Cassie walked out of the castle and into the encampment looking for Nephis. Assuming she had gone to see Effie, she made her way over to her hut. On the way she found Nephis talking to a young man whose presence oozed nobility and strength.
"Hey Neph," said Cassie.
"Hey," said Nephis, smiling at her.
"I was thinking we could ask Effie for her help as well," said Cassie.
"I was making my way over when I ran into Castor," said Nephis with a nod in his direction.
"Hello," said Castor. "I was just telling Nephis that I would like to help her in whatever her endeavors are."
Cassie had already thought about this. Castor's mission here was to kill Nephis, however for the time being he was a useful ally. She was fairly confident he wouldn't try anything until the raid on the Crimson Spire, and even if he did, she and Nephis would be ready for it. They had already discussed possible threats back at the Academy.
"We would really appreciate it," said Cassie with practiced warmth. "We could use all the help we can get."
Castor smiled and indicated for them to lead the way.
Effie opened the door slowly, wearing a bad case of bedhead and an expression that made clear she had just woken up.
"Hey... you two. I thought you had paid for the castle," said Effie sleepily.
"We did, but it wasn't really our style," said Nephis. "We can come back later if that works better."
"No no, come in, come in," said Effie, running her hands through her hair in a cursory attempt to fix it. She looked past them. "Uhh... is it just me or did the boy you came with suddenly get a lot taller?"
"This is a different one," said Nephis. "His name is Castor."
"Oh," said Effie, with the look of someone who had drawn a conclusion and decided it explained everything. "So you guys are like that."
Nephis stared at her, mildly confused. Cassie hid her laugh behind her hand.
"Anyway," said Effie, settling back. "What did you want to see me about?"
"We want your help," said Nephis.
"With what exactly?"
"We're going to conquer the Crimson Spire," said Nephis, her grey eyes steady and certain.
Effie gave her a long searching look. Castor glanced sideways at Nephis with an expression that was mostly shock and something else. A short silence settled over the four of them.
"Go on," said Effie, leaning back in her chair.
Four days later the group was north of the Dark City, having just cleared out an area full of nightmare creatures. Nephis had slain the champion among them and received the [Moonlight Shard] as her reward.
Cassie sat on a fallen pillar with a quiet sense of melancholy. Overall their trip north had gone better than she expected and the boons would help hasten her plans considerably. But she held the memory she had just received with a sad expression and let herself feel it for a moment before putting it away.
She looked down at the bracelet that now decorated her right wrist. The enchantment suited her well, she couldn't argue that. But the creature she had slain to receive it had been a familiar flying sword. Her long-time companion from her previous life was now gone, claimed by a different fate, and the Spell had given her something beautiful in exchange for something she hadn't expected to grieve.
Memory: [Dancer's Grace].
Memory Rank: Awakened.
Memory Type: Tool.
Memory Tier: III
Memory Description: [A blade that learned to dance before it learned to fight. It followed its mistress faithfully through every step, every vision, every quiet grief, until the dance ended and no one was left to lead it.]
Memory Enchantments: [Graceful], [Precise Art Form ].
[Graceful]
Enchantment Description: "When the user is in combat, the longer they remain undamaged this tool empowers the user with increased essence and speed."
[Precise Art Form]
Enchantment Description: "This tool makes it easier for the user to be precise in various forms such as combat, mobility, sorcery, and more."
With a quiet sigh she walked over to Nephis.
Cassie had failed to claim an echo of the Quiet Dancer. The Spell had chosen to gift the echo to Nephis instead.
The two of them stood and admired the Pegasus that stood before them. It was stunning, proud, regarding them both with calm appraisal. The Pegasi had been difficult opponents. Their sole form of offense was their steel hooves, but they had a specialization in speed both on the ground and in their dives that had made the engagement considerably less simple than it appeared on paper.
"She's beautiful," said Cassie with open admiration.
Nephis nodded.
The Pegasus would be a great help in battle. Her pure fighting prowess wasn't the most fearsome thing on the Shore, but she would give Nephis increased speed and aerial mobility that had been difficult to compensate for without her Transcendent transformation Cassie was used too. Cassie, however, was excited for a different reason entirely.
"How good do you think her endurance is?" she asked.
"Her main attribute grants a substantial sprint boost and increased endurance," Nephis answered.
Cassie had originally only planned for their group to collect the [Moonlight Shard] from the north and the [Dawn Shard] belonging to the first Bright Lord. She had figured that on the way to the Crimson Spire they could take a detour and claim the [Dusk Shard].
The [Dusk Shard] was near the corpse of the Bright Lord, but Cassie was already cutting it close originally.
"Would you be willing to put her to work in more than just fights?" Cassie asked, her flaw tingled but as long as she didn't order or direct it was not painful.
Nephis looked back at her with a curious expression.
Several hours later Nephis and Cassie were riding atop the Pegasus toward the Misty Mountains that lay beyond the Shore. Behind them, in a makeshift chariot, sat Effie and Castor.
Cassie smiled inwardly. With the dramatic increase in their mobility, they would be able to collect all three shards with time to spare. With Sunny handling the Lord of the Dead, Effie on their side, and the Pegasus cutting travel time in half, all that would remain was convincing Seishan to lend them the [Sunlight Shard].
The four continued on their way to the mountains. Every night Cassie braced herself for pain. Being in a cohort on a quest did not allow her to refuse help.
Sleep found her the way it always did now. Cassie had learned quickly that the Weaver's lineage did not allow for the luxury of drifting or avoiding her visions. The moment she closed her eyes, the threads were there pulling her forward into possibility.
This dream placed her in Ravenheart.
She knew the titanic bridge which had became a town for Awakened warriors. The Jade Palace rose ahead, with its walls of obsidian glass where Ki Song resided. She was in the bustling marketplace with numerous stalls offering a range of items, it was much more modest than she remembered which meant this possibility was much earlier. The district on the volcano was no built yet and was a continuation of the wilderness inhabited with nightmare creatures.
Her own figure stood at the edge of the square and suddenly her perspective jumped into her. This is how her visions acted when she would be present in the future. She walked through the market.
Three figures passed through her attention at different distances, however Cassie felt their weighty significance. A young man flew overhead with a shadow that raced across the ground at times looking like a dragon. A girl was by the edges of the market nearing the wilderness, silence moving with her. And closer, shopping at a clothing store was a girl gazing at a moon pattern on a black dress.
She made sure to take note of all of them but did not pursue any of them. She had to try and sense everything the dream could tell her.
She searched for a sense of doom. She had learned that if she tried she could feel if a vision was a possibility that would lead to ruin. She knew the future was perilous and that if the greatest, most needed champions of humanity were not where they needed to be all would be lost. The path they were forced to walk was so narrow and difficult to navigate.
Evening came fast. She felt the permeation of the dream god before she saw it, a color that arrived at the margins of the sky before the sky had agreed to it. Every vision had about a thirty percent chance of its invasion. She had stopped hoping it was weather. The dream's ambient warmth contracted by a degree. Two degrees.
The market continued as normal for a moment longer. But then the Dream god's influence set in.
It moved through a crowd selectively, like a quality being drawn out of certain random people rather than a tide simply coming in. A man near the fishmonger's stall went still. For others it was as if something behind the eyes had quietly stepped aside and let something else lean forward to look out.
Cassie moved.
She did not run immediately. She walked with intention toward the edge of the square, keeping the palace at her back, angling toward the outer streets. The ones who had turned tracked her without hurrying. They knew, the way the dream god always seemed to know, that the dream had its own logic and that logic was not always on her side.
Cassie's hand flicked and pinched the air attempting to weave. She had learned that she could weave an exit, however she was forced by Weaver's Lineage to stay in the dream for at least some time. Her attempt failed, she would have to survive a bit more.
She moved into the wilderness. Out here the pursuit lost some of its coherence. Human dreamwalkers were left behind being forced to walk faster. The nightmare creatures were fighting amongst themselves, those claimed by Dream god overcoming the one who were not. She kept moving. She wove as she went, not escaping the dream yet.
The wilderness was dark between the trees. Then she felt a sense of familiarity, of safety and understanding. A shadow that was exploring the wilderness, not belonging to the dream god. Her pace evened. The threads around her loosened slightly. The shadow protected her.
She found the strings of Fate between one heartbeat and the next, pulled it open the way she had learned to pull it, and stepped through.
White opened around her, finally escaping into her own cultivated dream. Cassie had created this space as a way to have a safe area while sleeping. She looked around the seemingly endless white room, the strings of Fate kept their distance at the perimeter, curling slow and luminous, patiently waiting. She had come to find them companionable.
She worked.
The knife came faster than it had before. The feel of the strings of Fate with her essence from the memory responded to Cassie with something approaching fluency. The threads wove into the temporary existence that dream memories she created through the sorcery of weave. For now she could not figure out the puzzle of making a memories both permanent and within The Spell while also making them usable against the agents of the dream god.
In her dreams she could weave without the excruciating pain that touching strings when awake brought. A boon of her aspect along with [Blood Weave], avoiding the need for [Bone Weave].
Although she figured it would be easier with it.
She let the knife dissolve into strings and began on a barrier designed to halt dream gods insidious tentacle attacks.
Cassie assumed the missing piece of the puzzle was the ability to enchant a memory. She had a suspicion that the ability to effect that which belonged to the dream was an enchantment of a memory. She stopped her practice of the barrier and pulled a few ascended shards out.
With practice and the intuition of her evolved aspect, she was able to them into something the Spell would look at and recognize as a memory just like Sunny used to be able to do. However, she failed to be able to add any enchantments or even change them from their base material and shape of shards. She surmised that this skill either required a depth of mastery she did not currently possess or that she would need another piece of Weaver's lineage.
At present, however, her need was only to turn the shards into memories, not useful memories.
Cassie exhaled slowly into the white room, and let the strings of fate drift at their patient perimeter, and feeling the pull of wakefulnesses woke up to a brand new day.
Today, they would reach their goal and hopefully claim the last two shard memories.
The four made their way to the base of the misty mountains, making sure to not venture far into the thicker mist. While both Sunny and Mordret had survived there, they had been at least Transcendent and stayed away from the more dangerous parts of the realm of Nothing.
They passed a grave and the mood turned more somber with the cohort being reminded of those who had come before on the Forgotten Shore. Eventually, they found their way to the entrance of a mine and went in.
They made their way through the mine silently, until they reached a corpse wearing a band with a single gemstone. The four approached the corpse and Nephis knelt in front of it for a moment before claiming the memory.
"Thank you," she said simply paying reverence to the original Lord of the Bright Castle.
The rest of the three all paid their respects in their own way before moving on to venture deeper into the caves.
They made their way into a large chasm filled with black sand and an unfinished statue. Cassie had already informed Nephis who told the group to not kill the Cursed Herald unless they have touched the statue.
What Cassie was not informed of was a couple of creatures that looked like giant lizards sculpted from the rock of the cave, with barbed and bladed tails. Cassie gazed at the creatures, she had inherited the power to gaze at the rank and class of others that belonged to both Sunny and Weaver, they were of fallen rank and of the beast class.
Nephis summoned the Pegasus and a charm that looked like a black feather, the memory she received from killing the previous Cursed Herald with Sunny and Cassie's help. It granted her strikes increased lethality when she was above her target which paired well with the flying steed.
"I will try to lead the lizard creatures away from the Herald while you guys can try to take it down-" Cassie said, her flaw causing pain for ordering a fight she was not in.
Nephis rushed to her side and nodded. Motioning for the other two to head for the statue and herald and wait for her.
"What happened?" asked Nephis with concern.
"My flaw it's-," Cassie started. "can I explain when we're back with Sunny?"
Nephis nodded.
"Good luck," she said hopping on her Pegasus as Cassie crept to the side to lure the lizard creatures away.
Cassie summoned her weapon, a basic sword memory, and walked toward the lizard creatures at an angle to catch their attention without inviting an immediate response. They did not rush. She maintained her distance and kept moving.
In the center of the chasm, Nephis moved first.
The Pegasus hit the Herald, steel hooves meeting six lethal claws in an impact that sent black sand outward in a wave. While the Herald was occupied with that particular problem, Effie and Castor made a controlled dash to the statue, touched it, and pulled back to give Nephis room to do the same the Pegasus riding by, Nephis reaching down as they passed. Then she rejoined the fight.
The three of them found a rhythm. Nephis and the Pegasus were the center of it, trading with the Herald at close range, the echo's speed and Nephis's strikes from on the mount forming a combination the Herald was struggling to solve. When the Herald's pressure built enough to push them back, Effie stepped into the gap, shield up, absorbing the heavier blows. Castor worked the edges, his jian finding angles between the Herald's focus and its blind spots, dealing damage with quiet consistency.
Cassie's task, meanwhile, had become more complicated.
The sound of the fight pulled the lizards' attention toward the center of the chasm, which meant she had to close the distance she had been carefully maintaining. She had to be present enough to be the more interesting problem, which was not a position she had intended to occupy this early. She did not entirely dodge the first tail strike, which she read a half-second late and caught across the cheek rather than avoiding entirely. It was a shallow wound became considerably more attentive to where both tails were at all times.
She had no intention of defeating either of them. She was not trying to win, only to persist, and persistence required a different kind of attention than victory did. She had lighter footwork, shorter commitments and willingness to give ground.
It helped that she was not who she had been.
The blind girl from the previous life would not have lasted ten seconds in this task. But Cassie had fully saturated her beast core and was close to completing her monster core as well. In fact if she hadn't turned as many ascended shards into memories that she had, she could have formed her monster core already. The increased strength and speed and agility were the difference between a tail strike that removed her hand and a tail strike that opened her cheek.
She kept stealing glances at the trio hoping to see them finish the Herald quicker.
The lizards had run out of patience with the cat-and-mouse game. The pressure they applied climbed steadily past what she had accounted for. She gritted her teeth and kept her feet moving.
In the center of the chasm, Nephis pulled the Pegasus into another charge, and then, at the last moment, left the mount entirely. She came down with her sword lit with divine flame, the strike landing true, the Herald announcing this with a shriek.
The Herald did not fall.
It lashed out instead, with the ferocity of a mad creature backed into a corner, and one of the strikes caught Effie's shield at an angle that transferred too much of its force through the metal and into the person behind it. Effie left the ground. Thirty feet of air, approximately, before she returned to the black sand a short distance from where Cassie was currently managing two increasingly impatient lizards.
Cassie did not have time to fully evaluate this. The lizards had read her distraction and discarded what remained of their caution, both of them pressing now, coordinated in the way animals sometimes were without having discussed it, and she was moving purely on instinct and the accumulated stubbornness of not being dead yet.
She dodged one strike.
Effie was on the ground behind her. Effie was large and armored and combat-capable and present, and the words were already forming before Cassie had fully decided to say them.
"Effie, help-"
The pain arrived.
It hit her chest first, and then it hit everything else. She went to her knees in the black sand. Blood came from her mouth and then her nose and the world tilted. She understood, through the haze of it, what had happened. That her flaw had weighed that Cassie herself would not be willing to show her back to lizards to help Effie stand in this moment, and had rendered its verdict with its complete indifference to circumstances.
In her vulnerable state, one of the lizards struck.
The tail was fast. She had known this. She had been keeping track of it for the entire engagement.
It did not matter, in the end, how much she had kept track of it.
The the pain arrived, and it was extensive, and she and Effie were both blown back in the black sand a few feet further from where they had been.
By this point Nephis and Castor had already defeated the Herald. A silent fire of fury in her eyes as she battled away one of the lizards and her Pegasus the other. In a few seconds, however, the lizards pushed back, gaining the advantage.
After all, the four as well as the echo had struggled much more than the two lizards had since the beginning of the battle in the chasm. Not only that, but as they were Fallen beasts, Nephis was not sure that she would be able to take both of them in a fight even with her echo.
Castor and Effie helped Cassie to her feet and the group retreated back quickly into the mines. The lizard creatures gave some chase, but once the four escaped the cavern their size prevented them from following further.
Nephis was there immediately, concern written across her face.
"Are you all right?"
"I'm alive," said Cassie. The smile she offered came out somewhat bloodier than intended.
She was not, technically, in bad shape by the standards of the Forgotten Shore. Blood from her mouth and nose, which was the flaw's reward and would resolve. Her left torso soaked through with blood, which looked alarming and had a straightforward explanation. The explanation was that her left forearm ended where her left hand had been, and the wound was not subtle.
Nephis saw it. Her healing flames appeared wrapping around what remained of Cassie's forearm with the focused intensity of someone refusing to accept information she had already received. The soothing warmth was genuine and welcome. The open wound closing, the bleeding stopping, the end becoming a closed end.
Nephis looked at it. Then she directed more flame at it, as if the first application might have missed something.
"Neph." Cassie's voice was gentle. "Stop. Please."
Nephis did not immediately stop.
"You can't grow it back," said Cassie, and put her right hand over both of Nephis's.
A silence.
"I'm sorry," said Nephis.
"For what?" Cassie asked. "For helping me do something I ask you for help doing?"
Nephis did not answer. Her jaw was set.
"Did you get the memory?" Cassie asked.
Nephis nodded. A memory appeared in a flash of white sparks.
"Then it's time to go back," said Cassie. "Do you mind if I sit for a few minutes first."
It was not really a question. Nephis sat with her, taking her right hand, and Castor and Effie took up watch at the mine entrance without being asked.
'Ah,' Cassie thought, looking at the sealed end of her left arm in the grey light. 'It would seem I traded blindness for a hand.'
She thought this over for a moment.
'It wasn't a bad trade.'
She thought of Sunny's face. Specifically, the way she had been able to see it with her own two eyes on the balcony, the way she fully intended to see it again in the Dark City. She weighed that against what she was no longer going to be able to hold him with.
She found that her feelings came down clearly on one side of the scale.
She very much looked forward to returning to the Dark City. And strangely, the shard memories, overthrowing Gunlaug, and the Crimson Spire were not, at this particular moment, the reason why.
The journey back was long enough that sleep found her before they reached the Dark City.
On the way back, Cassie dreamt of Bastion. Cassie had dreamt of Bastion before, the great castle that served as the seat of Valor. She had visited it several times since returning to the past. In each previous dream, she and Sunny had both been present. In each previous dream, the future it represented had been set to fall to ruin.
This dream was different on both counts.
Neither of them appeared to be present in this possibility, and the quality of it, the intuitive sense she had, did not carry the particular pressure of ruin. It carried something narrower. A path that must be walked.
She moved through the castle and its surrounding grounds trying to understand the details of the possibility well enough that she might have some hand in drawing it into reality. The corridors were occupied with people she did and did not recognize. Future Saints of Valor, in the earlier chapters of themselves.
What caught her eye was not any of them.
A dark-haired woman moved through the castle guiding two figures Cassie recognized immediately. Nephis. Effie. Both Awakened, both following the woman through Bastion as she introduced them to people along the way with the practiced warmth of someone performing hospitality as a form of politics.
Princess Morgan of Valor.
Cassie exhaled quietly.
So even having escaped the dream realm earlier than she had in the previous timeline, Nephis was still fated to find her way into Valor's orbit.
Her eyes drifted to Nephis's right pocket.
Something was there. Cassie looked more closely, trying to resolve the detail.
There was a flash. A shard of a mirror.
She stopped.
Her mind thought of the implications in the time it took her to draw a breath and the conclusions were not comfortable. Someone had already freed Mordret from his prison in the Chained Isles. Not only that he was close with Nephis, or some arrangement had been made between them that resulted in his shard resting in her pocket as she toured Bastion under the eye of Valor's princess.
She was still turning this over when the air changed.
Not the indigo-grey pressure of the forgotten god's arrival. Something else. Something colder, and completely without precedent in either of her lives.
She was pulled sideways through the dream.
She was pulled into a nearby castle wall and found herself stumbling back in her familiar white room.
She was not alone.
Floating in the air with a nebulous cloak fearsome mask and eight arms. Weaver had invaded her dream. Cassie silently looked up at them, fear gripping her.
Weaver looked down at her.
Cassie was silent.
"Why so quiet, epigon?" The voice arrived like a chorus. "Did thou not wish to usurp fate from me?"
Cassie trembled slightly, and then she remembered all of the burdens of the future that she had carried on her lonesome. She remembered being forced to choose between two people she held dear. She remembered the grief of what she had done to Sunny in the previous timeline, and the long hollow quality of the regret that had followed it. And then she remembered the fate that had come in a forlorn future to Sunny, Nephis, Kai, Effie, Jet, the list went on.
She raised her head.
"Your plans condemned everyone I cared for to ruin," she said.
Weaver laughed.
"I wonder about that," they said. "I wonder what would have happened had thou not intervened as thou did. After all, thy hand was only second to mine in bringing that to fruition."
"Then why give me the ability to disrupt your plan at all," said Cassie, "if the plan was so necessary?"
"Thou were meant to be a tool against certain ruinous possibilities," said Weaver. "Only it seems thou art a flawed tool."
"Everything is flawed," said Cassie, through her teeth. "Isn't that an unmovable law of existence?"
"Indeed it is, my epigon," said Weaver, with a dark laugh.
She felt the quality of the conversation shift. She felt like she being toyed with, which was not especially comforting.
"What are you, exactly?" she asked. "I was given to understand that the gods are dead. The daemons too."
"We are, at least mostly," said Weaver. "I am a Remnant of Weaver's will. More substantial than those conjured by the Nightmare Spell. Less than thee, in terms of the nature of my existence."
"Then why are you here?"
"Because," said Weaver, "as hateful as I am to thee, and thou to me, the dream god is considerably more hateful to both of us. And this time, my flawed tools cannot afford to fail."