The Chained Isles were quiet.
Not the normal kind of quiet, the soft, breathing stillness of a forest at dawn, but that brittle, suffocating silence that meant the entire environment was patiently waiting for something to die.
Sunny really, really did not like that kind of quiet.
He moved carefully through the ruins, his boots barely making a sound over a thick carpet of powdered stone and ancient, sun-bleached bones. Once, this particular chunk of floating rock might have been a fortress. Now, broken walls rose around them like the ribs of a dead giant, their surfaces heavily scored by deep claw marks and warped by ages of the Crushing. A collapsed tower leaned drunkenly against a half-fallen archway, both held together more by stubborn habit than structural integrity.
Above them, the sky was a pale, washed-out blue. But just past the island's jagged edge, the Sky Below yawned, an endless vault of absolute blackness speckled by distant, motionless lights.
Every few minutes, a faint, terrifying tremor shuddered through the stone under Sunny's feet as the colossal chains anchoring the island groaned and rattled.
The island was ascending. Slowly, steadily.
Sunny could feel it in his bones, the gradual, creeping increase of weight, the way his lungs had to work just a tiny bit harder to drag in the thinning air. It wasn't fatal yet. Just incredibly annoying.
His gloomy shadow flowed a dozen meters ahead of them, hugging the bases of the shattered walls and half-buried columns. It slid over cracked stone and into every deep crevice like dark water, meticulously scouting for threats. The happy shadow clung close to him, its outline happily smeared across the ground at his feet, feeding him vague, useless impressions. Cold! Hard! Empty! Fun!
Behind him, Cielle walked with that unsettling, unhurried grace that made her look like she weighed absolutely nothing.
Her massive white wings were folded tightly against her back to avoid brushing against the broken masonry. In the muted, dusty light, her pristine feathers seemed almost grey, dulled by the grit of the ruins. She was holding a heavy iron spear she had materialized from her soul sea, scanning the ruins with a silent gaze.
She did not complain about the altitude. She never complained.
"Pressure's picking up," Sunny muttered, mostly to fill the oppressive silence rather than because she needed the warning. "The island's still climbing. We don't want to be here when it hits the higher band."
"Understood," Cielle said from behind him. Her voice was perfectly flat, as if he had just commented on the weather. "We will leave before it becomes lethal."
"That's the plan," Sunny grumbled, stepping over a crushed skull. "So try not to get distracted by anything that looks like a good murder opportunity, alright? We are just scouting."
She considered that for a moment. "If it looks like a good murder opportunity," she reasoned calmly, "it is also a good resource opportunity. Soul shards are valuable. You like being rich."
Sunny sighed, rubbing his temple. "I do like being rich. But I also like breathing. We really need to work on your priorities."
They passed under the jagged remains of the archway, its keystone entirely missing. The ruins opened into what had once been a massive plaza: a flat, circular space half-choked with debris. A dry fountain lay collapsed to one side, the central statue shattered. One of the carved stone figures had fallen face-first into the cracked basin, its expression frozen in an eternal, eroded scream.
Sunny's shadow fanned out across the plaza, seeping into the long fractures in the stone. It brushed against empty cavities, shallow depressions, and ancient bloodstains.
No movement. Still too quiet.
Sunny narrowed his eyes, pushing his shadow sense to the limit and stretching the gloomy shadow further.
"There is a cavity beneath the stone," Cielle said quietly behind him.
He blinked, glancing back at her. "You see it?"
She tilted her head, her green eyes tracking the ground. "No. I hear it. The echo of our footsteps changes slightly. The ground is hollow in several sections. There are tunnels beneath the plaza."
Sunny grimaced. "Of course there are tunnels. Why wouldn't there be tunnels?"
He stepped carefully to the left, tracing a subtle sag in the stone with his eyes. There, a crack, slightly wider than the others, running almost perfectly in a massive curve across It looked suspiciously like the outline of an enormous trapdoor.
His shadows pooled uneasily at his feet.
"Alright," Sunny said slowly, drawing the Midnight Shard. "New rule. If a piece of ground in the Chained Isles looks a little too conveniently flat, we assume it's a lie."
"I thought we already assumed everything was a lie," Cielle said.
"Yes, but now the ground is personally offending me."
He was halfway across the plaza when the impression from his gloomy shadow violently changed.
It wasn't a sound. It wasn't a movement. It was a massive, sudden shift in pressure. Like something enormous was uncoiling very, very far below them.
Sunny stopped mid-step. Every single hair on the back of his neck stood on end.
"Cielle," he said, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "Back up. Slowly."
She did not argue. She took one perfect, silent step backward, raising her spear.
That was when the ground decided to try and kill them.
The stone beneath Sunny's leading foot buckled inward with a sickening, deafening crack. A jagged fissure tore across the entire plaza like a lightning bolt, the massive slab suddenly collapsing under its own weight. The impact shuddered violently through Sunny's legs, nearly throwing him off balance.
The shadows beneath them exploded.
they detonated, ejecting a terrifying storm of shattered rock and choking dust as something huge, pale, and multi-limbed forced itself upward from the dark in a frenzy of claws and mandibles.
The first Nightmare Creature hit the surface like a breaching whale. Its segmented, armor-plated torso folded and unfolded in a disturbing, insect-like rhythm. It was the size of a rhino, but significantly longer, possessing entirely too many legs and a head dominated by four overlapping sets of heavily serrated mandibles.
"Fallen," Sunny spat, throwing himself backward. He rolled perfectly over his shoulder, letting a bone-scythe leg slam into the ground exactly where his chest had just been. Stone shattered, the fragments whipping past his mask like shrapnel.
The first monster wasn't alone.
More erupted from the widening crack. A second, then a third, then a fourth. Their pale bodies were slick with some viscous, foul-smelling ichor as they scrambled over each other in a desperate, blind rush toward fresh meat.
"Move!" Sunny barked, already dissolving into the shadows.
He plunged into his own darkness as the nearest beast lunged for him, the world instantly turning into cold and muffled sound.
He emerged from a pool of shadow three meters to the right, half-crouched, the Midnight Shard already cutting upward in a brutal, highly efficient arc.
The black blade met pale chitin with a teeth-jarring crunch. Sparks flew. The Fallen Beast screamed as the tip of the tachi carved a deep groove along the underside of its jaw, but the armor was too thick. It failed to fully sever anything vital. Its mandibles snapped shut a hair's breadth from Sunny's face.
Sunny hissed , twisting away and using the weight of the sword to redirect himself around one of its massive legs. He felt the scythe like limb slice through the air where his ribs had just been.
Across the plaza, there was a sound like a thunderclap.
Cielle had not run.
She had launched herself straight at the oncoming swarm.
Her wings unfurled in a blinding flash of bright white, catching the thin air and slamming downward with enough force to send a shockwave of dust and grit blasting outward. The sudden, violent updraft threw the second charging behemoth slightly off-balance.
In that split second, Cielle stepped entirely inside its guard.
She leveled her spear, braced her back foot against a broken pillar, and drove the weapon forward with the absolute, terrifying force provided by her aspect.
The heavy spearhead bypassed the thickest armor plates entirely, slamming directly into the softer, vulnerable joint connecting the monster's front leg to its body.
The beast screeched, its leg buckling. Cielle didn't hesitate. She ripped the spear free, sidestepped a frantic, snapping bite that would have taken her head off, and slammed the butt of her weapon into the creature's milky, cluster-filled eye.
The beast thrashed wildly, blood spraying across the ruins, entirely blinding it on one side.
"Efficient," Sunny muttered, entirely too busy to admire her work because his own monster was refusing to die.
The Fallen Beast he'd slashed lunged again, its heavy head thrashing like a whip. One of its mandibles clipped him hard in the shoulder guard. Pain exploded down his arm like lightning, almost making him drop the Midnight Shard.
Sunny swore viciously, pouring shadow essence into his muscles. The Soul Serpent coiled tighter around his core, lending him a fraction more speed.
'Fine. If the hide is too tough from the top….'
He dropped low, almost sliding on his knees, and let the beast lunge entirely over him. As its terrifying bulk crashed forward, Sunny slid perfectly under it , his vision narrowing to the reeking underside of its body and the frantic, rhythmic pounding of its many legs.
He drove the tachi straight up, aiming right for the seam where two plates met near the abdomen. The Midnight Shard bit deep, grinding through softer flesh.
The creature convulsed violently, its legs scrabbling uselessly against the stone as its own momentum carried it forward, essentially gutting itself on his blade. It didn't die quietly. It thrashed and screamed, burying Sunny under a rain of foul ichor.
Sunny wrenched the sword free just in time for the ground to lurch again.
Not from the monsters this time. From below.
The fractures spider-webbing across abruptly widened into massive chasms. More stone sagged and fell. The half-buried foundations of the old structures groaned like a dying animal. One of the leaning walls finally decided it had had enough, breaking apart in a cascading collapse, sending a thick cloud of dust rolling across the battlefield like a tidal wave.
Sunny coughed, his eyes stinging behind his mask, his vision reduced to terrifying flashes through the haze.
"Cielle!" he shouted, trying to locate her with his shadow sense. The gloomy shadow skittered frantically across the broken ground, trying to find her silhouette amidst the chaos.
There.
Her outline was a bright, sharp anomaly in the murk. Her wings were flared, her spear was moving in tight, controlled thrusts, but she was surrounded by three nightmare creatures.
It was too many.
"On your–" Sunny started to yell, stepping forward.
Something hit him from the side.
Another beast had dug its way up from one of the new cracks, half its body still rooted below the stone. It slammed into him like a runaway freight train, its thorny carapace smashing into his ribs and sending him flying through the air.
Sunny's back hit a low stone wall hard enough to instantly knock the breath out of his lungs. For a terrifying second, the world went white around the edges. His fingers spasmed on the hilt of the sword, barely maintaining his grip.
The wall did not appreciate the abuse. It collapsed backward, raining heavy chunks over his head.
He tried to roll away. He was not fast enough.
A massive section of the plaza simply gave up entirely. With a deafening, catastrophic crack, a huge oval of stone, dozens of meters across, dropped out from underneath them, like a trapdoor finally springing loose.
Sunny felt the world tilt. The stone under his palms vanished. For one sickening, terrifying heartbeat, he was entirely weightless.
Then he was falling.
The pale light from above shrank in an instant, replaced by a clawing, absolute blackness rushing up from below. Shattered stone and massive boulders plummeted around him. One clipped his leg in passing, sending a hot, blinding spike of pain through his thigh.
Somewhere above, through the roaring of falling stone and the screeching of enraged monsters, he heard Cielle shout his name.
Then he heard her fall too.
Her wings snapped open on pure instinct, a brilliant flare of white against the shrinking square of sky. But the collapsing stone dragged thousands of pounds of ruin down with it, battering at her feathers. One great block of stone smashed into her side, knocking her violently off and dragging her down into the dark with the rest of the debris.
Two of the Fallen Beasts tumbled down after them, their massive claws gouging futilely at the disintegrating edge as gravity claimed them.
The rumbling, deafening roar of the collapse swallowed everything.
***
Sunny hit something solid much sooner than he would have liked.
He crashed through a thin shelf of stone that tried and failed to arrest his fall, shattering it completely, and then slammed shoulder-first into the sloping wall of a natural cavern. The impact rolled him brutally, scraping the puppeteer's shroud against raw, jagged rock, before he finally slid to a highly painful stop on a mostly flat surface.
For a few seconds, Sunny just lay there. His ears were ringing violently, and every single breath felt like a jagged burn in his chest.
Then the second wave of debris hit.
Heavy chunks of the ruined plaza hammered into the cavern floor all around him, sending terrifying shockwaves up through the rock. His instinct screamed at him to move. The happy shadow was shrieking in panicked delight. The gloomy one was calling him several very rude, highly specific names.
Sunny forced his abused body to respond. He rolled, half-crawling, half-diving toward a darker recess in the cavern wall just as a boulder the size of a wagon obliterated the exact spot where he'd been lying a second before.
The dust was immediate and absolute. It surged through the cavern like a living thing, choking, turning everything into a grey, suffocating fog. The last ragged shaft of pale light from above shrank, and then vanished entirely as the ruined ceiling settled and sealed itself shut.
Darkness fell. True darkness
Sunny froze. His heart was pounding frantically against his ribs. Every sense strained to its absolute limit. The only sounds were the echoing rumble of settling rock and the faint, high-pitched ringing in his ears. The oppressive pressure of the ascending island was slightly less noticeable down here, but he was running blind.
"Cielle?" Sunny rasped.
His voice sounded incredibly small and flat in the vast underground emptiness.
Silence answered.
No. Not silence.
There was breathing.
It wasn't human. It was wet, rattling, insectile breathing. Entirely too close.
One of the Fallen Beasts had survived the fall.
Then another. And a third.
'Of course they did,' Sunny thought bitterly. 'Why wouldn't they.'
Sunny bared his teeth in the dark, sucking in a careful, shallow breath through his nose. He could practically taste the dust, and copper. Blood. His own, and something else's. His shoulder throbbed with a dull agony. His thigh burned where the rock had clipped him. His ribs were one deep, bruised ache.
He pushed himself to one knee, ignoring the pain, and forced himself to his feet. Sunny felt his balance shift awkwardly in the complete absence of shadows. The Midnight Shard settled securely into his hand like an old friend, its familiar weight a small, anchoring point of certainty in the void.
"Cielle," he called again, keeping his voice lower, more controlled. "If you can hear me. Answer."
For a terrifying heartbeat, there was only the wet rasp of monster-breath.
Then, faintly, from somewhere much deeper in the blackness, came a simple, perfectly calm reply.
"Here."
Sunny closed his eyes and exhaled slowly, forcing his rising panic back down. The sound of her steady, unbothered voice steadied something fundamental in his chest.
She was alive. That was good.
They were separated in the dark with three giant monsters. That was very bad.
The Fallen Beasts began to move. Sunny could feel them clearly even here, their heavy weight shifting, thick legs picking their way across the shattered stone, large mandibles clicking together in anticipation. Their blindness hardly mattered down here. In this total darkness, their other senses were king.
Sunny rotated the tachi in his hand, feeling the worn leather of the hilt bite comfortably into his palm.
"Alright," Sunny whispered into the darkness, his voice sharpening into a cold, entirely humorless edge.
'You want to hunt in the dark?' Sunny thought, letting his shadows wrap around his body. ' Fine. Let's see what you bastards are made of..'