Shadow Slave novel Chapter 3168

The clear ringing of the bell resounded in the dark cave, straining to escape it. The shadow willed it to stay within the stone walls of his shelter, sensing the sound reverberating through him.

As a peculiar vibration was born in his chest, he remembered.

The courtyard of a dark, magnificent temple that stood under a lightless sky. The rustle of leaves washing over him as a towering tree swayed gently in the wind. The laughter of a young woman who sat on the ground, enjoying a lavish picnic...

The memory came and went, leaving behind a lasting ache. The shadow did not like the feeling, so he put the silver bell down and collapsed back into his natural, formless state.

Fleeing from it.

His thoughts were heavy.

What had come over him, anyway? Taking the form of a human... who would want to be a ghastly being like that?

It was the memories of the two men who died on the slopes of the lonesome mountain, no doubt. The two of them had lived similar lives, but went down entirely different paths. By the end, the gap separating them was as wide as the abyss. And yet, they died on the same day, with only a few meters between them, their blood mixing in the snow.

The shadow remembered being those men. He remembered being the abomination who had slain them, as well.

He even remembered being the worm who had created the abomination, using the mind of a distrustful king as its chrysalis. All those lives, all those deaths... they were there, hidden in the depths of the shadow's mind.

But he did not want to recall them.

So, instead, the shadow cast his senses far and wide, so that the empty state of being fused with the world erased his thoughts. So that he could forget.

Oblivion was the only solace to those who were denied death, it seemed.

Time passed, but no matter how much the shadow tried to return to his previous peaceful non-existence, fragments of memories kept creeping into his mind.

He remembered...

Living as a soldier in a lightless land. The world was besieged by darkness, and in its cold embrace, those who still lived had to fight desperately to survive. He fought for the right to exist, as well...

He was a warrior of the Starlight Legion.

His people were led by seven great heroes who had risen to the heights of power in the endless war against the darkness... as well as the awful beings that dwelled under its tenebrous veil. Under their guidance, the humans slowly pushed the detestable creatures back, coming together to build an impregnable city in the heart of the forsaken land.

The gods were dead, so they had no one to pray to. The sun was gone, so there was nothing to illuminate their path. Even the stars had vanished from the sky, having fallen down like flaming tears.

He did not know what the sun looked like, since he had been born after the darkness devoured the world. He did not know what the stars looked like, either. But he had heard the stories... he had dreamed countless times about their distant radiance, about the sea of silver light shining brightly in the boundless black sky.

He wanted to see the stars before he died. That was the goal of the Starlight Legion.

Death was a constant companion to the soldiers of the legion. Many of them perished on the battlefield, and few survived long enough to leave a lasting mark.

He was one of the few.

He had survived many battles, slain many abominations, and buried many comrades. The longer he lived, the stronger he became. Eventually, other soldiers came to rely on him as their brother...

But death wasn't the worst fate for those who fought under the banner of the Starlight Legion. They spent their lives surrounded by darkness, after all, and the darkness seeped into them slowly, year after year, pooling in their souls.

It began from an itch. A maddening itch that came and went, but could never be entirely chased away. Peculiar thoughts soon started to enter his mind. Sometimes, he caught himself looking at his fellow soldiers or at the civilians back home, thinking how soft their bodies were. How red their blood was.

He was thirsty.

At times, no amount of water could quench his thirst. He felt like he was burning in the middle of the desert, dying in unbearable heat.

He longed to dive into the embrace of a cold, dark sea.

One day, the itch drove him mad enough to shred his forearm in a frenzy. As drops of red, vibrant, fragrant blood fell to the floor, he froze and stared at the gruesome wound in shock and revulsion.

There was something there, hidden in the bleeding flesh.

Reaching into the wound with calloused fingers, he pulled a thin, translucent plate from within his forearm.

It was scale.

There were scales and filaments growing under his skin, propagating slowly. Shuddering, he dropped the scale, took a step back, and tried to suppress the desire to sever his entire arm.

In the end, he bandaged the wound, glanced around his tent, and thought of his modest home back in the city.

He was never going to come home again, it seemed.

Following the oaths, he reported himself to the capellan of the cohort. The rest happened quickly.

He was not the first among the warriors of the Starlight Legion to succumb to the curse of the darkness, after all — far from it. Those like him, the veterans who had been infected by the darkness, were all assigned to a special unit. They lived like lepers, isolated from the rest of the soldiers and hiding their gruesome bodies under layered bandages.

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