"The Dream god?" asked Cassie.
She and Sunny had arrived at that conclusion together, working from inference and the accumulated evidence of her visions. Hearing it confirmed directly from Weaver was more disconcerting.
"The one who sired myself and my siblings," Weaver began, their voice something akin to contempt. "It has always threatened to bring ruin to the entirety of this existence. It is why neither myself nor my siblings could be permitted to be worshipped. Now the dream god is closer than ever to the annihilation of all that is."
"Are you saying," said Cassie, with skepticism, "that you are going to help me?"
"I plan to guide and inform thee," said Weaver. "It is against my desire to see the dream god succeed."
"Why should I trust you?"
Weaver laughed for a long while.
"Because thou and that boy claimed by Shadow are my only heirs," they said. "Even if my blood has been removed from that particular divine Shadow."
"Forgive me," said Cassie, "but you don't seem like the kind of being who places much value on their children, by blood or not."
"I do not. At least not in the way that thou comprehend caring," said Weaver. "However, thou and I share a connection through blood. That connection cares not for either of our feelings."
Cassie considered this.
"Assuming I were to trust you," she said, "you're dead. Why does stopping the Dream god matter to you? They sired you."
"Thou would not understand," said Weaver. "But the best explanation I can offer is this: if fate no longer is, then it never was. My true existence is no longer, but it at least once was. Should we fail, it will be as though I never was at all. That is... distasteful."
Cassie was silent thinking of the concept.
"Our time is limited, epigone," said Weaver, interrupting her thoughts. "My existence and power in this form will too soon be no longer. Thou must read thy visions and seek me out within two years."
"Why do I need to read my visions? Why can't you simply tell me?"
"My connection to the Dream god is a direct one," said Weaver. "It is not yet time to significantly rouse that one from its slumber." Their gaze dropped to her left arm to the sealed end of her forearm. "The only thing I can give thee now is this: thou art to enter thy second nightmare sooner rather than later. It is improper for an heir of mine to be without a hand."
"You're saying we must enter the seed in the Chained Isles as soon as possible?" asked Cassie.
The dream had begun to thin at the edges. She could feel wakefulness gathering.
"I am saying that thou must follow thy instincts and thy visions," said Weaver. "We shall not speak again for a long while, epigone. And the next time we do shall be the last."
"What do you mean by—"
She woke up.
Nephis was crouched beside her, concern arranged carefully across her features.
"I'm all right," said Cassie, with a light smile.
"I'm glad," said Nephis, and helped her up. "We're back."
Cassie looked out from the camp toward the Dark City and felt something settle in her chest.
They made their way down toward it.
Toward Sunny.
The four made their way through the Dark City and into the encampment. They entered a two-story building on the outer edges, farther from the Bright Castle, and climbed the stairs to the second floor.
The second room on the left held two people. A shorter young man dressed in black, with black hair that fell to medium length. And beside him, an extremely handsome young man with brown hair and green eyes.
Sunny looked up, and he and Cassie's eyes met.
They walked toward each other and tightly embraced. Kai introduced himself to the others behind them. When Cassie and Sunny separated, his hands drifted from her back to her arms, and then stilled.
"What happened," said Sunny. His voice and expression soft.
"I was careless," said Cassie, with a grimace.
"I should have been there. The only thing it would have cost us was time," he said, his voice tight.
Cassie shook her head softly.
"You had business in the Dark City, and your progress would have been significantly hindered." She held his gaze. "Besides, there's something else we need to discuss, but it would seem that time is not our most abundant resource right now."
Sunny gave her a look and said nothing, and the two of them moved to join the others.
"Is everyone ready?" said Nephis, looking across the group.
All five nodded.
"Then let us begin." White sparks moved at her fingertips as she summoned a collection of memories onto the surface between them. "I want to discuss how we take down Gunlaug, and then how we conquer the Crimson Spire."
The [Midnight Shard], [Dusk Shard], [Dawn Shard], and [Moonlight Shard] appeared before her. She nodded at Effie, who produced the [Zenith Shard] after a brief flash of white sparks. Without prompting, Sunny set the [Starlight Shard] down alongside them.
Six shards.
"All that remains is one more," said Nephis. "If we gather all seven, we have the key to raid the Crimson Spire."
"I can have the last one by tomorrow night," said Cassie. She looked at Nephis. "Tomorrow is when you want to take down Gunlaug, right?"
Nephis nodded.
"Tomorrow evening I will challenge Gunlaug to a duel if he will not accept rallying under my banner for the raid on the Crimson Spire," said Nephis. "I am confident I will win. However, I will be incapacitated for a period afterward. There will be chaos among his commanders and uncertainty among the people."
"Effie, Kai, would you be willing to position yourselves to ensure Tessai is compelled to follow under our banner?"
Both nodded.
Nephis turned to Sunny.
"Don't worry, I'll handle Harus," Sunny said, before she had the chance to ask. "After I'm done with him I'll turn my attention to the other three."
"I already have a plan for Seishan," said Cassie, with a slight smile.
"Then I suppose I will defend Lady Nephis after the duel," said Castor.
Sunny and Cassie exchanged a look.
"I'll help with that," said Cassie, moving with it. "I'll take whichever side you don't."
Castor nodded, satisfied.
The door opened.
A petite young woman with dark hair and brown eyes stepped in, looking apologetic about the interruption.
"Sorry to bother you, but there's someone at the door for Lady Nephis," said Aiko.
Sunny kept his expression neutral. He and Kai had already arranged this, a false pretense. Aiko and Kai were innocent of the reason.
"Castor, would you mind checking what they need?" said Nephis, having caught the brief meaningful look from both Sunny and Cassie.
"Of course," said Castor, suspecting nothing. He and Aiko went downstairs.
"Kai, if you would," said Sunny.
Kai nodded. A flute-like memory appeared, and a cone of silence settled over the room. In the original timeline that memory had belonged to Castor, presumably acquired somewhere in the Dark City. Kai had it now as a consequence of having hunted in the City with Sunny instead.
"Is something happening?" said Effie, with the look of someone who had noticed several things.
"Yes," said Nephis. "There is something I needed to tell you while ensuring no one else could hear."
"No one else," said Effie slowly, "meaning not Castor."
Nephis nodded.
"He is an assassin sent to kill me."
Silence settled over the room.
"I assume," said Effie carefully, "that you have good reason for believing that."
"It is true," said Cassie.
"I can confirm it as well," added Sunny.
Effie looked at the three of them. She had arrived at the Dark City alongside them and knew the depth of what ran between them. Then she glanced at Kai.
"They're all telling the truth," said Kai, his eyes wide.
Effie's eyes widened as well. Kai's reputation in that particular area was not a small thing.
"What do we plan to do about it? I don't imagine he'll sit back while Nephis is incapacitated after the duel," said Effie.
"I'll handle it," said Sunny, with a particular quality of darkness in his voice.
"Are you sure? I'm already worried about you against Harus," said Effie, giving him a disbelieving look.
Both Cassie and Nephis opened their mouths. Kai got there first.
"I don't know if this counts for much," he began, "but Sunny is the strongest person I've encountered on the Forgotten Shore. Stronger than Gunlaug, if I'm being honest."
Effie looked at Sunny with an expression that balanced somewhere between respect and a thing that was almost fear.
"Assuming Castor misses his opportunity here," said Nephis, "he will almost certainly move against me at the Crimson Spire."
Her eyes hardened.
"In that fight, I want you all to leave him to me," she said, with steel underneath the words.
They all nodded.
"We should prepare for tomorrow," said Cassie. "But before we go, I want to ask something of you all."
The four looked at her.
"After we escape the Forgotten Shore," said Cassie, "I want the five of us to come back together. Regroup. Properly."
Sunny and Nephis both smiled. Kai nodded with great enthusiasm. Effie crossed over and put her arm around Cassie's shoulder, already beginning to tease her about how much she was clearly going to miss the group.
Later, Cassie found herself in the upper floors of a cathedral in the Dark City.
It was not exactly how she had imagined the first time she would be invited to a boy's bedroom.
To his credit, Sunny had at least cleaned the place up. He had even acquired new sheets for the bed, black, but not unfashionable.
'I'll have to remember to thank Kai,' thought Cassie.
"I'm surprised," said Cassie. "I half expected a prison chamber."
"I had reasonable suspicion that I might be having company at some point," said Sunny. He was standing near the window.
She looked at him. He was watching the city, and in this light he was unreasonably difficult to look away from.
He had told her that he had feeling for her and she had kissed him before they separated, but they didn't have time to discuss what their relationship even was yet.
"Sit down," she said. "You're making the room nervous."
"The room doesn't have feelings."
"Sit down anyway."
They sat next to each other on the edge of the bed.
He looked at her side.
"How bad was it," said Sunny, gently touching her left arm.
"Bad enough," she said. "Nephis was there so it could have been worse."
A long silence.
"The Chained Isles. The second nightmare seed," he said. "We'll stay together until then."
She shook her head softly.
"You cannot be there for me at all times, Sunny," said Cassie. "Besides, I need-" She paused. "I want something else from you."
Her mind went to the weight she had carried since the very first time the Spell had infected her. The horrible visions, murky and difficult. The terrible choices that had no answers. The feeling of being handed something impossible and being expected to carry it alone.
"Name it," said Sunny simply.
"Can you-" Cassie started, then paused, half-expecting the familiar pain in her chest. It did not come. "Can you please let me share the weight on my shoulders with you?"
Her cerulean eyes met his deep onyx ones.
"Is that all?" Sunny asked.
Cassie nodded.
"I'm scared that I'll fail again. That I'll make the wrong choices. That I'll be-"
Sunny gently guided her face toward his and kissed her softly.
"We won't fail," he said as he pulled back. "We'll make the best choices we can. And Cas-" he smiled at her, "you are not alone. Let me share your burden."
Cassie smiled at him.
"Only if you do the same for me," she replied.
Sunny nodded and they continued to talk softly, their fears, their pressures, their regrets, and the evening turned to night.
"We didn't get to talk," he said finally.
"No, we didn't," Cassie said.
He looked at the wall across from them. She looked at her hands.
"I don't think I understood what I felt toward you in the other life," he said after a moment. "Not clearly. There was too much noise. The bond, the resentment, the way everything between us kept getting tangled up in everything else."
"And now?" she inquired.
"Now I can see what it actually was." He paused. "In the last life there were people I wanted to protect. I loved Nephis. Rain was my sister. You felt like... I don't quite know."
Cassie listened quietly.
"What changed," he said, "Was understanding you. Not just knowing you. Understanding what it costs to carry what you carry. To see what you see."
Cassie gave him a small smile and then looked straight at the wall.
"I've spent most of my life watching what could happen next. Even when I couldn't see clearly, I was always oriented toward what was coming and it was never good." said Cassie. "The way I feel is... or maybe was structured around that. Around what a moment or decision means for what comes after."
"So when you felt something toward me-"
"It was before I became that way, I saw you first," she said. "You were the beginning of me becoming what I am, but also distinct from a total and complete tool for molding what was to come. Even if some of my mistakes used you as a tool, out of everyone else you alone were also a person."
Sunny didn't say anything. He was thinking about what it would mean to spend essentially your whole life knowing too much, the way it would hollow out certain ordinary things and make others impossibly weighted. He had only been like this for a short while.
"And now?" he asked.
"Now I have all of it," she said. "Two lives worth of knowing you. Which should make it simpler, and instead-" She stopped. "My younger self, the one who didn't know anything yet, she just liked you. That was it. She saw the vision and in this life saw you at the Academy and she just liked you. She didn't have time to see the horrors of the future and become... me."
"That sounds easier," Sunny said.
"It does," Cassie agreed. "I want to try that. I don't know exactly how, given everything. But I want to try the part where it's just-" she searched for it, "-where it's just us. Not the fate of anything. Just us."
Sunny considered that for a long moment. He thought about the version of himself that had told her he had feelings on the balcony. He thought about the fact that opposite to Cassie, his feelings stemmed from a shared understanding of bearing the fate of everything. His feelings were made stronger by the fact that he felt seen by someone else with regard to knowing what can happen next and being concerned wholly with the future. He thought about what it meant that she was the main person in both his lives whose choices made complete sense to him even when they cost him something.
"I don't think I can separate it entirely," he said honestly. "The part about the future and fate. What we're doing and why." He paused. "You're the person I want to do it with."
"Yes," Cassie said. "I know."
"Maybe we can try both," said Sunny. "Save the world with the fate of everything on our backs, while trying to also keep feelings simple."
Cassie laughed slightly.
"I'm not sure that'll work," she said dubiously. "But I trust the man who was potentially able to lead seven lives at once to be able to compartmentalize this type of stuff."
Sunny laughed.
"I was having trouble balancing Master Sunless and the Lord of Shadows, but I'll do my best," he said.
They continued talked and eventually Cassie's demeanor became more anxious.
"There's something I need to tell you about the dream I had on the way back," she said. "A vision. And then something else."
She told him about Bastion. Nephis and Effie following Princess Morgan through the castle, the mirror shard, and what it implied about the path ahead. She watched his expression move through several things, none of them comfortable. Then she told him about Weaver.
"So you think Weaver intends for our second nightmare to be different?" asked Sunny.
"Their wording suggested that the Chained Isles seed doesn't fit our path," Cassie confirmed. "If I had to guess, there is a seed near Ravenheart. I had a vision of Kai and myself there as Awakened. You were present toward the end, though I'm not certain whether my subconscious placed you there to ease my mind."
Sunny was quiet for a moment.
"I still think one of us should visit the Isles," said Cassie. "It makes more sense for it to be you, some of your shadows are there. And someone needs to free Mordret, if my other vision is right."
Sunny nodded slowly.
"Then that's the plan," he said. "I'll stop by the Isles while you and Kai search Ravenheart." He groaned slightly. "I suppose we also have to pacify Mordret somehow and introduce him to Neph."
"I've been thinking about that," said Cassie. "Nephis is well suited to defeat him in a soul duel. More importantly, I think we make his recombination with his flaw a condition of his escape."
Sunny's eyes widened.
"He won't agree to that. Or he'll agree and go back on it."
"He might want to," said Cassie. "But we have someone who can strike at a shadow directly. Mordret might not be killable, but I would assume he's wary enough of that to hold off. And if we reach Master rank before him, your pressure will compel him to follow through regardless."
"Maybe this time the maniac won't be an unstable variable," said Sunny, with a slight grin.
"Maybe not," said Cassie. "He did protect me and your sister before he died."
They sat in silence for a moment.
Then Sunny summoned the [Weaver's Mask].
"I want you to have it," he said.
Cassie looked at him. It was one of his oldest memories.
"Your aspect is built around fate, and you carry Weaver's lineage now, it only makes sense," said Sunny. "The main enchantment is concealment. In theory it should help shield you from the dream god."
"Thank you," said Cassie, as Sunny transferred the memory. "I have some things for you as well. And I want to talk about the next few days."
Sunny nodded. They talked about their plans for the rest of their sojourn in the Forgotten Shore.
The evening had grown quiet around them.
Cassie thought about what she had asked him.
'Let me share the weight on my shoulders with you.'
It had taken a lot for her to be vulnerable and to burden Sunny with answering the question.
Her mind wandered to the Shadow Bond. The fact that she had asked it as a request rather than a command did not change what she was capable of. It did not matter that she planned to never use it. It had made Sunny her slave on the day they formed it, bound him to her, and no amount of warmth between them altered the architecture of what it was.
She knew that intending never to use a power and not having it were different things, and that the difference was not small. She knew that Sunny had hated the Bond for most of his life even if being more accepting near the end of the past timeline, even then Nephis's madness had once again reminded him of the Bonds capabilities. Even so, he had agreed to be owned by her, and that was either a profound act of trust, and that she was not certain she deserved it.
In her past life she had toiled to make up for her greatest regret by trying to give Sunny the choice. It was not a perfect option. However, unless they got the Vile Thieving Bird to rip out the string attached to Sunny, This was not even an option.
But then she felt the power of Fate coursing through her. Sunny was never able to reach into another's strings as the Vile Thieving Bird was able to. However, Cassie's aspect was more in touch with fate, she was a prodigy when it came it manipulating fate. Perhaps if she got strong enough she could change fate with more precision this time.
Outside, the Dark City settled into its long and lightless night around them.
The next day moved quickly for all around the Bright Castle.
Nephis, Effie, Kai, and Castor were busy in the encampment. They were distributing the extra soul shards accumulated over the course of the journey alongside food. Even with Gunlaug's commanders handled, the change in leadership would produce some degree of pandemonium. Organizing a dreamer army and moving it toward the Crimson Spire as quickly as possible would be considerably easier with goodwill established in advance.
Their passage through the Dark City had been relatively uneventful, which was largely a consequence of Sunny having significantly reduced its population. As they approached the encampment, Cassie and Sunny watched from a distance as Nephis stood before the assembled Sleepers and spoke not with subterfuge, but plainly, about what she intended and what she was asking of them. It worked even without the weeks of tactics they had employed last time.
Cassie felt Sunny lightly squeeze her hand.
"Good luck," he said simply.
"You too," she replied, and watched him slip away toward the castle, unnoticed, as she went to join the others.
The plan moved into the castle shortly after.
Not long later, Nephis stood facing a man encased in golden armor. Gunlaug had refused her offer, which had surprised no one. The refusal had produced a duel and the castle held its breath.
Effie and Kai were in position to manage Tessai once the duel concluded. Castor had proposed monitoring from above, claiming readiness to drop down on any threat to Nephis while she was vulnerable in the aftermath. He had also suggested, with every appearance of reasonable concern, that Cassie position herself close enough to rush to Nephis's side the moment it ended.
No doubt, she thought, because eliminating both of them at the same time would be tidier.
She had agreed pleasantly and taken the position. The stage was set. The castle was ready to see the end of the anticipation.
Cassie had no particular doubts about how the duel was going to proceed. Her mind drifted.
She had been sitting on the roof of the cathedral earlier that morning, waiting for Sunny while he finished organizing a few things in his room below.
She had been looking at the object in her hand.
Her cerulean eyes met the depthless ones of the Weaver's Mask. It looked back at her with a slight mocking, but remembering her conversation with Weaver, also saw some semblance of anticipatory expectation.
'Epigone, huh' she thought. 'They must be offended that the Spell decided to call me their prodigy.'
She turned the mask over slowly. It was strange, being the heir of a being that had failed. Weaver had been as powerful as a god, they had in fact killed the gods. And yet they had watched their grand design unravel across timelines, had seen their plans compounded into ruin, had ultimately been reduced to a remnant haunting the dreams of the very tool they had deemed flawed. All of that power, all of that reach across the strings of fate, and it had not been enough.
Now the task fell to her. To succeed where Weaver had not. To walk the narrow path that the god of fate themselves had been unable to navigate.
She had expected that thought to be heavier than it was. By any reasonable measure, the prospect should have been crushing.
It wasn't.
She thought about the night before, Sunny's voice, the way he had listened to everything she carried and not flinched from any of it. It was truly a blessed thing to have someone else to help carry and understand the burden. Not to mention that someone else being the one she loved.
Weaver had worked alone. Had designed alone. Had watched alone as the design came apart.
She was not alone.
'It was not,' she thought remembering how she had faced it alone last time, 'a small difference.'
Sunny had emerged through the roof hatch a few minutes later and found her still holding the mask, looking out over the Dark City.
Below her now, Nephis rolled her shoulders once and raised her sword, and Gunlaug raised his weapon, and Cassie left the memory of the morning and brought her attention back to the courtyard.
It was time.