"Escaping without Nephis is off the table anyways," I said, and Sasrir gave a curt nod of agreement. "We cannot best the Crimson Terror without her. But that doesn't mean we just let her trample through and burn everything down around us. We control the board. We decide the terms."
"And there are… personal benefits," I added, a harder edge entering my voice. "The Lord of the Dead drops the key to access Weaver's Mask. A Divine Memory for obfuscation and fate-weaving.
Essential for anyone who knows how this story is supposed to go and wants to change it. And the Black Knight in the Dark City Cathedral… its Ruby Core. If we can kill it, that core could be the key to evolving Saint. We wouldn't just be powerful ourselves; we'd have the tools to build something lasting."
Sasrir was silent for a moment, processing the sheer scale of the ambition. It was audacious. Reckless. But for the first time, it felt possible. We weren't just two Sleepers trying to scrape by. We were something else, something more, with the tools and the knowledge to carve our own destiny out of this nightmare.
"A ambitious plan," he finally conceded, a slow, sharp smile touching his lips. It wasn't a nice smile. It was the smile of a predator looking at a full grazing field. "But the logic is sound. Control the Shards, control the Shore. Let the destined heroes play their part on the stage we set."
He looked out towards the labyrinth, towards where we now knew the Dark City waited. "Then we should not keep the Lord of the Dead waiting."
****************************************
Once again, we used the Azure Blade to point the way. Now that we knew the rough direction of the Dark City, al I had to do was ask the Blade to find the best route south-west repeatedly, slowly making our way through the Crimson Labyrinth.
It was after using the Enchantment [Wishing Star] for possibly the tenth time that I was suddenly struck by an oddity. "Wait a minute, weren't Memories supposed to be intuitive, and not have their abilities plainly spelt out?" Beside me, Sasrir also stiffened.
"You're right..." he said slowly. "Sunny could only do so because of Blood Weave changing his eyes, attuning them towards Fate. But you could do it from the start, with the Unshadowed Crucifix."
I pondered over the reason before asking tentatively, "Could it be our high level of Divinity allowed us to directly connect with Fate? Or is it a separate gift from the Curator?"
"Who knows?" he shrugged. "I doubt we'll find out anything soon, maybe if you devour Blood Weave you will be able to spot any differences. Anyways, that would explain why we never learned the capabilities of the Azure Blade in the novel...if they haven't been altered as well."
"Nah, the Curator wouldn't make such a grassroot change. Sunny was probably just unlucky."
The journey was a brutal, two-day slog through a gauntlet of the Labyrinth's horrors. The Wishing Star didn't guide us along safe paths; it pointed the most direct route, which often meant straight through the territories of things that very much wanted to eat us.
The first day, we were set upon by a pack of Scavenger Demons—larger, smarter variants of the ones we'd faced before. These weren't just mindless rushers. They used pack tactics, with smaller, faster ones harrying us while a larger, brutish alpha tried to flank.
Their claws seemed to drip with a numbing venom that made parrying a risky proposition. Sasrir's shadow-whips and my light-infused slashes from the Azure Blade eventually whittled them down, but it was a messy, exhausting fight that left us both with new scratches and a deep respect for the local wildlife.
That afternoon, we had to skirt a vast, stagnant sinkhole where giant, pulsating leeches—Dormant Beasts the Spell identified as 'Soul Sappers' after Sasrir sniped one of them—lurked just beneath a film of oily water.
They didn't attack directly, but they emitted a low-frequency psychic drone that made concentration difficult and threatened to lure us closer to the water's edge. We moved quickly and quietly, Sasrir's own mental defences straining against the invasive hum, his powers as a Listener working against him here.
As dusk approached on the first day, the shrieking started. A flock of winged demons—'Gloom Shrikes'—spotted us from above. They were Awakened Demons, each the size of a large dog, with leathery wings and beaks that could punch through coral.
Their true weapon, however, was their cry: a piercing shriek that disoriented prey and left them vulnerable to diving attacks. We were forced to take cover under a coral overhang, fending them off with bursts of light from the Crucifix and precise strikes from Sasrir's shadow arrows until they lost interest.
We camped that night in a high, narrow crevice, cold and in utter darkness. Lighting a fire was out of the question; the glow would be a dinner bell for every abomination within miles, especially the unspeakable things we could sometimes hear moving in the deeper, flooded parts of the chasm below us.
We took turns on watch, listening to the distant, haunting sounds of the nightmare realm. We each got enough rest anyways, though our nerves were a bit spent by the sunrise
The second day brought an even greater challenge. The path led us through a narrow canyon, and blocking it was a nightmare made flesh: a 'Coral Crawler' I would find out later-a Fallen Devil. It was a monstrous, multi-segmented thing with sixteen barbed legs that allowed it to skitter across the vertical walls with horrifying speed. Its main body was a bloated sac, and from its front, a proboscis-like mouth lined with rotating teeth extended and retracted, dripping a corrosive slime that sizzled on the coral floor.
A direct fight would have been suicide. Its armour was too thick, and its mobility was insane. Instead, we used the environment. While I used the Azure Blade to draw its attention, Sasrir flowed into the shadows on the canyon wall, manifesting spikes of solidified darkness to impale its legs and slow it down. It wasn't about killing it; it was about creating an opening. We scrambled and dodged, finally squeezing past it through a crack it was too large to follow, leaving the enraged creature shrieking behind us.
We fought and avoided a dozen other minor threats, but by the end of the second day, we had nothing to show for it but fatigue and depleted Essence. No new Memories, no helpful Echoes. Just the grim satisfaction of survival and the unwavering pull of the Azure Blade, leading us ever deeper into the heart of the nightmare. The Dark City was close. We could feel it—it had to be.
I had managed to use my four new Memories I had gotten previously as well, from the Living Weapons. They were a short sword, spear, hammer and katana, all with the same Enchantments and descriptions, making them not particularly useful to me, but Sasrir seemed to enjoy using them, perhaps to preserve Essence and not having to make his own weapons every time.
[Memory Name: Steel Memento]