Chapter Text
Hero didn't answer right away. His hand stayed on the sword hilt, eyes down, giving nothing away.
The scholar had an answer ready before the words had even finished landing. The boy already carried the scent of blood on him three times over, he explained — the whip wound, the slave he'd been buried under, the dead soldier's cloak he now wore. Keeping him alive only put the rest of them at greater risk. He was, simply, the correct choice.
How sound, Sunny thought, watching from the rocks above, unmoved. If it were any other situation, you'd probably get away with it.
He studied Hero's face — outwardly calm, unreadable, giving nothing away to anyone who couldn't see past the surface of it. Sunny could. Scholar's a dead man, he thought, flat and certain, the way you'd note the time or the weather.
Hero listened, expression darkening with every word, until finally he looked toward the boy with something dangerous kindling behind his eyes.
"That's true," he said.
Then he smiled, and drew his sword.
"Your logic is nearly airtight," he said, turning fully toward the scholar instead. "But you left one thing out of it. I know exactly who you are, and what you've done to end up in chains. If anyone here deserves to bleed for the rest of us, it's you."
The scholar's composure cracked instantly. "The scent—"
"I'll make sure you bleed enough to cover for him."
It happened too fast for the boy to even flinch. Hero crossed the distance in a blur, and the flat of his blade came down across the scholar's leg with a sound like a branch snapping. The scholar shrieked, collapsing — and before he could gather himself, Hero's boot came down on the other leg, grinding bone.
The boy made a small, horrified sound and looked away, hands pressed over his mouth.
"Wait here," Hero told him, calm as ever, and dragged the screaming man off down the path and out of sight.
The screams that followed went on for a long time.
Hero returned eventually, unbothered, as if nothing at all had happened. He sorted through what remained of the scholar's supplies, shouldered the pack, and told the boy simply that they needed to move.
They walked the flat stretch of the old path in silence, the going far easier than the climb had been. Sunny trailed at a distance, watching the boy's face — hollow, wrung out.
"None of that was your fault," Hero said eventually, not turning around. "The choice was mine alone. It's better you don't know what he'd done. Just trust that it was justice, not cruelty."
A lot of talking, Sunny thought, for a man who's already decided the boy is next.
Hero, met only with silence, gave a short, humorless laugh. "Not much of a talker, are you. Fair enough."
"Everyone wants to be the good guy, huh," Sunny murmured to himself, unheard, watching the young soldier's straight back as he walked ahead.
They said nothing more as the sun sank, painting the sky in bloody streaks of red and gold, and eventually found shelter in a narrow crevice folded into the mountainside — a small, hidden cave, sheltered from the worst of the wind.
"No fire tonight," Hero said. "We're too close to the beast now."
The boy sat with his back against the stone, watching Hero with wary exhaustion. For the first time since the Nightmare began, Hero neglected his sword entirely, sitting with it untouched across his knees, something heavy and thoughtful behind his eyes.
Sunny stayed at the cave's mouth, hidden by the full dark of night, watching both of them.
The sun disappeared entirely. Hero, blind now without any light to work with, sat quietly for a long while before finally rising to his feet.
"Are you asleep?" he asked into the dark.
"No," the boy said, small. "Why?"
"Nothing, I—" Hero started, then stopped himself, some new attention catching in his voice. In the pale scraps of moonlight filtering into the cave, Sunny could see it too — the boy shaking, visibly and steadily, arms wrapped around his own knees.
Hero's tone shifted, gentler now, almost pleading for understanding he had no right to ask for.
"I have to do this," he said quietly. "The scent of blood on you — it's too strong. It'll bring that thing straight to us if I let you live. I'm sorry. If things were different, I'd have gone to face it myself and let you run free. But my life was never only mine to spend. Not until certain debts are paid."
"Please," the boy said, voice cracking, desperate rather than bitter. "You could just let me go. Whatever finds me after that — it wouldn't be your burden anymore. I won't slow you down. I won't come near you again, I promise, just — please don't—"
"Dying in that thing's jaws is too cruel an end for anyone under my care," Hero said, and there was real regret in it, however useless that regret was. "Better that I do it myself. Quickly. You won't suffer."
"Please," the boy said again, smaller now, already knowing it wasn't going to work.
Hero rose, sword in hand, sorrow written plainly across what little of his face the moonlight caught. "I'm sorry."
The boy bolted.
He made it past Hero on nothing but blind luck, ducking under the first slash by inches, and didn't get so lucky with the second — steel caught him across the side, and he staggered the rest of the way to the cave mouth on momentum alone, collapsing straight into Sunny's arms as Hero came charging after him.
Hero skidded to a stop at the sight of him — a stranger, wearing the boy's exact face, holding the boy upright against his own chest.
"Who are you—" he started, then doubled over mid-sentence, retching blood onto the stone.
Sunny smiled.
Hero caught the smile even through his own pain, understanding dawning fast. "You. Is this your doing?" His eyes cut to the boy instead, something like betrayal creeping into his voice. "Did you curse me?"
"He didn't curse you," Sunny said, calm and unhurried. "Neither did I, really — not you, at least. Your two companions were cursed. You've simply been poisoned."
Hero's breathing turned ragged. "Poisoned how—"
"A slow one," Sunny said. "Kills over time, and while it works, the body starts to decompose from the inside. Unpleasant for anyone. But you're Awakened, aren't you?" He tilted his head, watching the realization land. "Lucky you. You don't get to just die from it. You get to rot while you're still breathing."
It was, of course, a lie — built carefully, in advance, around the one fact Sunny had already known going in.
Hero paled several shades further, staring at his own bloodied hand like it belonged to someone else. "What do you want."
"Oh?" Sunny said, mild.
"If you wanted me dead, you'd have cursed me the same as the others. So there's something else you're after."
Sunny let the silence answer for him a moment, then nodded slowly. He felt as if the Nightmare would end at the peak of this mountain. "I happen to be carrying the antidote. Follow my instructions exactly, and you might actually live through this." A pause, sharper. "Don't try to kill me and take it off my corpse, though. It's not as simple as drinking it. Apply it wrong and it'll do worse than nothing."
Hero's eyes went dark, calculating, before shifting entirely to the boy still leaning against Sunny's chest.
"Boy," he said, quiet and urgent. "I know I haven't earned your trust. Not after any of this. But don't trade one danger for another. This man carries a palpable aura of death around him. Follow him, and you'll meet your end all the same."
Sunny laughed. "Birds of a feather flock together, Hero."
Hero's eyes narrowed, realisation dawning upon him. "Shadow God?" He looked to the boy, confused now. "But you're a temple slave. Why would you carry any loyalty to the very faith that enslaved you?"
The boy, pale and swaying on his feet, answered in barely more than a whisper. "My mother loved the Shadow God..."
The boy's knees buckled a moment later, blood loss finally catching up with him. Sunny caught him before he hit the ground, then looked over at Hero.
"Pick him up. Carry him. You're coming with us."
Hero hesitated, glancing between the two of them.
"It's only your life on the line," Sunny said, light and almost cheerful about it.
That got him moving. Hero gathered the boy carefully into a bridal carry, and the three of them started up the old path toward the peak, Sunny leading, Hero following with his burden, silent and grim.
It didn't stay silent for long.
"Who are you," Hero asked eventually.
"I don't know," Sunny said, and meant it more than Hero could have guessed.
"Is the Shadow God planning some kind of counterattack? Is that what this is?"
"You already know the answer to that."
Hero's brow furrowed, but he didn't press further — not on that question, anyway.
"You can answer it yourself, actually," Sunny added, glancing back at him. "Just answer a different one for me first. Do you want to die?"
Hero said nothing.
After a long stretch of silence, he tried again. "How long were you watching us?"
"More than an hour, if you're curious."
"Obviously more than an hour. How long, specifically?"
"Long enough," Sunny said, and let the conversation die there.
They walked the rest of the way without another word, until Sunny finally judged the distance right and called a halt.
He crouched down and shook the boy awake. The boy blinked up at him, dazed. "What do you need?"
Sunny summoned the silver bell into his open palm.
Hero's eyes widened. "How did you make that appear out of nothing?"
"Don't worry about it," Sunny said, waving him off. He pointed to a spot a short distance away, tucked behind an outcropping. "Wait there. Like a good boy. He and I need to talk privately."
Hero eyed the spot, then nodded and moved to it. "Fine."
Sunny chuckled. "You won't be able to hear us either way. This bell makes us inaudible while it's ringing."
He helped the boy to his feet, positioning him so his back faced Hero, and gave him a long, meaningful look — the kind that asked do you remember what I told you without a single word spoken aloud. The boy nodded, faint but certain.
Sunny began ringing the bell. At the same time, the two of them started mouthing words at each other, lips moving in careful, silent rhythm, selling the illusion for the audience they'd left waiting behind them.
Sunny checked on Hero periodically as the performance went on. It was working — Hero had gone almost painfully still, straining to read their lips from a distance, entirely fixated on the wrong thing.
He never noticed the tyrant's approach at all.
Sunny watched it close the gap behind Hero, patient, silent, until it was nearly on top of him — closer than intended, if he was honest with himself. Wouldn't want him dying too fast.
He cut the bell off mid-ring.
"Psst," he said, smiling.
Hero turned toward the sound automatically.
"Behind you."
Hero's eyes went wide as he spun — and then the mountain closed in around him in a blur of claws and roaring fury, exactly the way it had for the boy days before.
Sunny didn't linger to watch how it played out. The warning hadn't been kindness — Hero dying too quickly here wouldn't have served him nearly as well as Hero staying alive just long enough to hold the creature off, buy them time to reach the peak, and — with any luck — leave whichever of the two survived weak enough to finish off later.
He grabbed the boy's arm. "Time to get going."
******************************************************
For a long stretch there was only the sound of their labored breathing and the wind. Then, quietly, unprompted, the boy started to speak.
"My mother... was a bastard child," he said. "My grandfather committed infidelity. Once it came out, both families — his and my grandmother's — started dying. Sickness. Accidents. Everyone thought it was a curse." He coughed, wet and rattling. "My grandfather sold her into temple servitude, hoping the gods would forgive him for it."
Sunny said nothing, just kept walking, kept the boy's weight steady against him.
"They all died anyway," the boy continued. "Turned out it was never a curse at all. My grandfather's wife had been killing them herself, one by one. She got caught. Executed for it, eventually." Another cough, blood flecking his lips now. "My mother stayed a temple slave regardless. No one ever went back to undo it."
He was quiet for a moment, gathering whatever strength was left to keep going.
"She suffered like that for years. A 'divine' prostitute, they called it. Shadow God did nothing. She got sick — thrown out of the temple for it. Shadow God did nothing. She died..." His voice cracked entirely. "And yet... Shadow God did nothing."
Sunny stayed silent, letting it sit.
"Why are you so devoted to him?" the boy asked eventually, exhausted past the point of caring how the question landed. "Sunless. Why?"
Sunny looked at him — barely upright, bleeding out, too far gone now to be any kind of threat or consequence — and decided, simply, to tell him the truth.
"I'm not," he said. "I don't care about the Shadow God at all. That was a lie. All of it, back there with Hero — I said what I needed to say to make you trust me."
The boy went still in his arms. Then he started to cry.
You should have known better than that, Sunny thought, something almost like guilt threading through the observation, quiet and unwelcome. I'm sorry you didn't.
The boy sobbed through another fit of coughing, blood and tears mixing freely now. "She loved him anyway," he managed. "Even though he never — he was never there for her. Never once. I never understood that. Why love something that's never shown up for you? That's never going to show up for you?"
They reached the temple entrance as the words trailed off into silence. Sunny looked at the ruined black marble ahead of them, then down at the boy.
"Maybe it's hope," he said, gentler than anything he'd said all night. "What is life without hope, after all?"
He carried him the rest of the way in silence, past the shattered gates, past the shapeless guardian that drifted close and then withdrew again, sensing something on him it chose not to challenge. The moonlight fell in broken columns through the ruined roof, pooling silver over drifts of undisturbed snow, and Sunny walked through all of it slowly, unwilling — for reasons he didn't examine too closely — to rush the last of this.
The altar waited at the far end of the hall, black marble untouched by the frost that covered everything else. Sunny approached it step by careful step, the boy's weight growing lighter and lighter in his arms with every passing breath, until he finally lowered him down onto the cold stone as gently as his own exhaustion would allow — easing his head back first, then his shoulders, then the rest of him, the way you'd set something down that you were afraid might shatter if you let it fall even an inch.
He stayed crouched there a moment, one hand still resting against the boy's shoulder, unwilling to let go just yet.
"I wish it could have gone differently," Sunny said, quiet, meaning it more than he expected to. "Someone like you never deserved the misfortune of ever meeting someone like me."
The boy's breathing had gone shallow, uneven, each one costing him more than the last.
"But what's done is done," Sunny said, softer now, something almost like an apology folded into the words.
"My mother used to say the same thing," the boy murmured, eyes losing their focus, fixed on some point past Sunny's shoulder that wasn't really there.
"So did mine," Sunny said.
The boy's lips moved once more, barely a whisper now. "Mister Sunless... I'm cold..."
And then, slowly — not all at once, not the way a person simply stops breathing, but gradually, like something being drawn down into still water — he began to sink into the black marble itself. Sunny watched it happen in silence: the boy's hair first, then the curve of his shoulder, then his face, disappearing beneath a surface that gave way without a ripple, until there was nothing left atop the altar at all. Not a mark. Not a drop of blood. Nothing to prove he'd ever been there.
Sunny stayed crouched beside the empty stone for a long moment, hand still hovering over where the boy's shoulder had been, genuinely caught off guard for the first time in longer than he could remember.
[You have offered a sacrifice to the gods.]
[The gods are dead.]
[You have offered a temple slave.]
[Shadow God stirs in his slumber.]
The messages hung there and faded without finishing, no blessing following after. Sunny watched them go, looked at the altar — pristine again, not a trace of blood or boy left on it — and sighed.
[You have slain a dormant beast, name unknown.]
The confirmation came a beat later, cold and clinical, exactly as it had for the veteran soldier days before. Sunny chuckled. "I've slain him? Huh."
Footsteps and ragged breathing echoed from the temple entrance. Sunny turned to find Hero staggering in, one arm gone entirely, blood soaking what remained of his uniform. He made it about halfway across the ruined hall before his legs finally gave out beneath him.
Sunny watched him with open curiosity, unbothered.
"Antidote..." Hero managed, and collapsed.
Sunny sighed and crossed to him. "All hope isn't lost. I can still save you." He crouched down. "Where's the boy, you ask? Dead. That one's on both of us."
Hero's remaining hand twitched weakly, too spent to argue the point.
"I'll need your shirt off," Sunny said. "Can you handle the cold?"
Hero nodded, barely.
Sunny pulled it free — checking, not treating, and found nothing hidden beneath it. No blade. He let out a small, satisfied breath. What a relief.
The message from earlier lingered in the back of his mind — Shadow God stirs in his slumber — unfinished, untested. Curiosity got the better of him. Hero would pay the price. He picked Hero up, weightless now with only one working limb to speak of, and laid him on the altar in the boy's place.
"I wanted good for him," Hero rasped, staring up at the shattered ceiling. "That beast's maw — it was too grueling a fate. I only wanted to spare him that."
"So you wanted to save him from it," Sunny said.
Hero nodded weakly.
Sunny laughed. "You weren't wrong to call me dangerous, you know. We're the same thing underneath it all, you and I. Black pits of tar. We devour everyone around us — their lives, or their innocence. Doesn't much matter which."
He pulled a flagon free and poured its contents directly over Hero's wounds. Hero flinched and whimpered, assuming it for medicine. Then Sunny pressed the same flagon into his one remaining hand.
"Drink."
Hero drank on reflex — and spat it out immediately, eyes going wide with recognition. "What in the world — isn't this Blood—" He stopped, understanding crashing into place all at once. "It's been— all along, it's been—"
"Bloodbane," Sunny finished for him, and laughed. "From those two slaves, straight through to you. Always Bloodbane. Nothing more exotic than that."
"How," Hero rasped.
"I told the boy to hand over every flagon he collected during his water run. Poisoned all of them. Left his alone."
"He was never malicious," Hero said, horror creeping through the pain. "Why didn't he question it?"
"Because I'd already told him I'd cursed the other two," Sunny said simply. "He was afraid of me by then. Fear doesn't ask questions. It just does what it's told."
Hero's face twisted — grief and disgust tangled together. "And you say we're similar?! You're a devil."
Sunny laughed again — and Hero, with the last dregs of strength left in him, lunged upward and drove a fist square into Sunny's nose, following it with the empty flagon flung straight into his face, Bloodbane residue splashing into his eyes.
Sunny grunted, more surprised than hurt. Hero's burst of righteous fury cost him everything he had left; he collapsed back onto the altar, spent.
"It's really unfair," Sunny muttered, wiping at his eyes, "having an Awakened dropped into my trial."
His own blood, smeared across the altar from Hero's punch, sank into the marble the same as everything else had. The system's voice returned — but this time the words came warped, glitching in and out exactly like his own cursed Aspect text.
[Ẏ̵o̸u̷ ̶h̷a̸v̷e̶ ̵o̸f̴f̶e̸r̷e̶d̷ ̸y̶o̸u̶r̸s̴e̸l̵f̶ ̷a̶s̸ ̸a̶ ̶s̸a̴c̷r̸i̸f̸i̶c̸e̷ ̸t̶o̶ ̶t̷h̷e̶ ̸g̸o̶d̷s̴.̷]
Sunny stared at the flickering text for a moment, then decided he didn't much care.
"Hero," he said, crouching down beside the altar again. "I have to congratulate you. On your intuition."
Hero's eyes cracked open, wary.
"In my short life, I've built up a bit of a reputation," Sunny continued, conversational. "My dumber enemies die by my hand. The smarter ones try to kill me the second they lay eyes on me. And the smartest of the lot turn around and run the other way." He smiled. "You're almost among the smarter ones."
"Shut your mouth," Hero managed, weak but venomous. "I don't want to hear about your exploits."
Sunny laughed. "Plenty of dead men have said the exact same thing. Can't say I blame you — I wouldn't want to hear my own murderer bragging, either. Especially not if he killed me in a way that made my death look almost simple. Dying to a bluff, of all things."
He leaned in, smile splitting wider.
"But this isn't a brag." His voice dropped, quiet and certain. "It's an introduction."
Auro felt the first chill crawl up his spine before Sunny had even taken three steps, though he couldn't have said why — there was nothing to see yet, nothing but a hunched, faceless shape closing the distance between them.
"I am Sunless," he said, still hidden. "Son of Saints. Queen of Misfortune and Death Bringer."
Hero's vision swam, blurring at the edges — blood loss, poison, or both — and for a moment the whole temple tilted sideways, out of focus, useless.
"I am the sole heir of—"
When his sight steadied again, Sunny's hands had dropped from his face, hair no longer hiding anything at all.
Hero found himself looking directly into a pair of bloodshot eyes — reddening further even as he watched, and yet strangely dry, no shine to them at all beneath the moonlight — set into a smile that had already decided, with total certainty, exactly what he was.
Meat. Nothing more.
This isn't fear, Hero thought, the realization arriving distant and strange even to himself, disconnected from the panic clawing up his throat. It's—
It's— he tried again, desperate now, the word dissolving before it could fully form, slipping out of reach every time he grasped for it.
"Death," Sunny finished, smile widening further still.
Something in Hero simply broke at the word, some last resistance giving way all at once. His breathing slowed. His vision, already dimming from the blood loss and the poison both, began to narrow further, the ruined temple ceiling shrinking to a pinprick of moonlight far above him.
Hero's last thought drifted somewhere far away from the temple, from the mountain, from any of it — away from duty, from debts owed, from every noble reason he'd told himself justified any of this.
I'm cold...
And then, slowly, the same way the boy had gone before him, he began to sink — first his shoulders, then his ruined arm, then the rest of him, swallowed inch by inch into the black marble beneath him until there was nothing left at all. No blood. No body. Not even the memory of a struggle.
[You have slain an awakened beast, Auro of the Nine.]
[You have offered an awakened sacrifice to the gods.]
[The gods are dead.]
[The awakened, Auro of the Nine, was fated.]
The messages paused there, hanging in the ruined air. Sunny frowned, waiting.
A low, wet roar answered instead, echoing through the shattered entrance. Sunny turned to find the Mountain King dragging itself into the temple — grievously wounded, one arm hanging by threads of sinew, but alive, and drawn by something even the ruined temple couldn't hide from it.
"Huh," Sunny said.
The tyrant heard him and roared again, lurching fully through the broken gates.
Sunny reflexively steps back.
[Shadow God flinches in his slumber.]
[He has sent a blessing from beyond the grave.]
[Child of Shadows, receive your blessing!]
The shadows filling the hall rose as one, surging forward to bind every limb the creature had left. It thrashed, straining uselessly against a god's strength even in its dying breath — and came apart between them a moment later, torn to pieces across the ancient floor.
[You have slain an awakened tyrant, Mountain King.]
[Wake up, Sunless! Your Nightmare is over.]
[Prepare for appraisal…]