Ah, this fucking sucks.
The thought crystallized in Lucian's mind as his numb feet trudged through the endless white. Where were they even going? He'd been trying—left and right, up and down, every angle his frozen brain could manage—to find what he could do to finish this First Trial. But he couldn't find anything.
It wasn't like he was someone from a rich family who knew about this curse and what it meant. He wasn't some noble's son with tutors who'd explained the Underworld's rules. He was just a normal nineteen-year-old with no parents, no education, no advantages of any kind.
Whatever happened next, he had to figure it out himself. Solve this situation with his own hands—hands that were currently turning blue from cold and bleeding where the manacles bit into flesh.
It was already freezing. And to top it off, the snow was getting heavier.
Fat white flakes drifted down from the gray sky, settling on his shoulders, his hair, his eyelashes. They melted against his skin and refroze, creating a layer of ice that made every movement painful. He didn't know where he was. Didn't know where they were going. Didn't know anything except that everywhere he looked was snow—white, plain, endless snow falling from a sky that seemed determined to bury them all.
As he was thinking hard, desperately searching for something he could do, some way he could escape this frozen hell—
Screaming.
Suddenly, from somewhere at the front of the column, he heard it. Crying. Agonizing sounds. Not one voice but many, dozens of people wailing in terror. The sound carried across the wasteland, distorted by wind and snow but unmistakably human. Unmistakably afraid.
The black-armored guard—the same one who'd beaten a child younger than Lucian to death—heard it too. His helmet turned toward the noise, and his voice boomed across the column.
"Fuck! Who wants to be on their deathbed now, HA?" The words dripped with irritation rather than concern. "Which of you pigs dares to cause a ruckus this time?"
He shouted toward the front, his voice echoing off nothing, swallowed by the snow.
"Guards! Check the front!"
He sat atop his horse, waiting. The animal stamped nervously, its breath creating clouds of mist in the freezing air.
A moment passed.
No reply came from the front.
Another moment.
Still nothing.
The guard's face was covered by some kind of black helmet—full coverage, no visor, just a dark metal shell that revealed nothing. It was impossible to tell what expression he was making beneath that armor. But Lucian knew. He could feel it in the sudden tension that rippled through the column, in the way the other guards shifted uneasily on their horses.
Something was wrong at the front row.
Something was happening.
Maybe it's some kind of revolt from the slaves, Lucian thought, his mind grasping for explanations. Maybe they finally fought back. Who knows?
But he didn't know anything for certain. His hands, legs, and neck were still cuffed by cold chains. He was just another piece of cargo, blind to whatever was unfolding ahead.
The guard moved his hand to the rope tied to his horse's bridle, pressed his legs against the horse's stomach. The animal responded immediately—rearing up with a sharp whinny, its front legs lifting off the snow-covered ground before it surged forward toward the front of the column.
For one strange moment, the sight was beautiful.
White snow falling in gentle curtains. A rider in full black armor galloping through it, cape streaming behind him, horse's hooves kicking up powder that sparkled in the dim light. It looked majestic—like something from the stories of knights and heroes that Lucian had heard as a child, back when he still believed the world contained such things.
But this man wasn't a knight. He wasn't righteous. He wasn't a hero.
He was just a vile creature who'd killed a child for fun.
The beauty was a lie, like everything else.
As Lucian watched the guard ride away, his eyes caught something.
A glint. Something shining had fallen to the ground when the guard moved, dislodged from his belt or saddle by the horse's sudden movement. It lay in the snow maybe ten feet from where Lucian stood, half-buried, catching what little light filtered through the gray sky.
Lucian was near it. Closer than anyone else in the column.
He moved. Hardly. Slowly. Each step was agony—his frozen feet screaming protest, the chains connecting him to other slaves pulling taut, limiting his range. But he pushed toward the shining object, dragging the people connected to him along whether they wanted to move or not.
As he reached down toward the ground, the chains on his wrists pulled tight. The metal bit into his skin, the edges finding fresh flesh to tear. Both hands started bleeding—warm red droplets falling onto white snow, the only heat Lucian had felt in hours.
He didn't care.
Pain was familiar. He'd lived through worse. Cold weather without anything to cover his body. Beatings that left him half-dead in alleyways. Once, he'd bumped into some rich man on the street—an accident, he was just walking, wasn't even looking—and the man had claimed Lucian made his expensive clothes dirty. The beating that followed had lasted twenty minutes. Nobody intervened. Nobody cared.
This pain? The chains cutting his wrists?
Nothing.
His bloody fingers closed around the object.
A key.
Small. Iron. Ordinary-looking. He didn't know what it was for—could have been anything, a lock to a chest, a door, a cage. But his mind made the connection immediately, hope surging through him like electricity.
Try the handcuffs first.
Maybe his luck hadn't fallen to complete shit. Maybe, just maybe, something would finally go his way.
He maneuvered the key to his left hand, feeling for the keyhole on the manacle around his right wrist. His fingers were so numb he could barely feel the metal, working by touch and desperate hope alone. He found the hole. Inserted the key.
It fit.
Wow, Lucian thought, hardly daring to believe it. It fits perfectly. Maybe it's finally my turn. Maybe I can run away from this place.
He rotated the key slowly, his breath held, his heart pounding so hard he could hear it over the wind.
Click.
The chains on his hands fell away.
The weight vanished. His wrists were free—raw and bleeding, but free. The sensation was almost overwhelming after hours of constant pressure. He could move his arms. He could—
But life wasn't that easy.
It was never easy.
It never went well for anyone, least of all Lucian.
The screaming hit him first. Not distant anymore—close. Getting closer. Slaves from the front of the column were running toward him, toward the back, toward anywhere that wasn't there.
Everyone.
Screaming.
"HELP! HELP! THE MONSTER IS KILLING EVERYONE!"
They were trampling each other. Killing their own in blind panic. Chains tangled and people fell and others ran over them without stopping. The column dissolved into chaos—hundreds of terrified humans fleeing from something, their coordination gone, their humanity stripped away by pure animal fear.
Lucian didn't know what they were running from. Couldn't see past the wall of bodies stampeding toward him. But he knew one thing with absolute certainty:
Stay in the column and die.
As his hands were freed from the cuffs, he threw himself to the side, off the path, away from the rampaging tide of slaves. He hit snow and rolled, chains still binding his neck and ankles but his arms free enough to pull himself clear of the stampede.
Bodies rushed past. Screaming. Crying. Bleeding. The white snow turned red beneath their feet—a bloodbath spreading across the pristine landscape, crimson staining everything it touched. The smell hit him next: copper and fear-sweat and voided bowels, the scent of mass death.
And then Lucian saw it.
At the far end of the column. Where the front row had been. Where the screaming had started.
Something.
His hands, already trembling from the cold, started to tremble more. And more. His legs shook beneath him—not from the freezing temperature anymore, but from something else entirely. Something primal. Something that made every instinct in his body scream RUN.
It was massive. Dark. Wrong in ways his mind couldn't process. A shape that didn't belong in this world or any other, moving through the chaos with terrible purpose.
And then—
It disappeared.
Into the mist. Into the falling snow. Like magic. Like it had never been there at all.
One moment: horror given form.
The next: nothing but white.
Lucian stood on the side of the path, chest heaving, blood dripping from his wrists onto the snow. He watched everyone running. Screaming. Dying. The column that had marched in orderly misery now scattered like insects fleeing a fire.
The snow kept falling.
Gentle. Pure. White.
Covering the blood. Covering the bodies. Covering everything.