He dreamed of a mountain.
That was the first, primal understanding that pierced the veil of transition. Not a gentle, tree-lined peak or a noble, snow-capped sentinel. This mountain was wrong. It was a jagged, twisted aberration of geology that clawed at the bruised-purple sky like the petrified fingers of a corpse trying to escape its grave. Its slopes were sharp, razored ridges and sudden, sheer drops, stripped of any semblance of mercy or scalable incline. A single, treacherous road clung to its side like a pale, infected scar, half-buried beneath shifting ice and ancient, weathered stone.
The moon hung low and swollen, a jaundiced eye casting a sickly, phosphorescent pallor across the broken landscape. It illuminated no beauty; it only revealed the scale of the desolation.
Then the wind came. It didn't blow—it howled. A sustained, deafening shriek that carried not just cold, but a psychic weight of despair. It was the sound of the mountain itself, screaming a warning that had gone unheeded for millennia.
Before he could even process the scene, the sky betrayed him.
The moon fell.
Not in a slow, celestial descent. It plummeted beyond the sharp horizon as though weighted by chains and dragged down by unseen, impatient hands. In its wake, the sun—a furious, molten coal—erupted in the west. It tore across the heavens in a violent, impossible arc, painting the sky in streaks of bloody orange and bruised purple before vanishing, swallowed by the east. Snow, already settled on the ground, shuddered and leapt upward, reversing its fall in a million glittering particles, stitching itself back into the sagging, leaden clouds above.
Time was moving backward.
The boy's breath hitched in a throat he didn't yet physically possess. A cold deeper than the mountain's chill seized his spirit.
"No," he whispered into the unraveling cosmos. "No—not this. Not this again?"
Centuries unraveled in seconds, a dizzying, nauseating spectacle. The road emerged from beneath grinding glaciers, ancient paving stones slick with sudden meltwater. Bones—human, splintered, clearly gnawed—appeared in gruesome piles, then vanished, replaced by the frantic, fading footprints of those who had made them. Rusted chains materialized from the ether, links groaning with phantom weight, then dissolved into the echoes of suffering they represented.
A caravan resolved from the chaos, moving backward up the mountain. Dozens of figures, linked and stumbling. Slaves.
Time stuttered. Slowed. Crystallized.
Then, with a final, psychic slam, it crashed forward into its proper, terrible flow.
[Aspirant.]
The voice was colder than the void between stars, deeper than the mountain's roots. It held no warmth, no amusement, no personality. It was the sound of absolute, indifferent law.
[Prepare for your First Nightmare.]
Pain was his rebirth.
It came not as a wave, but as a sudden, total immersion. He gasped, a raw, animal sound torn from his lungs as sensation—too much sensation—flooded a body that now felt terrifyingly real and devastatingly fragile. The cold didn't just surround him; it bit into his exposed skin with thousands of needle-teeth, seeking marrow. His feet, bare and torn, screamed in agony with every shift on the frozen, jagged stone of the road. It felt like walking on ground glass and shattered bone.
A heavy, rhythmic clanking and a sharp, metallic pull at his wrists joined the symphony of pain. He looked down. Thick, crude iron shackles encircled his wrists, the metal so cold it burned. The edges had bitten into his flesh, leaving raw, weeping sores that had frozen and stuck to the iron in places. A single, heavy chain linked his cuffs to the man ahead and the man behind. Every stumble, every tug sent bolts of lightning up his forearms.
"…Fuck," he breathed, the word a ghost of steam in the murderous air.
Gritting his teeth, he raised his head, forcing his eyes to focus against the wind-driven ice.
The chain stretched forward into the gloom, a serpentine line of misery winding up the impossible switchbacks of the mountain road. Perhaps fifty slaves were interspersed along its length—men with hollow cheeks and dead eyes, women shuffling with a mechanical hopelessness, children so numbed by cold and fear they made no sound. They moved not with purpose, but with the grim inertia of those for whom stopping meant being cut loose and left to die.
To his right: a sheer, unforgiving cliff face of black rock, rising vertiginously out of sight.
To his left: nothing. An absolute, void-like drop that swallowed the howling wind itself, offering no bottom, no echo, only a silent, hungry maw.
The wind battered them with physical fists, trying to peel them from the mountain's side.
"What kind of merciless start is this…?" he muttered through chattering teeth, his mind racing even as his body faltered. This was beyond a hard trial. This was a grinder. He recalled the cosmic being's words: trials, not executions. This felt like an execution meticulously designed to look like a trial.
Ahead, a broad-backed man with shoulders torn open by the chain links plodded forward, dried blood staining his threadbare tunic like a second skin. Behind, a thin, twitchy man cursed in a guttural, unfamiliar tongue—a language the boy had never heard, yet whose meanings for pain, cold, and damnation he understood perfectly. An illusion of comprehension, granted by the Spell.
They're not real, he reminded himself, clinging to the thought like a lifeline. They're set dressing. Part of the test. The Spell didn't care about fairness or narrative cohesion. It cared about measurement. About judgment.
"Status," he whispered, a futile hope.
Nothing. No screen, no prompt, no comforting hum of a system. Only the wind and the chains.
"…Right," he breathed, the hope dying. "Payment comes later. If you survive the invoice."
A mounted soldier trotted past the line, the steel plates of his archaic armor crusted with frost. A long spear rested casually on his shoulder. His horse, a massive destrier, snorted plumes of steaming breath, its iron-shod hooves striking sparks from the stone with a confidence that mocked their shackled shuffle. The boy instantly lowered his gaze, making himself small, unremarkable. Here, weakness wasn't just a disadvantage—it was a provocation.
They walked.
Minutes blurred into a singular, enduring agony. Hours became a metric of suffering. The cold gnawed through his thin, ragged clothes and into his bones, a dull, persistent ache that competed with the sharper pains. His legs trembled with a growing weakness that had nothing to do with his previous life's training. His vision began to swim at the edges, darkening with a fatigue that was more spiritual than physical.
Then—
A new sound cut through the wind's scream.
Not the clank of chains or the shuffle of feet.
Something… wet. A thick, dragging slither. Something heavy crushing stone.
A scream erupted from up ahead—not of fear, but of pure, visceral horror. The caravan jolted to a halt, the chain snapping taut and yanking them all off-balance.
"What's happening? What is it?" the twitchy man behind him hissed, panic cracking his voice.
The boy lifted his head, ice-melt stinging his eyes.
It climbed up from the void.
Not from the road, or the cliff. From the absolute nothingness to their left. A shape of nightmare biology hauled itself onto the mountainside, black claws longer than a man's forearm sinking into solid stone as if it were soft clay. Its body was a monstrous amalgamation: the elongated, twisted torso of a decaying dragon, patchy mangy fur clinging to sections of rotting, weeping flesh. A crown of immense, asymmetrical antlers, bleached white and splintered, rose from a skull-like head stretched in agony. Where a mouth should have been, a vertical split like a pig's snout gaped open, revealing rows of jagged, mismatched teeth that dripped a viscous, black fluid.
Its limbs were all wrong—too many joints bending in impossible directions, ending in those devastating claws or cloven, burning hoof-like feet.
It carried an aura of profound negation. Where its claws touched, the stone blackened and crumbled into ash. Frost near it turned to a crawling, greenish rust that ate at the rock. The very air around it seemed to decay, thinning and smelling of open graves and spoiled meat.
The creature exhaled.
The wind flowing past it rotted, carrying a wave of nausea and weakness that washed over the slaves.
"MONSTER! BY THE SPELL, A MONSTER!" a slave further up screamed, the voice breaking into a sob.
The creature's head—a grotesque pendulum—snapped toward the sound with unnerving precision. In the sockets of its skull, two pinpricks of sickly, phlegmatic green light ignited.
It smiled, the vertical maw stretching wider.
The massacre was efficient, brutal, and over in less than a minute.
The creature moved not with mindless rage, but with a horrifying, tactical intelligence. It didn't just attack; it herded. A swipe of its tail shattered a section of the chain, sending a cluster of slaves stumbling toward the cliff edge. A blast of its corrosive breath turned a charging soldier into a dissolving statue of rust and putrescence. A horse screamed as its legs liquefied into black sludge, throwing its rider under a crushing, rotting foot.
Panic was its greatest ally. The line disintegrated into a scrambling, screaming mob.
The boy ran. Or tried to. The chain pulled him back. He fumbled with the frozen, blood-crusted shackles, his numb fingers slipping.
"NO—LET GO! RELEASE ME!" a slave ahead wailed, grabbing at him in blind terror.
A shadow fell over them. The boy looked up.
The creature's claw, longer than a sword, descended. It punched through his chest with a wet, crunching sound he felt more than heard.
Agony, white-hot and total, erupted. But worse than the pain was the sensation that followed—a swift, spreading unmaking. He looked down to see the wound around the impaling claw blackening, his flesh withering, curling away like paper in a fire, the corruption racing outward through his veins. The pain was eclipsed by a profound, soul-deep chill of dissolution.
His vision tunneled. The last thing he saw was the monster leaning its horrific head down, those green pinpricks regarding him with what could only be intellectual curiosity. Its breath was the stench of a thousand opened tombs.
It spoke, its voice a dry rasp like grinding stones in a deep well.
"You learn slowly."
Then—
Darkness.
He woke up screaming.
The sound was ripped from him, raw and terrified, before he even understood why. Cold stone. The bite of the chains. The howl of the wind. The dizzying view of the cliff and the void.
The mountain. The caravan. The same bend in the road ahead.
He gasped, a hand flying to his chest, clawing at the rough fabric of his slave tunic.
No wound. No rot. Heart hammering against his ribs, whole and terrified.
"…No," he whispered, the denial weak in the vastness. "No, no, no—"
The chain ahead jerked. The broad-backed man resumed his plodding walk. The same faint, echoed screams of those further up the line—screams he now knew the origin of—drifted back on the wind.
His breath came in short, shallow pants, fogging in the air. A cold sweat broke out on his skin, worse than the ambient chill.
"…It reset."
Understanding didn't dawn; it slammed into him, a physical weight in his gut. This wasn't a "retry." There was no checkpoint, no second chance offered kindly. This was a cage. A time loop. A prison of recurring agony where the jailer was a creature that seemed to…
A new, more terrifying understanding followed.
The creature knew.
He knew it the moment, in that very same loop, when the wet, slithering sound came earlier. The monster didn't emerge to wreak general havoc. This time, it pulled itself onto the path just ahead, its ghastly head turning, those green eyes scanning… and locking directly onto him. It killed him faster, almost impatiently. Death two: a backhanded swipe that ripped his throat out before he could blink.
Death three: a gale of its rotten breath pushed him silently over the cliff edge into the consuming void.
Death four: it collapsed a section of the cliff face on top of him, burying him in crushing, decaying stone.
Death five: a glancing claw strike that didn't kill immediately, but introduced a festering infection that had him dying over hours in shuddering, feverish agony, begging the unmoved soldiers for a mercy kill.
The monster learned. It adapted its approach based on his actions. It taunted him.
"You're thinking now," it rasped during one death, after he'd tried to hide behind a rock. It found him anyway, picking him up and methodically snapping his spine over its knee. "Good."
He stopped counting after ten. The numbers became meaningless. After twenty, pain itself began to lose its sharpest edges, becoming a dreadful, familiar constant. Fear, that initial electric jolt, curdled into something thicker, more corrosive: a grinding, soul-crushing desperation.
He tried everything his fraying mind could conjure.
Running the moment the loop reset, screaming warnings that no one heeded. Hiding in shallow crevices the creature seemed to smell out. Trying to attack the soldiers to steal a weapon, only to be cut down by their spears for his trouble. Using a sharp stone to saw at the chain links for hours, only to have the monster arrive the moment he was almost free.
Nothing worked. The creature was a constant. It always found him. Sometimes it killed him immediately, a lesson in despair. Sometimes it let him run, let him think he'd found a new path, let hope blossom for a few precious minutes before descending with leisurely cruelty.
Each death chipped away not just at his resolve, but at his sanity. His thoughts grew jagged, disconnected. He found himself laughing, a high, cracked sound, at the sheer absurdity of being disemboweled for the twelfth time. By the thirtieth death, he was screaming incoherent insults at the sky, at the mountain, at the indifferent moon. By the fortieth, he fell silent, his eyes taking on the same hollow emptiness as the illusory slaves around him.
By the fiftieth—
Amidst the numb horror, a sliver of his analytical mind, hardened by years of street survival and cosmic bargaining, forced its way to the surface. He noticed patterns not in the monster's attacks, but in its behavior.
It always emerged from the void, never the cliff wall. Its first appearance in any loop was a testing probe, a gauging of reactions. It always spoke to him after killing him, a single line of cryptic commentary.
"…You're not just hunting," he whispered during one loop, his voice hoarse from disuse and screamed lungs. He stood still, ignoring the panicking slaves, watching the creature methodically herd the others. "You're judging. You're part of the test."
The creature, in the act of corroding a soldier into a screaming puddle, paused. Its skull-like head rotated a full hundred and eighty degrees to peer at him. The vertical maw stretched into a grotesque, knowing smile that promised exquisite pain.
The next death was the worst yet. It involved the slow, meticulous peeling of skin, not with claws, but with the caustic drip of its saliva, a lesson in attention.
When he woke again, shuddering violently on the cold stone, he didn't scream. He didn't move. He simply stared up at the bruised sky, at the malevolent moon, at the hateful silhouette of the mountain.
His hands shook, but not from cold.
"Okay," he whispered, the word raw but deliberate. "Okay… think. Really think."
Brute force was a fantasy. Running was a hamster's wheel. Direct confrontation was a guaranteed, painful exit.
But this was a Nightmare. A trial designed by the Spell. Not a meaningless slaughterhouse. A test had parameters. A puzzle had a solution.
Which meant—
"There's a rule," he muttered to the wind. "A weakness. A condition for victory. There's always a rule."
He laughed then, a soft, cracked sound that held the ghost of his old, weary defiance.
"Time loop. Intelligent, adaptive enemy. Fixed environment. Obvious kill zone…"
His mind, though scarred by countless deaths, began to race, piecing together the fragments of fifty horrors.
The chains. Their purpose was to restrict, to bind the test-taker to the fate of the group.
The cliff. An instant-fail condition.
The rot. The monster's primary weapon, representing corruption, decay, the negation of effort.
The wind. A constant environmental pressure, a distraction, a carrier of sound… and scent?
The slaves. Illusions, but part of the scenario's "rules."
The soldiers. A false hope, a lesson that conventional power within the Nightmare was useless.
The monster's own words echoed in the vault of his skull: You learn slowly.
"…So I need to learn faster," he breathed. "Not how to fight it. How to pass it."
The caravan, oblivious to his internal epiphany, crested a familiar, treacherous bend. The void yawned beside them, hungrier than ever. The wind screamed its eternal warning.
And somewhere in that absolute blackness below, something waited. Something that was, he now understood, an integral part of the mountain's memory.
The boy closed his eyes, shutting out the terrifying vista. For the first time since being thrust into this endless hell, a smile touched his lips—not of joy, but of grim recognition. The smile of a man who has finally seen the shape of the trap he's in.
"Next loop," he whispered, a vow to the uncaring stone, "I try something new. I stop playing the slave."
The mountain did not answer.
But in the depths of its ancient, petrified memory, it remembered his smile. And the creature in the void felt the first, faint tremor of a variable changing.