The first thing to fall from the sky was ice.
Sunny saw it before anyone else because he'd been watching the slope. Chunks of rock and shards of ice the size of a man's torso broke free from somewhere above the camp and came screaming down through the darkness, trailing dust and smaller debris.
He was already moving when the first piece hit the ground.
One measured step back. The ice shattered where he'd been standing a half-second earlier, spraying shards across the stone. Around him, slaves lurched and screamed, tangling themselves in the chain as they tried to flee in every direction at once. The panic rippled through the column like a wave, each falling body pulling two or three others down with it.
Sunny stayed upright. The chain tugged at his wrists as the slaves on either side of him thrashed, but he'd braced his weight and angled his body to absorb the lateral pull without losing balance. A basic stabilization technique. His instructors would have been disappointed if he'd fallen.
"On your feet, fools! Get to the wall!"
The older soldier, the one with the whip, was shouting from somewhere near the bonfire. His voice carried the particular quality of command that belonged to men who had survived enough violence to expect more of it at any moment.
Nobody reached the wall.
Something massive hit the stone platform between the caravan and the mountain face, sending a tremor through the ground that Sunny felt in his teeth. For a moment it looked like a lump of dirty snow, roughly spherical and as tall as a mounted horseman. Then it unfurled.
Two stumpy legs. A hunched, emaciated torso. Four arms, the upper pair disproportionately long and multijointed, ending in bone claws the length of short swords. The lower pair was shorter, ending in fingers that looked almost human. Its fur was yellowish-grey and thick, matted with ice and filth. Five milky white eyes regarded the camp with the flat indifference of a predator surveying prey that couldn't run.
Sunny cataloged it in two seconds. Four meters tall. Mass roughly eight to ten times a human adult. Bone claws on the upper limbs, manipulator hands on the lower. Fur thick enough to function as natural armor. Five eyes suggested wide-angle vision with limited depth perception. The jaw was half-open, revealing rows of teeth designed for shearing rather than grinding, which meant it ate meat, which meant it ate people, which meant the bones in the time-reversal vision belonged to previous caravans that had camped in exactly this spot.
What unsettled him were the shapes moving under the creature's skin. Wormlike, constant, pressing against the fur from inside as though the body contained things that wanted out.
Anvil's lessons on Nightmare Creature classifications had been thorough. Beasts were mindless. Monsters had cunning. Demons were intelligent. Devils were strategic. Tyrants were above all of them, capable of creating lesser versions of themselves.
The things moving under the creature's skin looked very much like lesser versions trying to get out.
A Tyrant. In a First Nightmare.
Sunny had never heard of anything above a Devil appearing in a First Nightmare, and even Devils were vanishingly rare. A Tyrant was an impossibility, the kind of improbable event that shouldn't happen.
Unless you had an Attribute that attracted the improbable.
The creature moved.
It was faster than something that size should have been. One of the upper arms swept in a horizontal arc that covered the space between it and the nearest cluster of slaves, and the bone claws cut through the broad-shouldered man like he was made of wet paper. Blood sprayed across the stone in a wide fan, hot and dark, and the impact sent the severed body tumbling into Sunny.
He went down. The corpse landed on top of him, heavy and wet, and the chain wrenched his wrists as slaves on both sides scrambled away. For a moment he was blind, pinned under dead weight, his broken ribs screaming as the body compressed his chest.
He went still and listened.
The creature's footsteps shook the ground in a pattern that told him it was moving away, toward the center of the camp where the densest cluster of slaves was tangled in the chain. Screams erupted from that direction, layered over the wet sounds of claws finding flesh. The soldiers were shouting, and Sunny heard at least two horses screaming, which meant the creature was killing mounts as well as people.
He had seconds before it circled back.
He braced his palms against the broad-shouldered man's chest and pushed. The body was enormously heavy, slippery with blood, and Sunny's arms were shaking from the cold and the damage to his wrists. He pushed harder, redirecting the force through his shoulders the way his instructors had taught him for escaping ground pins, and the corpse shifted, rolled, and fell sideways.
Then he felt something wriggle under the dead man's skin.
The movement was unmistakable. Something inside the body was changing, rearranging, reshaping the flesh from within. The broad-shouldered man's fingers were lengthening, the nails thickening into points. Bone growths pierced the skin along the spine, extending like spikes. The face cracked down the center, splitting open to reveal a secondary mouth crowded with needle-thin fangs.
The thing was making offspring from the dead. That confirmed the classification. Only Tyrants and above could create lesser versions of themselves, and the broad-shouldered man's corpse was becoming one.
Sunny scrambled backward, the chain snapping taut at a meter and a half. On the other side of the transforming corpse, the shifty slave stared with his jaw slack and his eyes vacant, the expression of a man whose mind had decided that what he was seeing couldn't be real and had therefore stopped processing it entirely.
"Move away from it!" Sunny shouted.
The shifty slave tried and fell. The chain was twisted between the three of them, pinned under the corpse's weight.
The scholarly slave was a few steps behind, pale as death, pointing at the shackles with a trembling hand. "Th-the chain!"
The Larva was almost finished transforming. Its new body was smaller than the parent creature but built along the same lines: hunched torso, clawed hands, too many teeth. Its movements were sluggish and uncoordinated, the way a newborn animal's are when it hasn't yet figured out how its limbs work. That sluggishness was a window, and the window was closing.
Sunny had trained for situations like this. Not this specific situation, because no training could have anticipated being chained to a metamorphosing corpse on a frozen mountain, but the underlying problem was one Anvil had drilled into him a thousand times: an armed opponent at close range with restricted mobility. The solution was always the same. Use whatever was available. Use the environment. Use the enemy's limitations against them.
The chain was the weapon.
Sunny lunged forward. The Larva's arm shot out, claws extended, and Sunny sidestepped with a movement that was precise and practiced and hard to predict for anyone who wasn't specifically trained to recognize combat technique.
He threw the length of chain over the Larva's shoulders and pulled, pinning its upper arms against its body. Before the creature could react through its post-transformation disorientation, Sunny wrapped the chain around it twice more, ducking under a jaw that snapped at his face with enough force to take his head off.
"You two!" he shouted at the slaves behind him. "Pull on the chain! Now!"
They stared.
"Pull!"
The shifty slave and the scholar grabbed the chain from opposite sides and hauled backward. The links tightened around the Larva's torso, catching on the bone spikes and holding. The creature bucked and strained, its muscles bulging with a strength that made the chain creak and groan.
Sunny didn't wait to see if the chain would hold. He threw his shackled hands over the creature's head, caught its neck in the short connecting chain between his wrists, and stepped behind it in a single fluid motion, pressing his back against the Larva's spine. He pulled down with his full body weight, using his back as a lever and gravity as an ally.
It was a strangling technique. His instructors had taught him six variations for humanoid targets. This was a crude adaptation, performed with iron chain instead of hands, on a target that was not human and possessed a neck that was thicker and more muscular than anything the technique had been designed for.
The Larva thrashed. Bone spikes along its spine scraped against Sunny's back, opening new wounds on top of the whip marks. His wrists felt like they were going to shatter. His ribs ground against each other with every heave of the creature's body.
He didn't let go.
The seconds stretched. His vision was greying at the edges, his arms trembling, his grip maintained by will more than strength. The Larva's struggles weakened in increments so small that each one could have been wishful thinking.
Then the body went limp.
[You have slain a dormant beast, Mountain King's Larva.]
Sunny collapsed.
He lay on the cold stone with his arms still wrapped around the dead creature's neck, breathing in short, shallow gasps that his broken ribs punished with spikes of pain. Blood from the Larva's spine wounds soaked through his tunic and mixed with his own. The chain was tangled around both of them in a knot that would take minutes to unravel.
The screaming hadn't stopped. The parent creature was still rampaging somewhere in the camp, and judging by the frequency of the screams, the caravan's numbers were dropping fast.
But Sunny was alive.
He untangled himself from the chain with hands that wouldn't stop shaking and pulled himself upright. The shifty slave was on his knees, trembling, staring at the dead Larva with an expression that hovered between horror and disbelief. The scholar was leaning against a rock, his face grey, his breathing rapid.
They were both looking at Sunny.
Sunny met the scholar's eyes and saw the question forming there, the recognition that something about this boy didn't add up. He held the man's gaze with the blank, shellshocked expression of a terrified slave who had just survived on pure adrenaline, and after a moment the scholar looked away.
The Mountain King was still alive. The caravan was being destroyed. And Sunny was still chained to a line of people who were dying around him.
He needed to get free, and he needed to survive. Everything else could come after.
The Spell created trials. Not executions.
At least, that was what Anvil had told him.