Sunny dreamt of a mountain.
Jagged and solitary, it rose above the lesser peaks of its chain like a blade driven into the earth. A radiant moon washed its slopes in pale light, and an old road clung to the rock face, half-buried under snow. On one side, a sheer cliff. On the other, an abyss so deep that the darkness at the bottom seemed to have weight.
Time reversed. The moon dropped below the horizon, the sun streaked backward across the sky, and centuries unwound in seconds. Snow leapt from the ground and returned to the clouds. Bones appeared on the road and then vanished, and in their place a slave caravan materialized, chains rattling, moving backward down the mountain.
Time stopped. Then it resumed.
[Aspirant! Welcome to the Nightmare Spell. Prepare for your First Trial...]
The pain arrived all at once.
Bleeding feet on frozen stone. Shackled wrists rubbed raw by iron. Broken ribs grating against each other with every breath. A back scored by whip marks that wept through a threadbare tunic into the freezing air. Sunny's body was a catalog of injuries, each one competing for his attention with the desperate urgency of damage that had been accumulating for days.
He did not panic. He cataloged.
Feet: lacerations, moderate. Mobility compromised but functional. Wrists: abrasion and possible infection from prolonged contact with unclean metal. Pain significant but manageable. Ribs: at least two fractures on the left side, possibly three. Breathing restricted. Back: multiple lash wounds, partially scabbed, risk of reopening with exertion.
The assessment took him three seconds. In another three, he'd evaluated his surroundings.
A chain wound up the mountain road, and shackled to it at regular intervals were dozens of hollow-eyed people. Slaves. Ahead of Sunny, a broad-shouldered man with a bloodied back walked with the deliberate gait of someone conserving energy. Behind him, a smaller man with quick, desperate eyes cursed steadily under his breath in a language Sunny didn't know but somehow understood. Armed horsemen in ancient-style armor passed periodically, their faces carrying the particular blend of cruelty and boredom that belonged to people who had stopped seeing their charges as human.
Sunny had seen that expression before. It was the same one the older guards in Bastion's outer ring wore when they escorted prisoners to the lower cells.
He took stock of what the Spell had given him, which was nothing. No weapons. No tools. No freedom of movement. His hands were chained, his body was broken, and the only assets he possessed were a threadbare tunic and whatever was inside his own head.
The Spell had stripped him bare.
Sunny had expected something like this. Anvil had explained that the Nightmare calibrated its difficulty based on the individual, balancing disadvantageous circumstances against the potential rewards. An Aspirant with Sunny's training would be given a harsher starting position to compensate for his superior preparation. The Spell didn't create executions, but it didn't create easy victories either.
Still, the thoroughness of the disadvantage was impressive. He was a trained killer in the body of a malnourished slave, shackled to a chain gang on a frozen mountain with no visible path to freedom and a host of injuries that would limit his effectiveness in any confrontation. If the Spell's goal was to test whether his skills could function when every external support had been removed, it had designed the test well.
He checked his status. The process was instinctive; Anvil's tutors had explained how the Spell's interface worked, and Sunny had practiced summoning it hundreds of times during his years in Bastion, though the runes had never responded because the Spell had not yet claimed him. Now, when he focused, shimmering characters materialized in the air in front of him, visible only to his eyes.
Name: Sunless. True Name: — Rank: Aspirant. Soul Core: Dormant. Memories: — Echoes: — Attributes: [Fated], [Mark of Divinity], [Child of Shadows]. Aspect: [Temple Slave].
He read the Aspect description twice.
[Slave is a useless wretch with no skills or abilities worth a mention. A temple slave is just the same, except much rarer.]
In other circumstances, this might have been devastating. An Aspirant relying on a strong combat Aspect to survive the Nightmare would have been gutted by a result like this. But Sunny had never relied on the Spell for his combat ability. His skills were real, physical, earned through eight years of daily training. The Aspect was irrelevant to his immediate survival. What mattered was the Attributes, the terrain, and the chain around his wrists.
He dismissed the runes and studied the Attributes instead. [Fated] suggested that improbable events were drawn to his presence. [Mark of Divinity] implied some connection to a divine being. [Child of Shadows] was self-explanatory, or at least it would be once he understood what the Spell meant by "shadows."
None of them were immediately useful. All of them were worth remembering.
Sunny stumbled, pulled the chain, and the shifty-eyed man behind him exploded.
"Whore's bastard! Watch where you're going!"
The broad-shouldered man ahead chuckled without turning. "Why bother? The weakling will be dead by sunrise anyway. The mountain will kill him."
A pause. Then: "It'll kill you and me, too. Just a bit later. I really don't know what the Imperials are thinking, forcing us into this cold."
The shifty man gasped. "Speak for yourself, fool! I'm planning to survive!"
Sunny said nothing. He was listening, because the conversation contained information, and information was worth more than comfort. These people were not real. The old policeman in the waking world would have told him that, if Sunny hadn't already known. They were constructs of the Spell, characters in a story designed to test him.
But they didn't know that. They believed they were real, and they behaved accordingly, with all the unpredictability and emotional volatility of actual people. That made them useful, because useful people could be leveraged, and dangerous, because dangerous people could be provoked.
A third voice spoke from somewhere further back in the chain. This one was calm and measured.
"This mountain pass is usually much warmer this time of year. We just had really bad luck. Also, I would advise you against harming this boy."
"Why is that?"
"Haven't you seen the markings on his skin? He is not like us, who fell into slavery due to debts, crimes or misfortune. He was born a slave. A temple slave, to be precise. Not long ago, the Imperials destroyed the last temple of the Shadow God. I suspect that this is how the boy ended up here."
Sunny filed this information carefully. Temple slave. Shadow God. The Spell had given him a backstory, one that tied into his Aspect and his Attributes and, presumably, whatever trial awaited at the summit. The gentle-voiced man was the Spell's delivery mechanism for exposition, and the fact that he existed meant there was more to learn.
The broad-shouldered man grunted. "So what? Why should we be afraid of a half-forgotten, weakling god? He couldn't even save his own temples."
"The Empire is protected by the mighty War God. Of course they're not afraid to burn down a few temples. But we here are not protected by anything or anyone. Do you really want to risk angering a god?"
Silence.
A young soldier rode up on a white horse. He was handsome in the way that soldiers in the dramas Sunny had watched in the outskirts were handsome: clean-jawed, earnest, wearing his authority like borrowed clothing. His eyes swept the slaves with something that might have been concern.
"What is going on here?"
No one answered immediately. The gentle-voiced slave spoke: "It's nothing, sir. We are just all tired and cold. Especially our young friend over there. This journey is truly too hard for someone that young."
The soldier looked at Sunny with pity.
He let his shoulders drop a fraction further than they already were. He let the pain in his feet show on his face, which wasn't difficult because the pain was real. He became, in the space of a breath, exactly what the soldier expected to see: a frightened child too weak for the journey, too small for the chains, too broken to pose a threat.
The soldier sighed and extended a flask. "Bear with it a little more, child. We will stop for the night soon. For now, here, drink some water."
Sunny reached for it.
A whip cracked.
The pain was sudden and enormous, a line of fire across his back that split one of the existing whip marks open and sent a cascade of agony through his nervous system. He stumbled, pulled the chain, and the shifty man cursed again.
An older soldier stopped his horse behind them. The whip was his. He didn't look at the slaves. He looked at the younger soldier with undisguised contempt.
"What do you think you're doing?"
"I was just giving this boy some water."
"He'll receive water with the rest of them once we camp!"
"But—"
"Shut your mouth! These slaves are not your friends. Understood? They're not even people. Treat them like people and they'll begin imagining things."
The older soldier cracked his whip again for emphasis and rode past. The younger one watched him go, then lowered his head and replaced the flask on his belt without meeting Sunny's eyes.
Sunny watched both of them go.
The whip wound burned on his back. The cold bit at his skin. The chain pulled at his wrists with each step.
He thought: the older soldier is the real threat. The younger one is a potential asset. The gentle-voiced man behind me has information I need. The broad-shouldered man ahead of me has the physical strength to be useful if directed properly. The shifty man is unpredictable and should be watched.
He thought: there are bones on this road, which means other caravans have come this way and died. Something on this mountain kills people. The Spell wants me to face it. Everything between now and that confrontation is preparation.
He thought: I have no weapons, no Memories, no abilities. I have a broken body in chains on a frozen mountain surrounded by armed men who consider me property.
The Spell had taken everything Anvil gave him. That meant whatever it was testing, the answer had to come from Sunny himself.
The caravan moved on. The wind howled. The mountain waited above them, patient and vast, its summit hidden in clouds that looked like they were made of iron.
Sunny put one bleeding foot in front of the other and began to plan