The rusted gate slammed shut behind the last straggling servant.
SFX: CLAAANG—
The sound rolled across the frozen expanse like the toll of a funeral bell.
Levi flinched. His new heart stuttered inside his narrow chest, a sharp, panicked flutter that made him dizzy for a heartbeat. He turned instinctively—but there was nothing left to see.
The courtyard was gone.
Sealed away behind black iron and rust.
There was no going back.
Ahead stretched only the wasteland.
An endless sweep of crusted snow broken by jagged outcrops of black stone, all of it sloping upward, drawing the eye inexorably toward Blackwind Mountain.
Levi squinted against the glare.
The sun hung too low in the sky—a bloated blue orb, wrong in every sense of the word. Its light washed the world in cold, unnatural hues. Snow reflected it mercilessly, turning the ground into a field of knives. Shadows fell sharp and violet-tinged, stretched at impossible angles. Even the air shimmered, frost crystals floating like glittering ash, stinging his eyes and scraping his lungs with every breath.
The mountain loomed.
Not like a place.
Like a presence.
Its lower slopes were scarred by a switchback trail carved into the ice, zigzagging upward like an old wound that refused to heal. Higher still, the peak vanished into roiling clouds of blizzard. Wind screamed down from those heights in violent gusts, and beneath the howl Levi thought he heard something else—
A distant, mournful wail.
Too rhythmic to be wind.
Too vast to be human.
The guards did not give them time to stare.
Clad in heavy furs over dark plate armor dulled by frost, they barked orders in sharp, clipped voices. Spear butts slammed into ribs and backs, hooks snagged robes, shins were struck without hesitation.
"Move!"
"The mountain waits for no one!"
Levi's body—this body—shivered uncontrollably.
The servant's robes, thin and already damp from the stone chamber below, were useless. The wind cut through them like razors, biting bare feet, numbing fingers, gnawing at the exposed strip of skin above his frayed collar.
Numbness crept in fast.
His toes vanished first, turning into blocks of distant, aching ice. His fingers stiffened, refusing to curl properly around the rough fabric of his sleeves.
As the column lurched forward, Levi's gaze snagged on shapes half-buried along the trail.
At first he thought they were rocks.
Then he saw the hands.
Frozen remnants of earlier trials.
Bodies—or what remained of them—jutted from the snow at grotesque angles. Arms twisted skyward. Legs bent the wrong way. Faces locked in final expressions of terror, mouths open in silent screams, eyes rimed with frost.
They wore the same gray robes.
Some were fresh enough that ice still clung delicately to their eyelashes.
Others were older. Gnawed. Hollowed.
No markers. No graves.
Mercy, it seemed, was not part of the Spell's design.
The guards set a brutal pace.
Their boots crunched confidently over packed snow while the servants slipped and stumbled on hidden ice. Whips cracked through the air—
SFX: CRACK—CRACK!
—like thunderclaps.
Leather tips bit flesh, drawing thin red lines that froze almost instantly. Cries of pain vanished into the wind. Anyone who slowed earned another lash.
At the head of the column rode the lead guard.
He sat astride a massive, shaggy beast—part horse, part predator. Its breath steamed in thick clouds, fangs bared beneath a muzzle streaked with frost. Coal-bright eyes swept the line with feral intelligence.
The rider himself was worse.
Strikingly handsome in a cruel, sculpted way. Sharp features. High cheekbones. Red-brown hair tied back beneath a fur-lined helm. His eyes were amber—cold, assessing, amused.
Cassian.
Levi had heard the name whispered earlier, thick with dread.
Cassian watched the servants the way one might watch ants drowning in meltwater.
When someone faltered—just for a second—the whip sang.
He wielded it lazily, with perfect precision.
A young woman near the middle stumbled once, foot sliding on ice. The whip coiled around her ankle and yanked hard.
SFX: WHRRK—THUMP!
She hit the ground screaming.
Cassian laughed.
It was a pleasant sound. Low. Almost warm.
That made it worse.
Levi kept his head down, eyes fixed on the cracked heels ahead of him. But he felt Cassian's gaze linger—longer than it did on most.
The smallest.
The weakest.
The one least likely to survive.
A spear butt jabbed his shoulder.
SFX: THUD
"Keep up, runt," a guard muttered. "Or I'll leave you for the wind myself."
Hours bled away.
The trail steepened, switchbacks tightening, forcing them into sharp, punishing turns. Breath burned in Levi's chest, lungs screaming in protest—whether from the altitude or the fragility of this borrowed vessel, he couldn't tell.
Snow deepened in places, dragging at legs already trembling with exhaustion.
Then the cold claimed its first.
An older man near Levi—gray-bearded, movements slow from the start—stumbled. He pitched forward and vanished face-first into a drift.
His breath puffed weakly.
Once.
Twice.
Then not at all.
The line slowed instinctively.
Shouts erupted immediately.
"No stopping!"
"The mountain sorts the weak!"
No one was allowed to help.
A guard prodded the fallen man with a spear tip, rolling him onto his back. His eyes were glassy, staring past the blue sun into nothing.
Cassian dismounted.
He moved with effortless grace, boots barely sinking into the snow. He nudged the corpse once, almost gentle, then shook his head.
"Unfit," he said mildly. "Leave him."
He mounted again.
"The wind will cover him soon enough."
They moved on.
Levi glanced back as they crested a rise.
Snow was already swallowing the body.
Erasing him.
As if he had never existed.
The message was clear.
This was not a place for the dying.
This was where dying finished.
As the march dragged on—if time even meant the same thing beneath this alien sun—the column stretched thinner. The strong surged ahead. The weak lagged, whipped and cursed forward like cattle.
Levi found himself drifting beside two others who matched his careful, conserving pace.
One was a slight woman, small even among the servants. Mousy brown hair peeked from beneath her hood, eyes wide and constantly darting.
"Mira," she whispered earlier when a guard's back was turned.
The other was broader. Older. A man with a weathered face like cracked leather and a beard already stiff with ice.
"Torin," he had said gruffly.
His eyes were hard—but not cruel.
For a while, no one spoke.
The wind stole breath, and the guards punished distraction. But when the riders pushed ahead to scout a narrow pass, Mira edged closer, her voice barely audible.
"Where… where did you come from?" she whispered, teeth chattering.
"Before this. The door. The red one."
Levi hesitated.
His old life felt distant. Warped. Like a memory viewed through thick glass.
"A city," he said finally. His voice cracked in this younger throat.
"I was… sick. Dying."
Mira nodded immediately.
"Me too," she said. "Cancer. Months, they said. Maybe less." She hugged herself tighter. "Thought the end would be a hospital bed. Not… this."
Torin grunted. "War," he said. "Shrapnel in the gut. Slow bleed." He glanced at Levi, eyes narrowing slightly. "Woke up here stronger than before. You, though…"
He trailed off.
Levi gave a weak, bitter smile. "Feels like I drew the short straw."
Torin snorted softly. "Mountain doesn't care about fairness. Only whether you keep moving."
The words were few. Halting. Stolen between gusts of screaming wind.
But they were something.
A fragile warmth.
A thread of humanity stretched across the frozen hell.
For the first time since the red door had opened—
Levi didn't feel entirely alone.