He had probably gone to join the fight at the other side of the stone platform, where the sounds of battle still raged against the darkness.
The screen followed him for a moment — a lone figure with a clean sword running toward the glow of the fire and the shadow of the monster — and then returned to the three freed slaves.
"W-wait, he's going to fight THAT thing?!" Effie exclaimed, pointing at the screen. "Alone?! Is he insane?!"
"He is a soldier," Nephis said quietly. "It is his duty to stand between that creature and the people."
"Duty won't stop those claws!" Effie shot back.
"No," Nephis agreed, her expression unreadable. "It never does. He knows that too. He is going anyway."
Rain looked between them with wide eyes, then back at the screen, silently hoping the kind soldier — the one who had given her brother water, the one who had given her brother the key — would somehow survive.
The screen flickered and new images were shown.
The three slaves huddled near the great bonfire, feeding it broken planks from the shattered carriages. The battle at the far end of the platform was hidden from them by the fire's glare, but they could hear it — the clash of steel, the furious clicking of the monster, the shouts of the few soldiers still standing.
Shifty flinched at every sound. Scholar sat rigid, lips moving in silent calculation or prayer. Sunny simply watched the darkness with narrowed eyes, the length of chain still wrapped around his knuckles, saving his strength for the moment it would be needed.
Because it would be needed. Nights like this did not simply end. They had to be survived, minute by frozen minute.
"Look at him," Kai murmured with quiet admiration. "Everyone else is panicking or praying and he's just... conserving energy. Watching. Waiting."
"That's the street in him," Jet said, arms crossed. "You don't survive out there by burning yourself out on fear. Fear is expensive. He learned to budget it."
"i still can't believe he was a mundane through all of this," Effie muttered, shaking her head. "A MUNDANE. no aspect worth anything, no training, no soul core, nothing. Just chains and spite."
"Mostly spite," Jet said.
"The best foundation there is," The prince of nothing said with an approving nod.
Everyone chose to ignore him.
The screen flickered and new images were shown.
The sounds of battle grew thinner as the night dragged on. One by one, the voices of the soldiers fell silent, until only two remained — a hoarse, furious bellow that could only belong to the veteran, and the sharp, controlled shouts of the young soldier.
Then the veteran's voice cut off mid-roar.
And then there was only one.
Rain's hands flew to her mouth. "No..."
"The whip guy..." Effie whispered. Strangely, there was no satisfaction in her voice at all, only grief. "He... he was trying to save the slaves at the end. He was pulling them to the wall. He didn't have to do that."
"People are rarely only one thing," Cassie said softly.
"Then i hate this trial even more," Effie said, her voice thick. "It doesn't even let you enjoy hating people properly."
The screen flickered and new images were shown.
Through the shimmer of the fire, they could finally see it — the last duel of the night.
The young soldier stood alone against the Mountain King, and somehow, impossibly, he was still standing. He moved like flowing water, giving ground, circling, striking at the joints and the eyes, his blade finding the gaps in that arrow-proof hide that a dozen dead men had failed to find. The monster's five milky eyes tracked him with insect indifference, but its torn hide and severed smaller hand said the indifference was becoming expensive.
For a moment — one beautiful, impossible moment — it looked like a fair fight.
"He's winning?!" Kai leaned forward, eyes shining. "He's actually — a single Awakened soldier against a TYRANT — who IS this man?!"
"Someone who should have had songs written about him," Jet said quietly. She wasn't smiling. She had seen too many battlefields to be fooled by a beautiful minute. Her trained eyes were already reading the truth: the widening gap between his steps. The half-second his recoveries had started to cost. The arithmetic of exhaustion, closing in on its answer.
Nephis saw it too. Her hand had found Cassie's without either of them noticing.
"come on..." Rain whispered, gripping the edge of her seat. "come on, come on, you can do it—"
The screen flickered.
The claw caught him mid-turn.
The sword fell first, ringing against the frozen stone. Then the light of the bonfire seemed, for just a moment, to dim — as though the mountain itself had lowered its eyes.
Silence fell over the viewing hall like snow.
Effie sat down slowly. When she finally spoke, her voice cracked. "...He gave Sunny the key. He was in the middle of the worst night of anyone's life, fighting for his own survival, and he stopped. Turned around. And threw a slave his key." She scrubbed a hand across her face. "Who DOES that? Who just... does that?"
"A true soldier of humanity," Nephis said quietly.
From her, there was no higher praise, and everyone in the room knew it.
Kai's voice was hollow. "He deserved to make it out."
"Deserving has nothing to do with it," The prince of nothing said. For once there was no smile on his face at all. "The Spell does not reward the worthy. It harvests the willing. That man spent his life exactly as he wished to — protecting others. Do not weep for him. Envy him. Most people never get to choose what their life purchases."
"...that's the second nicest horrifying thing you've said today," Effie muttered wetly.
"i am on a streak."
Rain wasn't listening to any of them. She was crying quietly, and she didn't care who saw. Thank you, she thought at the screen, at the fallen figure the fire's light was already leaving behind. Thank you for the water. Thank you for the key. Thank you for looking at my brother and seeing a person.
Cassie sat very still, and the cold thought she had been running from all night finally caught her.
The Spell showed us his kindness on purpose. Nothing tonight is wasted — the despair, the courage, the death. It is all... teaching material. Her blind eyes widened slightly. A lesson. But for whom?
She already knew.
For Sunny.
Fate is building something out of him, piece by piece, loss by loss. And if fate has been shaping his path this carefully from the very beginning... then his being forgotten by all of us... that was never an accident either.
Her hand trembled in Nephis's grip. Nephis, mistaking the reason, squeezed back gently.
The screen flickered and new images were shown.
With the last soldier fallen, the Mountain King stood alone among the dead, and the night belonged to it completely.
The three slaves pressed themselves flat behind the shelter of a toppled carriage near the fire. There was nothing to do now but the hardest thing of all — nothing. No fighting, no running, no clever tricks. Just stillness, and silence, and listening to the wet sounds of the creature claiming its harvest, and praying to gods that clearly weren't watching that its five pale eyes would not turn their way.
Shifty had both hands clamped over his own mouth. Scholar had gone grey as the frost. And Sunny lay between them in the blood-soaked dark, forcing his breathing slow, forcing his body still, while every animal instinct he owned screamed at him to run.
The screen made them listen to all of it. The whole long night.
"i can't—" Kai turned away from the screen, then forced himself to turn back. "i can't imagine it. Lying there. Hearing that. For HOURS. Not moving. How do you not go insane?"
"You go somewhere else in your head," Jet said. Her voice was flat in the way voices go when they know something firsthand. "You find one thing to hold onto and you hold it until morning."
"and what do you think he held onto?" Effie asked quietly.
Nobody had an answer.
Rain wiped her eyes and lifted her chin. "Waking up," she said with quiet certainty. "He promised himself he'd wake up. My brother doesn't break promises."
The screen flickered and new images were shown.
Dawn came the way it does after such nights — slowly, and then all at once.
Grey light crept across a field of frost and ruin. The great bonfire had burned down to sullen embers. And the Mountain King was gone — vanished into the depths below the platform with its harvest, leaving behind only silence, and cold, and the dead.
Then, from beneath the shelter of the broken carriage, a blood-caked figure stirred. Pushed himself up on shaking arms. And sat up into the pale morning like something the mountain had tried its very best to digest, and failed.
Sunny was alive.
The hall EXPLODED.
"YEEEES!" Effie leapt to her feet, punching the air with both fists. "HE MADE IT! THE WHOLE NIGHT! THAT'S MY BOY! You beautiful, paranoid little cockroach, YES!!"
"cockroach?!" Rain rounded on her, scandalized even through her tears.
"IT'S A COMPLIMENT! Cockroaches survive EVERYTHING! It's the highest honor i can bestow!"
"then call ME a cockroach too!"
"You haven't EARNED it yet, tiny cockroach-in-training!"
"He survived," Kai breathed, laughing shakily, slumping back in his seat. "A Tyrant-class Nightmare Creature, larvae, the cold, the whole night — as a mundane. As a MUNDANE."
"Sheer will," Nephis said softly. There was open awe in her voice now, and she made no effort to hide it. "No Aspect. No Flaw to blame, no blessing to thank. Everything he did tonight, he did with nothing but his mind and his hands." She paused. "i have known Masters who could not have survived that night."
is he... similar to me? she wondered again, the thought returning like a tide. Fighting the whole world alone, with nothing... no. Not similar. Her eyes tracked the small, bloodied figure on the screen. i had my hatred to keep me warm. What did he have?
Jet let out a long breath and muttered something about needing a very strong drink.
The screen flickered and new images were shown.
Shifty crawled out from under the carriage, saw the daylight, and burst into hysterical, sobbing laughter. Scholar emerged next and immediately began doing what scholars do — counting the survivors, with a scholar's grim thoroughness.
The count did not take long. Three.
Then Sunny rose on unsteady legs, and walked, limping, across the frozen killing field — to the place where the young soldier lay.
The hall went still again.
They watched him stand over the body for a long moment. Watched his jaw work, his fists open and close, all his usual sharpness struggling against something that had no sharp answer. Then he knelt, and with two fingers, gently closed the soldier's eyes.
And picked up the fallen sword.
"He's... taking it?" Rain asked uncertainly, looking around the room, not sure how she was supposed to feel about her brother looting the man who saved him.
"He is," Nephis said. "As he should."
"but—"
"A sword buried in the snow protects no one," Nephis continued, her eyes never leaving the screen. "In your brother's hands, it will finish what its master began. There is no greater honor for a soldier's blade than to keep fighting."
On the screen, Sunny's lips moved — something quiet, meant for no one living. The screen, merciful for once, let the words stay between him and the dead.
"i bet it was a promise," Effie said thickly. "Something stupid and sincere that he'd rather die than say out loud."
"obviously," said Jet.
"He will keep it," The prince of nothing said with total certainty, like a man reading from a book he had already finished. "He keeps everything, my friend. Grudges. Debts. Promises. Sunless never lets anything go." A pause, and then, softer: "it is his greatest strength. it will also be his greatest wound. the two are always the same thing, in the end."
Nobody argued. Nobody even glared at him this time.
Rain looked at the screen — at her brother standing in the grey dawn with a dead hero's sword in his hand and a long, dark road winding down toward a distant, silent city — and felt pride and grief tangled so tightly in her chest she could no longer tell them apart.
you survived the mountain, brother, she thought fiercely. now survive whatever comes next. and then come home. i'll be waiting. i'll ALWAYS be waiting.
...even if the whole world forgets you again. i won't. never again.
Cassie alone did not celebrate. She sat motionless amid the joy and relief, listening to the cold whisper beneath it that only she could hear.
the mountain was never the trial, fate seemed to murmur, satisfied. the mountain was only the introduction.
The screen flickered.
New images began to form.