Child of Death, Destroyer of Worlds

Shades of Time

And the image above is not mine, it was drawn by Firehedgehog for this chapter. Enjoy, and feel free to scream at me in the comments...

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Goth spat out some of the sand that had found it's way into his mouth. He hated it when that happened....

He adjusted the protective googles that he was using to keep the sand out of his eyelights and he buried the lower half of his face behind his scarfs before he started to make his way through the desert again.

He hated Underdesert, there was too much sand everywhere and it was starting to get into uncomfortable places.

Goth struggled through the winds, at this rate, he was better off taking shelter somewhere or portaling out and coming back when it was dark. It would be colder but he wouldn't have to worry about the sand too much.

But even after two weeks, he still wasn't used to this.

His feet sunk into the sand as he walked, slowly making his way through the desert.. If the wind died down and stopped throwing the sand everywhere, then he could possibly use a Shortcut to cross the desert faster, if he could just see where he was going....

He continued to walk for what felt like another hour, stumbling through the sand...

But when he passed a pair of ruined pillars, he felt something crawling down his back...

The sand had stopped moving, in fact, everything had stopped moving.

Goth pulled down his scarfs and he pushed his protective goggles up, setting his face free as he looked around.

What was so special about this place that the sands here were so calm? He could see a cave in the distance, but apart from that, nothing was here apart from the pillars.

He turned around to look at the pillars and he froze.

The cravings on the pillars looked just like the cravings that he saw when he watched Shades's fight in his temple.

He wanted to cry and scream, because after over two whole years of searching, he had finally found what he was looking for. A clue to Ink's Soul.

A few tears started to fall from one of his eyesockets.

He wiped them away and he smiled, before he started to run towards the cave.

His feet still sunk into the sand as he ran, nearly causing him to trip a few times but he didn't care, he was one step closer to home!

One step closer to being with Palette again.

He stopped when he realised that due to his overdue growth spurt, Palette was now the huggable one out of the two of them. He giggled, before he started to run again.

He really wanted to tell Shades about this but he hadn't heard from him since the message that he sent to him.

And to be honest, he was very worried about Shades, he didn't know if his counterpart had healed from his wounds and if he was back to searching for the next clue that he needed to find Ink's Soul.

He had been having a bad feeling ever since Shades defeated that Guardian, something like that would not go unnoticed, someone would know that the Guardian would have been defeated and they would have time to prepare any other Guardians that they had.