For a while, the only sounds were breathing and the slow, wet drip of blood.
The echoes of screeches and impacts had faded. The rain of dust had finally settled into a fine, choking layer over everything.
Sunny stood with his back still touching Cielle's, the Midnight Shard hanging low in his hand. His lungs burned. His shoulder throbbed with every heartbeat, a hot, pulsing ache under the Puppeteer's Shroud. His throat tasted like stone and iron.
He checked the world through his shadow again.
No movement.
"That should be all of them," he muttered.
"Yes," Cielle agreed. She sounded… not winded, exactly, but there was a faint roughness under the flat tone. "The noise stopped."
Sunny let out a long breath he hadn't realized he was holding and stepped forward off the boulder. His boots landed in something wet and sticky. He didn't bother looking down. There were worse things to step in than monster blood.
He wiped the flat of his blade on the plating of the nearest carcass out of habit before dismissing it. The Midnight Shard dissolved into sparks, flowing back into his core. The cavern felt a little emptier without its familiar weight, though the Soul Serpent's cold coil remained a steady presence around his soul.
All around them, the fallen beasts lay in broken heaps, limbs twisted at unnatural angles, carapaces cracked open, fluids seeping into the stone. Some had been partially crushed by the collapse. Others had clearly died from precise strikes to joints and soft underbellies.
Most of those belonged to her.
Cielle stepped down after him, landing with the soft crunch of loose grit under her boots. Her wings shifted once, feathers rustling faintly, then settled tightly against her back. Her hair was full of dust, and there was a streak of black ichor drying along her jawline that she hadn't bothered to wipe away.
She looked completely at ease standing in the middle of the slaughter.
Sunny, by contrast, felt like a rag that had been wrung out and set on fire.
He rolled his sore shoulder carefully, listening for anything that sounded like torn muscle or cracked bone. Pain, sure. But it moved. That was enough for now.
"Well," he said hoarsely, "that was unpleasant."
"It was efficient," Cielle replied. "They died quickly. Mostly."
"...Comforting."
His gloomy shadow trailed over one of the nearest corpses, mapping the ridges and cracks in its chitin. The happy shadow bounced around between carcasses, acting out exaggerated reenactments of the fight with little pantomime stabs and collapses.
He ignored it.
The cavern itself was larger than he'd first realized. Now that his shadow sense wasn't entirely consumed with tracking enemies, he could feel the full shape of it, a roughly oval chamber with a slanted ceiling, partially collapsed on one side. Jagged pillars of rock jutted from the floor where chunks of the ceiling had punched through. Narrow tunnels branched off in three directions, full of twists and tight squeezes.
No light reached this place anymore. The world above was gone, replaced by tons of darkness.
"We need a way out," he said quietly. "Before the air quality gets more offensive than the smell."
"I can fly up through a gap when we find one," Cielle said. "You cannot."
"Thank you for that very necessary observation."
He started walking . The gloomy shadow flowed ahead of him again, checking for voids in the ceiling, narrow chimneys, any shaft that might lead back toward the surface.
The happy shadow wandered in lazy circles, occasionally kicking at an imaginary rock.
Behind him, he heard the soft, wet sound of Cielle retrieving their loot from monster flesh, one by one. Each extraction came with a faint crack or squelch. She wiped them off on whatever leathery hide was closest, then made them vanish somewhere on her person.
He didn't look too closely at that, either. Some mysteries were better left unsolved.
"Do you always throw that well in the dark?" he asked, partly to distract himself from the growing awareness of how stale the air was becoming.
"Yes," she said simply.
"Of course you do."
Sunny sighed and summoned a memory he had just received.
His fingers closed around cool, ridged metal. It was a small pendant on a broken chain, an ugly, lopsided thing shaped like a crude, many-eyed insect.
"Well, hello," he murmured. "What did you do to end up down here?"
He turned the pendant over in his hand, feeling the faint hum of power within it. Not strong, while it was an ascended charm, it seemed to possess useless enchantments, but still worth having. He was about to summon the runes to inspect it properly when something in his periphery twitched.
He froze.
His shadow had not moved.
Cielle's had.
He looked down slowly.
Their silhouettes sprawled across the uneven floor, smeared and broken by the jagged shapes of rock and corpse. His own main shadows was where he expected it to be, scouting ahead or playing with rocks.
Cielle's stood slightly behind and to his right, elongated by a light source that did not exist. It should have been a static outline attached to her heels and wings, instead, a thin, indistinct arm of darkness had peeled itself a fraction of a degree away from the rest of her silhouette and was pointing.
At his hand.
The shadow-hand twitched, then, apparently satisfied, relaxed and melted back into the rest of her outline.
...No.
He deliberately shifted his weight to stand, stepping slightly to the side.
His own shadow moved with him instantly.
Hers followed a heartbeat later, correcting its position with a jerk like someone dragging a reluctant dog on a leash.
The difference would have been invisible to normal senses.
To him, it was glaring.
Cielle came to a stop next to him, close enough that her wing brushed lightly against his arm. She glanced down at the pendant.
"Valuable?" she asked.
"Hopefully," Sunny said, voice a shade tighter than he liked. "At least worth enough to make nearly being eaten alive feel slightly less insulting."
She made a soft sound.
Her gaze drifted away from the trinket, sweeping the cavern slowly. Her eyes weren't tracking anything specific. They were slightly unfocused, pupils dilated in the dark.
He watched the fine muscles at the corner of her jaw tighten, then relax.
"The shadows are very loud today," she said quietly.
Sunny's fingers closed reflexively around the pendant.
"...Loud?" he repeated.
"Yes." She tilted her head, as if listening to something only she could hear. "They keep touching everything. Talking all the time. It is… crowded."
His first instinct was to snap at his own shadow for bothering her.
Which was insane.
He forced himself to unclench his jaw.
"Talking," he said, careful. "What are they saying?"
Cielle frowned faintly, like someone trying to translate a language they'd never heard before. Her shadow, at her feet, shifted its weight a fraction of a second after she did.
"They show things," she said finally. "Where they are. Where you are. Where everything is. Like echoes. Like when you shout into a canyon and wait."
Sunny felt something cold and breathless unfurl in his chest.
Shadow sense. She was describing shadow sense.
Not well. Not precisely. But close enough that his skin crawled.
"You can see through them," he said. It wasn't a question.
"I can… listen." She paused, then nodded once. "And see. A little."
His gloomy shadow, the treacherous bastard, waved enthusiastically at her silhouette. Her shadow tried to wave back and ended up making a twitchy half-gesture that looked like a dying octopus.
Sunny ground his teeth.
Of course.
He had known, in theory, what her Dormant ability did. Copy aspects after sufficient exposure and "understanding." He had seen glimpses of it earlier the way she seemed to unerringly find safe footing even in treacherous terrain, how she had started seeing better in the dark.
But this?
This was his.
The one thing that had kept him alive more times than he cared to count. The thing that let him stalk gods and monsters in the dark and not immediately die. Harus had died due to it.
And now she was… growing her way into it.
He should have been thrilled.
Strategically, it was incredible. A second person with some level of shadow sense in a place like the dream realm was incredible. Their effectiveness as a pair would skyrocket. Their already unnerving battlefield coordination could become something practically obscene.
Emotionally, however, his reaction was much simpler, much dumber, and much more dangerous.
He felt possessive.
Not in the general, petty way he felt about people trying to steal his things or his carefully hoarded Memories.
This was worse.
Sunny looked at the overlapping silhouettes at their feet, the way his shadow sprawled, confident and territorial, and hers clung to it like a smaller, clumsier animal trying very hard to imitate its bigger, meaner cousin.
Something unpleasant and hot twisted in his chest.
It wasn't that he didn't want her to have it.
He wanted her to have everything.
He just… didn't want anyone else to ever touch it. Or her.
"How long," he asked quietly, "have you been able to do that?"
Cielle considered it.
"Since earlier," she said. "When we fell. It was… faint, before. Just noise. Now it is clear. Your shadows are very loud."
He exhaled slowly through his nose.
Of course they were.
He imagined, for a brief, hysterical moment, his happy shadow chattering at her like an overexcited puppy while his gloomy one tried to maintain some semblance of dignity and failed.
"Does it hurt?" he asked. The question surprised even him, but it was out before he could stop it.
Cielle blinked once.
"No," she said simply. "It is… bright. Annoying. But it's not painful."
"Bright," he echoed flatly, looking around at the absolute pitch blackness. "In a cave with no light."
"Yes," she said. "You are very noisy."
His shadow puffed up, offended.
Sunny pinched the bridge of his nose with his free hand and resisted the urge to flip his own reflection off.
He took another look around through their combined shadow field. The sphere of his awareness had subtly expanded, sharpened. Tiny details he would normally have ignored stood out, a narrow, vertical crack in the far wall, the way a hanging slab of rock didn't quite meet the ceiling.
Some of that was him.
Some of that was her.
This was bad.
Interesting.
Terrifying.
Useful.
He hated how many of those things were true at the same time.
"Alright," he said finally, voice low. "New rule."
Cielle turned her head slightly, listening.
"If anything in the dark so much as thinks about moving toward you," he said, "you let me know before you throw anything at it."
"Why?" she asked, genuinely curious.
"Because," Sunny said, a grin appeared on his face as he was staring down at the way their shadows overlapped, "if something wants to eat you, I want first rights."
Her shadow tried to nod along with his.
Cielle's lips quirked, the barest hint of amusement ghosting over her face.
"Okay," she said.
It didn't make the possessive chill in his chest go away.
If anything, it made it worse.