Shadow Slave | A Slave Once Again

Chapter Eight: Confrontation

Third POV:

Soon, another map was spread on the table. This one was drawn on a piece of crude parchment made out of monster hide, and much less detailed than the one hanging on the wall. Well, that was understandable. Because the second map did not depict the Dark City, but the Forgotten Shore itself. Sunny stared at it in silence.

..Yeah. Nephis had not wasted any time during these three months.

He had a rough idea of how she had gathered all this information, from the Song Daughter in the castle, the local stories, and eventually Cassie's vision.There were a lot of things that he recognized on the map.

At the center of it, a straight black like depicted the Crimson Spire. The Labyrinth flowed from it, devouring the parchment like an ocean of blood. To the east, a small circle of black ink with a symbol of a white tower inside of it marked the Dark City.

The city was perched on the edge of another, much larger circle. It didn't take too much effort to recognize the cyclopean crater — after all, Sunny had traversed it on a rickety boat once, a lifetime ago. However, looking at it in scale, he finally realized just how giant the crater was, and how vast the Forgotten Shore itself appeared.

'If this was the Forgotten Shore, Just how vast the nightmare desert is.'

The Nightmare Desert was a place where he faced so many harrowing creatures like the Skinwalker and it was where he challenged the Third Nightmare.

Back on Earth, it should be at least as large as several continents.

The Dream Realm was indeed much bigger than their own planet, considering that just one of its numerous regions was this enormous.

There were other symbols on the map that he did recognize. Several of them attracted his attention especially.

On the other side of the crater, almost exactly opposite the Dark City, a symbol of a tree depicted the Ashen Barrow. Some distance to the east of it, on a straight line, there was a mark in the shape of a red cross.

Another red cross was drawn inside the crater just outside the eastern side of the Dark City. The third one was about a week's worth of traveling time to the north, near a symbol that looked like a grotesque, misshapen skull. The fourth one was halfway between the ruins and the Crimson Spire. The fifth one lay to the south, about the same distance as the third, drawn atop the symbol of an arching bridge.

The last red cross was at the very edge of the parchment, far away to the south, beyond the Labyrinth. Near it, two symbols were drawn: one was a crown, and the other one was a question mark.

Sunny already knew what these crosses represented.

They were the giant statues of the seven forgotten heroes who had given the terrible oath to vanquish the darkness and created the Starlight Legion.

'And that Cursed Spire with its artificial Sun.'

The one to the east of the Soul Devourer was the statue of the knight that he had used as a shelter on his first night in the Dream Realm a lifetime ago.

The one near the walls of the city belonged to the woman whose hand had saved them from drowning in the dark sea on the night of their escape.

The other four crosses, marked four more headless statues.

But where was the seventh?

Only Sunny and probably Cassie knew it was on a patrol, around the forgotten shore.

Sunny glanced at the map and said:

"So let me get this straight. You want to leave the Dark City, cross the Labyrinth, reach the edges of the Forgotten Shore... and then return?"