The caravan dragged itself upward.
Sunny counted the slaves as they walked. Forty-seven at the start, linked to a central chain at intervals of roughly two meters, with twelve mounted soldiers providing escort. The road was narrow enough that the column stretched single-file for most of the ascent, which meant the guards couldn't observe every section simultaneously. There were gaps in their sightlines, brief windows where a slave in the middle of the column could act without being seen.
Sunny filed this information alongside everything else. He wasn't ready to act yet, because acting required a plan, and a plan required more data than he currently possessed. He didn't know what was at the top of the mountain. He didn't know why the caravan was going there. He didn't know what had left the bones he'd seen in the time-reversal vision, or when whatever had left them would arrive.
What he did know was that the cold was killing people.
The slaves around him were weakening. Some stumbled every few steps, their feet too damaged or their strength too depleted to maintain the pace. Twice, Sunny watched a slave fall and fail to get up, and both times the soldiers unchained the fallen body and threw it off the road without breaking stride. The abyss swallowed them in silence.
He watched the bodies fall and noted the soldiers' procedure. Two men would dismount, one to work the shackle lock and one to stand guard. The lock took approximately eight seconds to open. During those eight seconds, both soldiers had their hands occupied and their attention focused downward.
Eight seconds was a long time.
Not yet. The chain was still on his wrists, and the soldiers still outnumbered the slaves in any metric that mattered: weapons, strength, mobility, morale. An escape attempt at this stage would end with Sunny dead or worse. Patience was the correct response. Patience, and observation.
The air, at least, was extraordinary. Sunny had spent eight years breathing the Dream Realm's atmosphere inside Bastion's walls, so clean air was not a novelty for him the way it would have been for someone coming directly from the outskirts. But the mountain air was different from Bastion's. It was thinner, sharper, and cold enough to feel like it had edges. Each breath cut into his lungs with a clarity that was simultaneously painful and vivid, as though the mountain was determined to make him feel every moment of his survival.
He summoned his status runes again and studied the Attributes more carefully than he had during the initial check.
[Fated] Attribute Description: "The strings of fate wrap tightly around you. Unlikely events, both good and bad, are drawn by your presence. There are those who are blessed, and there are those who are cursed... but rarely both."
[Mark of Divinity] Attribute Description: "You bear a faint scent of divinity, as though someone briefly touched by it once, a long time ago."
[Child of Shadows] Attribute Description: "Shadows recognize you as one of their own."
Anvil's tutors had covered Attributes extensively during Sunny's education. They were passive traits that reflected innate qualities or Aspect-derived affinities, and while they rarely provided direct combat power, they could dramatically alter the conditions of survival in ways that weren't immediately obvious.
[Fated] was the most concerning. It didn't guarantee good luck or bad luck. It guaranteed improbable events, which meant volatility, and volatility was the enemy of planning. Sunny's entire operational framework depended on predictability: predicting enemy behavior, predicting environmental conditions, predicting the consequences of his own actions. An Attribute that attracted the improbable was an Attribute that undermined the foundations of everything Anvil had taught him.
He suspected it was also the reason he'd received the Temple Slave Aspect. The Spell had given him one of the rarest, most useless Aspects in its repertoire, which was exactly the kind of improbable outcome [Fated] would produce. Whether the rarity would eventually prove to be a hidden asset or simply a cruel joke remained to be seen.
[Mark of Divinity] was straightforward in theory. Anvil's texts had mentioned divine-adjacent Attributes in the context of sacred sites and sorcery enhancement. Neither was relevant to Sunny's immediate situation, but the connection to divinity intersected interestingly with his Aspect's backstory as a temple slave of the Shadow God. There might be something to exploit later.
[Child of Shadows] was the one that interested him most, and when the sun dropped behind the mountain and darkness crept across the slope, he understood why. His vision didn't dim. The shadows that swallowed the other slaves' sight were transparent to him, as though he were looking through tinted glass rather than standing in darkness. He could see the road, the rocks, the faces of the people chained around him, all rendered in a cool, colorless clarity that was eerily similar to the way the enchanted lanterns in Bastion's east wing had illuminated his room.
He could see in the dark.
For the first time since entering the Nightmare, Sunny felt something that wasn't tactical calculation or cold assessment. It was a small, private satisfaction, the kind a craftsman might feel when a tool proves sharper than expected. Night vision wasn't flashy. It wasn't a combat Aspect or a sorcery Attribute. But for someone whose training had been built around moving unseen and striking from positions of concealment, the ability to operate in total darkness while everyone around him was blind was worth more than any weapon the Spell could have given him.
"Stop the caravan! Prepare to camp!"
The column ground to a halt on a section of road where the path widened into a small clearing, partially sheltered from the wind by a mass of protruding rock. The slaves collapsed where they stood, shivering and spent. Soldiers dismounted and began herding them into a tight circle, forcing them to share body heat, and a large bonfire was lit in the center of the camp.
The stronger slaves pushed toward the fire. The weaker ones were forced to the outer edge of the circle, backs to the wind. The chain made movement difficult, which meant that proximity to warmth was determined largely by starting position and physical strength. The broad-shouldered man who had been walking ahead of Sunny spent several minutes trying to work his way closer to the flames and ended up roughly where he'd started.
"Damn Imperials!" he hissed.
Sunny stayed where the chain put him and didn't fight for a better position. Warmth would have been welcome, but drawing attention would not, and the outer edge of the circle had an advantage the stronger slaves hadn't considered: it was closer to the darkness, and the darkness was where Sunny could see and they couldn't.
The soldiers distributed water and food. A few sips of icy water and a small piece of bread so hard and moldy that chewing it felt like an act of faith. Sunny ate the entire thing, because his body needed fuel regardless of what that fuel tasted like. Eight years of Bastion's measured nutrition had taught him that eating was a mechanical process, not an aesthetic one.
The shifty slave who'd been cursing behind him all day looked at his bread with anguish.
"By all the gods, they used to feed me better even in the dungeons!"
He spat on the ground.
"And most of us innocent men in the dungeon were there waiting to visit the gallows, too!"
A scattering of bright red berries grew from the snow where the paved road ended and the rocks began. They were vivid against the white, almost unnaturally so, and the shifty slave's eyes lit up as he began crawling toward them.
Sunny recognized them Bloodbane. He'd studied them in the poison treatise Anvil had given him during his second month in Bastion, filed alongside countless other toxic substances under the heading of naturally occurring Dream Realm flora. The berries grew where human blood had been spilled, concentrated their toxins in the seeds, and could kill a grown man in quantities as small as three or four.
"I would advise against eating those, friend."
The gentle-voiced slave spoke from further back in the chain. Sunny turned and saw him clearly for the first time: a tall man in his forties, lean and dignified, with the bearing of a scholar. How someone like him had ended up in a slave caravan was unclear, but the Spell populated its Nightmares with constructs that served narrative functions, and this man's function was obviously exposition. He knew things, and the Spell wanted Sunny to hear them.
"You and your advice again! What?! Why?!"
"These berries are called Bloodbane. They grow in the places where human blood was spilled. That's why there's always a lot of them along the slave trade routes."
"So what?"
The scholar sighed. "Bloodbane is poisonous. A few berries might be enough to kill an adult man."
"Curses!"
The shifty slave flinched back and glared at the scholar.
Sunny was no longer listening.
Because while the others argued about berries, he had been surveying the camp from the outer edge of the circle, using his night vision to study the terrain beyond the firelight. The road, the rocks, the shape of the clearing. The wind pattern. The sightlines.
And he had recognized the site.
This was the place from his vision at the start of the Nightmare, the place where time had rewound and shown him bones buried under snow. The bones of these slaves. The bones of the very people sitting around this fire, arguing about bread and berries, not knowing that something was coming for them from somewhere on this mountain.
Sunny scanned the darkness above the camp. The slope rose steeply beyond the clearing, broken by outcroppings of jagged rock that could conceal anything. The soldiers had posted sentries on the road in both directions, but none of them were watching the slope itself, because the slope was too steep for a human to descend safely.
Humans weren't what Sunny was worried about.
He shifted his weight, testing the slack in his chain. About a meter and a half of free movement in any direction. Enough to dodge, if he knew which direction to dodge in. Not enough to run.
He thought about the eight seconds it took to open a shackle lock. He thought about the soldiers' procedure for unchaining fallen slaves. He thought about the fact that his hands were bound but his legs were not, and that the chain connecting his shackles to the central line was iron, not steel, and iron was brittle in extreme cold.
Then, from somewhere above the camp, a thundering noise split the silence of the mountain.
And something massive came crashing from the sky