they plummeted toward the only stable landmass in the cluster. Reckoning Island rushed up to meet them. At the last possible second, Cielle flared her wings out, catching the air with a violent, thunderous crack. The rapid deceleration jarred Sunny's bones, but they glided smoothly over a dense canopy of trees and touched down softly in a wide, sunlit clearing.
Sunny jumped off from her, hitting the ground in a low crouch. The Midnight Shard manifested in his hand, its dark blade drinking in the pale light. Beside him, Cielle stood tall, her wings hovering slightly above the grass, her hands raised as those chains slid silently from her sleeves, wrapping around her forearms like coiled vipers.
They waited, their breathing slow and measured, listening for the inevitable roar of a Nightmare Creature.
Five seconds passed. Then ten. Then a full minute.
There was no roar. There was no screech. There was no sound of breaking branches or the heavy thud of a Corrupted beast charging through the brush.
Sunny slowly stood up, his eyes and senses quickly scanning the perimeter. His grip on the tachi tightened until his knuckles turned white.
Reckoning Island was beautiful.
It was, without a single doubt, the most pristine, idyllic place Sunny had ever seen in the Dream Realm. The grass beneath his boots was a vibrant, flawless emerald, soft and thick. The trees surrounding the clearing were lush, their leaves a brilliant, healthy green, heavy with strange, vibrant fruits. A few yards away, a crystal-clear stream babbled happily over smooth stones. The sky above them, framed by the canopy, was a bright, perfect azure.
It looked like a paradise.
Sunny hated it instantly.
"I hate this," Sunny whispered, his voice dripping with absolute, visceral revulsion. A cold sweat broke out on the back of his neck.
Cielle's chains clinked softly as she shifted her stance. She didn't relax her guard for a fraction of a second. Her emerald eyes swept the tree line, analyzing the impossible perfection of the meadow.
"It is unnatural," Cielle agreed, her voice dangerously calm. "There are no nightmare creatures and the environment does not look like it suffers from the crushing"
"Yeah," Sunny muttered, his skin crawling. "In the Dream Realm, a place only stays this pretty if whatever lives here kills everything else before it can even touch the grass… as for the crushing, things aren't often what they seem. The silence isn't peaceful. It's a graveyard."
His instincts were screaming at him. It was a pervasive, suffocating sense of wrongness that seemed to seep out of the very air itself. The idyllic tranquility felt like a painted mask stretched tightly over a rotting skull.
"Do not touch the fruit," Sunny warned, his eyes darting toward the shadows beneath the trees. "Do not drink the water. Don't even step on the flowers if you can help it. We find a corner, set up a perimeter, and we do not move until the airspace above clears."
"Understood," Cielle said. Her chains swayed gently, acting as extensions of her own deadly will.
They began to move across the clearing, stepping with agonizing caution. Every soft crunch of their boots on the perfect grass sounded deafeningly loud to Sunny's ears. The quiet horror of the island pressed down on them, heavier than the Crushing of the sky. It was the anticipation of the drop, a terrifying certainty that something was watching them from the woods.
"I'll scout the perimeter," Sunny whispered, stopping near a cluster of large, moss-covered rocks.
He narrowed his eyes and willed his shadow to detach from his heels.
The dark silhouette slipped away, flowing over the emerald grass like a spill of ink. Sunny closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, shifting a portion of his consciousness into the shadow.
Through the shadow's eyes, the idyllic colors of the island vanished, replaced by a stark, cold canvas of gray and black. Sunny guided the shadow forward, letting it slither under the roots of the massive trees, gliding over the smooth stones near the babbling brook.
He searched for a heartbeat. There was nothing. The woods were entirely, horribly empty.
The shadow crept further away, moving into a patch of tall, sunlit grass near the edge of the clearing. Sunny pushed his perception deeper, trying to find the source of the profound dread that was clawing at the edges of his mind.
Then, the shadow stopped.
Through the shadow's senses, Sunny perceived a shape perfectly still in the tall grass, it was not of a nightmare creature but of a human….. Then it moved, fast, too fast.
Sunny frowned, his brow furrowing in confusion. A person? Here?
He willed the shadow to move an inch closer, trying to make out the details of the figure standing in the brush. Then it did something jarring.
For a single, absolute microsecond, Sunny was merely confused. Shadows were incorporeal. They couldn't be touched. You could drop a mountain on a shadow, and it would simply cast itself over the stone.
A jolt of pure, blinding agony lanced straight up Sunny's spine.
It wasn't a physical pain. It didn't feel like a blade cutting flesh or a hammer breaking bone. It felt as though someone had reached directly into his chest, wrapped their hands around the very core of his soul, and squeezed.
Sunny let out a sharp, vicious hiss, his breath leaving his lungs in a violent rush.
He staggered with his knees buckling under the shock of the soul-rending pain. But he didn't fall. Driven by resilience and years of surviving the impossible, Sunny caught himself. He dropped to one knee, gritting his teeth so hard he tasted blood, The grip on the Midnight Shard tightening until the wrap groaned.
"Sunny!"
Cielle reacted instantly. She didn't ask what was wrong, seeing him stumble, her experience took over with terrifying speed.
With a sharp flick of her wrists, the chains erupted from her arms, lashing out like striking vipers to form a deadly, swirling barricade between Sunny and the tree line. Her wings flared, radiating a blinding, starlit glow that cast long, stark shadows across the perfect grass.
"Where?" Cielle demanded, her voice cold and absolute.
Sunny forced himself to stand, his chest heaving, a dark, murderous fury burning in his eyes. He raised his sword, pointing the obsidian blade toward the tall grass where his shadow was still pinned.
"There," Sunny snarled, the pain in his soul radiating like a cold fire.
The tall grass parted.
The ambush had not been sprung by a towering leviathan or a horrific abomination.
The figure that stepped out into the sunlit clearing was exactly Sunny's height. It wore the same clothes that resembled the puppeteer's shroud. It held its posture with the exact same slouch.
As the figure raised its head, the sunlight caught its face.
It wasn't a shimmering beast. It wasn't a faceless monster.
It was a perfect, flawless replica of Sunless.
The pale skin, the dark, cynical eyes, the messy black hair, everything was identical. Even the dark blade it held in its hand was a perfect mirror image of the Midnight Shard.
The replica tilted its head, looking at Sunny with his own face, its dark eyes completely devoid of humanity.
Sunny stared at the creature that had just directly damaged his soul. The idyllic beauty of Reckoning Island suddenly felt like a sick, twisted joke.
"You have got to be kidding me," Sunny whispered, his voice dripping with pure venom.
The thing didn't answer. It simply raised its copied sword, dropped into Nephis's fighting stance, and charged.
'What is this bs'