The wind carries teeth on the summit of Mount Mourn. Sunny crouched beneath the overhang of a shattered obelisk, clutching an iron-tipped spear he had salvaged from a petrified sentry. His breath condensed into crystalline shards before touching the stone.

Down in the ravine, something massive was hunting. The snow crunched rhythmically under broad, clawed feet. Every step sent miniature tremors through the shale rock. Sunny did not look down. Looking invited attention, and in the First Trial, attention was synonymous with slaughter.

“Stay low,” Sunny whispered. To his right, his detached shadow stretched fluidly along the frosted basalt wall, miming a blade slicing across a throat. “I know it has armor, you sarcastic puddle of ink. Give me a better angle.”

The shadow rippled, morphing into a slender tendril that reached toward the ridge above. There, precariously balanced above the monster's patrol path, hung a massive shelf of blue glacial ice.

Sunny’s eyes narrowed. A faint, vicious smirk touched the corner of his lips. “Brains before brute force,” he murmured, easing his body along the narrow ledge. “The gods may have forgotten this valley, but they left behind plenty of gravity.”

With three deliberate strikes against the fissure in the shale, the mountain groaned. The avalanche descended like a tidal wave of powdered glass, burying the howling horror beneath fifty tons of prehistoric frost. A golden shimmer flickered in the periphery of Sunny's vision: Trial Objective Completed. Mark of the Shadow Ascendant Recognized.