"Because the monster isn't dead."
The words settled over the campfire like snow. The soldier was the first to respond, his expression shifting from composed authority to something tighter and more alert.
"Why do you say that?"
Sunny couldn't explain the real reason, which was that the Spell hadn't announced the kill. Instead he pointed upward, toward the cliff face the Tyrant had originally descended from.
"The monster jumped from an incredible height to land on this platform. It wasn't harmed at all. Why would it be killed by falling off the platform?"
Nobody found a flaw in the argument.
"Which means it's still alive, somewhere down the mountain. So by going back, we will be delivering ourselves into its maw."
The shifty slave cursed and crawled closer to the bonfire, staring into the darkness. The scholar rubbed his temples. The soldier processed the information quickly, as Sunny expected he would.
"Then we go up and over the mountain pass. But if the monster is still alive, there is a high possibility that it will return here and then pursue us. We need to move as soon as the sun rises."
He gestured at the torn bodies littering the platform.
"We can't rest the whole night. We need to gather supplies now. Food, water, warm clothes, firewood." He pointed at himself with the tip of a knife he'd drawn from his belt. "I will carve the oxen carcasses for meat."
The scholar volunteered for firewood. The shifty slave, with a gleam in his eyes that Sunny didn't trust, offered to find warm clothing. Which left Sunny with water. The soldiers had each carried flagons, and the dead soldiers were scattered across the platform in the dark.
The dark that only Sunny could see through.
He moved through the carnage with the methodical efficiency of someone conducting a search pattern, which was exactly what he was doing. Bastion's east wing. The fourth ring. The surveillance exercises. The same skills, applied to a different landscape. He checked bodies, collected flagons, noted the positions of weapons and equipment that might prove useful later.
On his way back from the far edge of the platform, he made a detour. The Bloodbane berries were still growing in their bright red clusters where the paved road ended and the rocks began. He picked them carefully, using a strip of cloth torn from a dead slave's tunic to avoid skin contact, and crushed them between two flat stones until the juice ran clear.
Then he went back to the flagons he'd collected.
He squeezed Bloodbane juice into each one. Not enough to taste, but enough to kill a man over the course of a day or two if he kept drinking. He left his own flagon untouched.
It was not a reaction to a specific threat. Nobody had threatened him yet. The soldier had given him the shackle key, the scholar had provided useful information, and the shifty slave was too frightened to be dangerous. By any reasonable assessment, these were allies, or at least co-survivors whose interests aligned with his own.
But Sunny had spent his entire life around people whose interests changed the moment survival became uncertain. In the outskirts, the man who shared his food with you today was the man who took your shoes tomorrow. In Bastion, Anvil had dedicated an entire module to the mechanics of loyalty: how it formed, how it fractured, and how to ensure that when it fractured, you were the one holding the knife.
The shifty slave was the kind of man who would kill for a pair of boots. The scholar's kindness had the studied quality of a performance, and people who performed kindness for no reason were either fools or predators, and the scholar was not a fool. The soldier was a slaver who had shown momentary compassion, and compassion from a captor was the most dangerous thing in the world because it made you want to trust him.
The poison would weaken them gradually, while Sunny remained at full capacity.
If they tried to kill him, and Sunny was certain at least one of them would, the Bloodbane would have already done most of the work.
He found the old veteran near the edge of the platform.
The man who had whipped him was dying. Terrible wounds covered his chest and stomach, and his breathing had the shallow, irregular rhythm that Sunny recognized from the anatomy primer's section on traumatic hemorrhage. Minutes left, not hours.
The veteran's eyes found Sunny in the darkness and widened with recognition. His hand moved weakly, reaching for something. Sunny followed his gaze to a broken sword lying on the stone nearby.
He picked it up.
The old man's eyes fixed on the blade with an intensity that was hard to read. It might have been a final request. It might have been defiance. Sunny studied the dying man's face and saw something he hadn't expected: relief.
The veteran didn't want the sword to fight with. He wanted to die with it in his hand, or at least with someone holding it over him, which was close enough. A soldier's death instead of a slow one.
In another life, the outskirts boy who had been whipped might have hesitated, or gloated, or felt some satisfaction at watching his tormentor bleed out on cold stone.
Sunny leaned forward and drew the broken blade across the old man's throat in a clean, precise motion.
The veteran twitched. His eyes held something that might have been gratitude or might have been hatred, and Sunny sat beside him in the dark because it seemed like the right thing to do, even though he couldn't articulate why.
[You have slain a dormant human, name unknown.]
A kill announcement for a mercy killing. The Spell didn't distinguish between murder and compassion. It simply counted.
[You have received a Memory: Silver Bell.]
Sunny summoned the description.
[Silver Bell: a small memento of a long-lost home, which once brought its owner comfort and joy. Its clear ringing can be heard from miles away.]
He dismissed the runes. A sentimental trinket with no combat application. Consistent with the Spell's apparent determination to give him nothing useful.
He stripped the veteran's fur cloak and leather boots. Officers equipment, warmer and sturdier than anything else on the platform. He also pocketed a dagger the man had at his side. The cloak was bloodied, but so was Sunny.
When he returned to the bonfire with the flagons and his new clothes, the others were already finished. They spent the rest of the night sitting with their backs to the fire, staring into the darkness. Nobody slept. The possibility of the Mountain King returning was too vivid to allow for rest.
The soldier sharpened his sword. The sound of the whetstone scraping against the blade was, against all reason, comforting.
At dawn, they loaded themselves with everything they'd gathered and set out.
The road ended two hours later.
A rockfall had obliterated entire sections of the path, turning what had been a narrow but traversable mountain road into a broken cliff face. Sunny stood at the edge of the gap and looked down into the chasm with the flat expression of someone calculating alternatives.
"What do we do now?"
"I'll tell you what we need to do! Get rid of some dead weight!" The shifty slave's eyes landed on Sunny's fine boots, then turned to the soldier. "Listen, your lordship. The boy is too weak. He's slowing us down! Plus, he's weird. Doesn't he give you the creeps?"
Sunny ignored him. He was studying the rockfall, mapping the debris field, identifying potential footholds and routes. The surface was unstable, but the slope wasn't vertical. Difficult, dangerous, but not impassable. Not for someone who had spent years navigating Bastion's architecture at night.
The soldier shut down the argument. The scholar, looking unwell, offered a solution: the road had been built over an older pilgrim's path that led to the mountain's peak. If they climbed above the rockfall, they could find remnants of that path and follow it back to an intact section of the road.
They climbed.
The ascent was a different kind of violence than the fight on the platform. It was slower and quieter, but relentless. Every meter upward cost them in ways that accumulated rather than striking all at once: strained muscles, shallow breathing, the constant drain of keeping their footing on ice-covered rock while carrying supplies. The mountain wasn't trying to kill them the way the Tyrant had tried. The mountain was simply indifferent to whether they survived, and indifference, Sunny was learning, was harder to fight than malice.
He was the weakest in the group and he knew it. The soldier moved with his usual ease. The scholar was older and slower but had a methodical determination that kept him going. The shifty slave was stronger than Sunny and had more stamina. But Sunny had something the others didn't: a body that had been conditioned to function under discomfort, because Anvil had never permitted comfort to be part of the equation.
The Bastion training regimen hadn't included mountain climbing, but it had included exhaustion. Sunny knew what it felt like to push past the point where his muscles stopped cooperating, because his instructors had taken him to that point regularly and then made him continue. The climb was agony, but agony was familiar territory.
By the time they found a suitable camp at nightfall, the shifty slave was in worse shape than anyone. His eyes were unfocused, his breathing shallow and labored. Mountain sickness, the scholar said, which affected people differently.
The soldier took first watch. Sunny took second.
He sat on the ledge in the darkness, looking down at the distant ribbon of the road. His night vision showed him things the others couldn't see, and what it showed him was this: far below, on the stone platform where the caravan had died, a dark shape was crawling over the edge of the cliff. It moved slowly, dragging itself onto the stone. It stopped. Then it began to feed.
Every time its claws contacted a body, the Mountain King would lift it and bring it to its jaws. The wind carried the faint sound of crunching bone.
Sunny watched, and as he watched, he noticed something. The Tyrant's five milky eyes never moved. They stared forward with the fixed emptiness of glass, and the creature's head didn't track its targets visually. It oriented on sound: the scrape of claws on stone, the shift of a body's weight, the subtle creak of freezing meat.
He tested the theory. He pushed a small rock off the ledge. It clattered down the slope, dislodging others, and the sound cascaded into the silence like thunder.
The Tyrant turned its head. It stared directly at the source of the sound, directly at the ledge where Sunny was sitting, and for several excruciating seconds neither of them moved. Sunny didn't breathe.
Then the creature turned away and resumed feeding.
It was blind.
Sunny replayed the platform fight in his mind with this new information. The Tyrant had reacted to the wagon only after it scraped against the rocks. It had targeted the densest clusters of screaming slaves. The young soldier had survived so long because he fought with minimal wasted motion, producing less noise than the panicking victims around him.
This was important. Sunny filed it alongside every other piece of data he'd collected and woke the others at dawn.
"Did anything happen while we were asleep?"
"The monster ate the dead."
The soldier's frown deepened. "How do you know?"
"I heard it."
The soldier went to the ledge and looked down, trying to make out the distant platform. After a long silence, his jaw tightened.
"Then we need to move faster. If it finishes with the bodies, it will come for us next. We need to find that old path before nightfall."
They climbed. The sun rose with them, slow and indifferent. Nobody talked. Each of them was focused on the next handhold, the next footstep, the next breath.
The shifty slave fell behind. His strength was abandoning him in stages, each rest stop leaving him weaker than the last. The others assumed it was altitude sickness, and Sunny let them, because the symptoms were indistinguishable. Headache, nausea, confusion, loss of coordination. The Bloodbane was doing its work underneath the mountain's, and the two together were killing the man faster than either would have alone.
Sunny watched him deteriorate and felt nothing about it, which was itself information. He'd poisoned a man who might never have threatened him, and the man was dying, and the empty room inside him didn't stir.
The scream came in the early afternoon.
Sunny turned in time to see the shifty slave's foot slip on an ice-covered rock. His legs were too weak to catch himself, his coordination too degraded to find purchase. He fell backward, hit the slope, and rolled, picking up speed, his body bouncing off outcroppings with impacts that Sunny could hear from twenty meters above.
He came to rest against a large protruding stone. From the way his body was arranged, Sunny knew he was dead before the Spell confirmed it.
The three of them stood on the slope and looked down at the broken shape that had been a person. The scholar's face was grey. The soldier's expression was unreadable.
Sunny felt the empty room inside him echo, the same absence that had followed Theron's death in Bastion.
They kept climbing.