Sunny was hit with a wave of powerful heat as he stepped out of the mirage. He grimaced involuntarily as a hideously bright sun suddenly struck through the daunting and endless darkness that nestled in the eyeholes of Weaver's Mask, causing him to hiss and throw up an arm to block the powerful rays.
He squinted through the demon mask, trying to gauge his surroundings and remember what exactly he had been told to do...
'What?'
He blinked and froze. He had been told to do something? By who?
'Wait, where am I? Wasn't I just in Godgrave?'
For a moment, he panicked. Because if he was in Godgrave, and not the domain of his divine shadow fragment... then that meant the sun was out. He became even more unnaturally still. His heart began to thump furiously in his chest, and the six shadows that fanned out behind him like a deck of cards seemed to tense. His thoughts whirled inside his head ferociously. How was he not dust? Had he been spared, lucky maybe?
He stayed like that for a moment longer before tentatively moving the gauntleted fingers of his left hand, flexing the onyx metal of the Mantle. No, it couldn't be luck. Fateless beings had no such thing.
As he hoped, the bright sunlight didn't immediately incinerate him into a cloud of shapeless ash. Sunny let out a shuddering gasp, his knees suddenly feeling weak. This was his original body. It might have been different if it was one of his shadow incarnations, but if he had been destroyed... he had no doubt it would have been the end. Even he could not hope to challenge, let alone rival, the abomination that dwelt behind Godgrave's clouds. He doubted that even a sovereign would be able to walk freely under its penetrating gaze.
Sunny relaxed slightly as he straightened, lowering his arm but still squinting from the biting glare. After a moment of thought, he summoned the Nebulous Mantle, Ananke's last gift, and threw it over his head, granting him glorious shade. It folded over the horns of Weavers Mask, making strange bumps in the fabric. He raised its end in front of his face with both arms, finally able to freely look around himself. He felt naked without shadow sense, which was strangely muted, so he cautiously extended it around him as he took in his surroundings.
It was a desert. Extending for dozens and dozens of kilometers around him. Even with the powerful eyes of a Saint and his shadow sense, he couldn't feel past the hazy, shifting sands.
'The Nightmare Desert?'
But no, as he continued to feel his way through the sands, he began to spot scarce vegetation. Extending his will under the ground, he felt dozens of small, near minuscule dens, full of... not nightmare creatures? He tilted his head in confusion.
'What? Is that... a rat?'
No, not quite, though it looked much like it. A kind of...mouse. They had been rarer in the outskirts, since rats usually outcompeted them for the already scarce food sources, but they still scurried about in the nicer areas.
If anything about the outskirts could be called nice.
And was that a... lizard, too? He had only ever seen nightmare creature versions of them before, but he was pretty sure that's what the scaly little beasts were. Their heads and spiky, scaled spines had a vague resemblance to Kai's dragon form, as well as Severax. Just much, much smaller. And without giant wings.
'Probably distant cousins.'
They were kind of gross too. He didn't like the way their tails moved as they scurried about in their dens, as if they had wills of their own.
Shadow sense didn't work nearly as well as it should have, due to the blinding sun and lack of structures, but what it did do was make the scarce vegetation much easier to focus on, casting their shadows long and deep where they persisted. They reacted strangely to his mental touch, as though in awe, surprise, and... anticipation? Fear, too. These shadows hadn't been touched by a being quite like him in millenia. Perhaps even ever. They shifted as though waking from a great sleep, seemingly gaining the strange semblance of sentience that wild shadows sometimes had.
'Strange.' He frowned. 'They shouldn't be this awed by my presence...'
Ah, but who was he kidding? He hadn't found a single shadow creature he had not created himself aside from Nightmare, of whom he had fittingly found in a Nightmare of his own, gone insane from a thousand years of loneliness. Plus, he was practically a shadow deity himself. After all, he had been recognized as their champion even before achieving transcendence. Without the help of the Spell, he couldn't entirely gauge how their... admiration had grown, but he could feel that it had been explosive.
Was it really so strange for the shadows to revere him as such?
'Whatever.'
He had bigger things to focus on. Like where the hell he was.
Just "desert" wasn't enough. Was he in the Dream Realm? Or had his tether been messed with somehow, sending him to wherever he was?
Was there an aspect that could do that? It wasn't outside the realm of possibility. With a grim look on his face, he reached inwardly for his tether, but felt... nothing. It was though the space it had once occupied had never existed.
He also couldn't dive into his own soul sea, either, which made him feel slightly uncomfortable. Almost naked. Surely he wasn't going to have to spend another year trying to get back in, right? Because of the Nebulous Mantle, he knew he was able to summon his memories, but he tried them each in turn anyways, feeling himself relax slightly more with each summon. Finally, he dismissed the Silver Bell with relief coloring his face.
For some strange reason, where he was, wherever it was... didn't feel like Earth. Not the Earth he knew, at least. He could tell that much. But it also didn't feel like anywhere he had been or heard of in the dream realm. And he had been to quite a few places in the Dream Realm the past few years, much more than most Awakened would travel to in their lifetime. This place felt different, somehow, and on a much more fundamental level than the dream realm did. It wasn't just the reaction of the shadows that had tipped him off, either. He had felt it, somewhere back in his mind, the moment he had appeared here. He frowned again.
'When I stepped out onto the sands, it felt like I forgot something.'
That in itself was strange, and more than a little scary. The Mantle of the Underworld boasted an impressive amount of resilience to mind and soul attacks alike, and he was even wearing Weaver's Mask... who or what had the kind of power to not only force him to come here, but also make him forget about the interaction he'd had with it?
He quickly checked himself over. There didn't appear to be any bruises, lacerations, or damages across his entire body under the Mantle of the Underworld. He didn't even feel drained, which definitely would have been the case if he had suffered from mental or soul attacks, even if he had forgotten about them. But who knew how much time had actually passed since he left Godgrave? He could have been injured a thousand times over, and steadily healed the same amount through the passage of time. He sighed.
'The last time I had my memory messed with, it was by an infinite amount of crazy versions of myself that spent thousands of years trying to fix a single mistake.'
Sunny suddenly felt a headache coming on. He forced the thoughts out of his mind. '
Well, whatever. No use dwelling on it, now. I have a feeling that even without the nightmare creatures, this world isn't exactly going to be safe.'
But what was he going to do? Pick a random direction and just start walking? That didn't exactly sound practical. But what choice did he have? He sighed and turned to face his shadows.
"What do you guys think?"
Suddenly, standing before him, as if they were always there, were six exact copies of himself. Those without helmets had their hair tied behind their heads in a high knot like himself, and each sported the mantle of the underworld. All had pale, porcelain-like skin and onyx eyes drowning in darkness. All but two had dismissed their helmets. Gloomy, the furthest to the left, looked at him with disdain. He was one of the two that hadn't removed his helmet.
"What the hell are you talking about? We're the same person, fool."
The happy shadow, helmetless, standing next to him with his arms crossed, looked at him with an expression close to disgust.
"You know exactly why, prick. It helps us think."
The haughty shadow, who stood to the right of happy, had chosen to don one of Sunny's memories, 'Definitely Not Me'. The inferior memory copied the relief of Weavers Mask near perfectly and turned his hair a brilliant white as a boon.
Creepy, the furthest to the right and of whom had been staring into the distance, suddenly crouched low to the sand, an expression of eerie fascination on his face. A deafening explosion sounded as he suddenly launched himself towards a lizard resting on top of a rock a couple dozen meters away, snatching the creature neatly before it could even react and kicking up a veritable storm of dusty sand. The sound of his launch echoed for kilometers around, and the dust cloud consumed the odd gathering.
Creepy studied his prize with an intense expression, a creepy ghost of a smile on his face as he turned the squealing lizard over and inspected its scaly, yellow underbelly. Happy and naughty coughed at the cloud of dust that had been suddenly kicked up in their faces. Sunny tossed the Nebulous Mantle to happy and watched as he covered his face with it.
"What the hell, jackass?!"
Naughty screamed in rage, making the sand shake and reverberate at their feet, sinking each of them a few inches into the sand. His eye twitched for a moment, either from anger or the cloud of dust. Creepy, now close to half a kilometer away, froze and turned, slightly paler than usual, facing the indignation of the rest of... well, him. He turned back meekly, still holding the lizard in the vice-like grip of one of the Mantle's gauntlets, being careful not to crush it into pulp. "Sorry..."
But his morbid curiosity overtook him.
"But look, guys, it's more yellow here on its stomach, instead of green. Why do you think that is? And it's got these little black claws, too. Dozens of small, sharp, triangular teeth as well, like the kind used for ripping flesh. There's this weird thing on its throat too, like a thin, fleshy sac. I wonder what's inside it..."
Sunny watched with an expression of incredulity and a little bit of sickness. How could that fool be so distracted? And so disturbingly... morbid, as well. Sure, there was a part of him that was interested in this seemingly new world, but seriously.
"Can we focus for like, I don't know, five minutes? If not, I'm just gonna turn you guys back into shadows. I know you guys have the same feeling I do. Like we're wasting time, for whatever reason there may be."
Creepy reluctantly and carefully lowered the lizard to the ground, watching intently as it scurried away across the sand before disappearing in a den. He sullenly trotted back to them, not having a shadow to step into to get there quicker. He looked kind of disappointed.
"Fine, let's get on with it."
Gloomy rolled his eyes inside of his helmet and haughty huffed indignantly, arms crossed, but they all turned their focus back to the original Sunny. Even crazy, who had been the second farthest to the right, and who had been oddly silent throughout the whole ordeal. His fingers were twitching at his sides and he looked kind of like he was about to implode.
He was the second one who wore the helmet of the Mantle of the Underworld. Slightly uneasy at the sight, Sunny summoned the Endless Spring and raised the bottom of the mask to drink deeply. The invigorating water felt cool and slick as it slid down his throat, and he almost sighed in contentment. Even with the uncanny elemental resistance of the Mantle of the Underworld, he was still feeling kind of hot. The armor itself could be a little stuffy sometimes anyways, if worn for a little too long. And he was technically wearing seven suits of it right now, albeit on different bodies. More used to the bright sun, now, he had no use for the Nebulous Mantle as an overhang. Sunny paused tentatively for a moment, then passed the Endless Spring to gloomy. He looked kind of surprised, though he tried to not show it.
"You know we don't need sustenance, right?"
He asked with condescension and a hint of incredulity in his voice. Sunny felt slightly awkward as he answered, rubbing the back of his head and staring at the sand with the slightest hint of pink on his face.
"Well, yeah, but it feels nice, right?"
Gloomy stared at him for a moment behind his visor before scoffing and snatching the bottle from Sunny's hand.
"Whatever."
He dismissed his helmet and took a quick gulp before shoving it into happy's hand, wiping his face roughly with a gauntleted hand. Happy received it with confusion as well, this time towards gloomy's seeming... thoughtfulness? Did he really have any of that? Gloomy looked away and grit his teeth.
"Drink or don't, idiots. Like I care."
Happy nodded slowly and took a slightly longer drink himself. He then passed it to haughty, who scoffed with an air of indignance and raised his palm in a clear show of superiority. Why would he lower himself so as to drink from the same glass as these other fools? He would never be so desperate. Happy resisted rolling his eyes and reached past him to hand it to crazy, who, upon attention, returned to a facade of complete normalcy and even bowed slightly, not dismissing his helm. He didn't drink any, though, and instead handed it off to creepy, who took it but also passed it straight to the next person, Sunny himself, completing the strange loop. Looking sullen, creepy kept stealing glances in the direction the lizard had scurried off to. Refusing to tax his mind in attempting to understand the strange interaction, Sunny dismissed the memory and rested his gauntleted palms on the sides of the Mantle of the Underworld.
"Okay then. What do you all say about splitting up? Same groups we were before, except the Lord of Shadows will have to lend one to both me and Happy. I know that we don't have any idea about the dangers we're going to be facing in this place, so the two of you will have slightly less power than me, but... yeah. We need to protect our original body, right? Lord of Shadows- haughty- you take crazy. I'll take gloomy, and... creepy, I guess? Happy, you get naughty. That way, the more experienced at being... human... will be in the lead. This work?"
They looked amongst themselves for a moment. Happy shrugged and gave him a small smile. "Best we're gonna get for now, I'd say."
Gloomy nodded solemnly and it was haughty's turn to roll his eyes behind the mask, huffing an annoyed sigh, but he nodded as well. Creepy shrugged indifferently, still staring into the desert, and crazy suddenly barked explosive laughter, doubling over and holding his stomach. He twitched uncontrollably for a few moments. Sparing him a quick glance, Sunny nodded to the other... Sunnies. It was a little bit awkward, since they hadn't been back together in a while. It was really a kind of reunion. It had been years since they had all been together. Crazy, gloomy, creepy and naughty all dissolved into their original shadow forms, attaching themselves to the decided leaders of the upcoming expedition. Sunny wrapped creepy around the Mantle of the Underworld, and the slight discomfort from the heat dissipated. He left gloomy at his feet. It was good practice for if- when- he found people, and had to pretend to be, if not a normal human, at least... human. People would be freaked out if he didn't have one. If necessary, he had more than enough concentration to spare on substituting a wild shadow to mimic his movements so he could borrow gloomy's strength, as well. After all, Sunny was a master of splitting his concentration.
"Alright, then. See you guys around."
Happy smiled and waved at his farewell, turning and walking in the opposite direction of the sun. Haughty gave him a curt nod and marched off toward the sun, and Sunny paused for a moment, watching them go through three sets of eyes. He sighed, then started forward at a brisk pace, walking perpendicular with where the floating ball of fire would eventually set. 'God, I hope Nephis is okay... if she's even in this nightmare. Maybe everyone is. Unfortunately, I have no way to tell.'
* * *