Cassie woke him half an hour before dawn by touching his shoulder.
Sunny opened his eyes and found her face close to his, her expression tight with controlled urgency. In the dim grey light that preceded sunrise, her skin looked pale and drawn.
"What is it?"
She leaned back and gestured toward where Nephis was already sitting up, awake and alert. Cassie must have woken her first.
"I had a vision." The Oracle's voice was steady, but Sunny could hear the effort behind the steadiness. "About the Demon."
He sat up immediately, all traces of sleep gone.
"Past or future?"
Cassie thought for a moment. "Past. I'm sure of it."
Nephis shifted closer, drawing her knees up. "What did you see?"
The blind girl took a breath and seemed to internally organize what she'd seen before reporting it.
"I saw the Ashen Barrow at night, in a storm worse than anything we've experienced. Wind was bending the branches of the great tree so hard they looked ready to snap, and lightning hit the island constantly, one strike after another." She paused, her brow furrowing as she organized the images. "The Demon was standing in the middle of it, at the base of the tree. Electricity was crawling across its armor and jumping between its spikes, but it didn't move. It just stood there, watching the storm, as though it were beneath its attention."
Sunny listened with focused stillness. Every detail was potential data, and storms meant environmental conditions they hadn't accounted for. The Demon's behavior during a storm told him something about its priorities and where it ranked weather against other threats.
"When the storm started to weaken," Cassie continued, "the Demon turned away from it and looked up at the tree. There was a light in the canopy, a reddish glow coming from somewhere deep in the branches. The Demon watched it for a long time. Then it walked to the trunk and placed one of its pincers against the bark, very gently."
She swallowed.
"Then the vision shifted. I was looking at the Barrow from far away, from a height I couldn't have reached on foot. The island sat in the middle of the dark sea, and the sea was full of things. The water was alive with them, shapes moving beneath the surface, pressing against the edges of the Barrow like they wanted to climb up but couldn't. They were drawn to something on the island, and the Demon stood between them and whatever it was guarding."
Sunny felt the shape of an idea forming. It was still indistinct, a pattern lingering just beyond the resolution of his shadow sense, but its geometry was familiar. Targets that presented as indestructible were almost always anchored to something. Something like that couldn't be overwhelmed directly, so you attacked the anchor instead. You found the thing the target was protecting, and you used it.
The Demon guarded the tree, and the sea creatures wanted whatever the tree held badly enough to attack the island.
The fire had died to embers overnight, and the grey dawn light was filling the spine through the gaps between the massive vertebrae. Sunny sat in the cold and let the data rearrange itself in his mind.
The picture resolved into something workable. An anchored target guarded its charge while the dark sea rose every night with creatures drawn to the Barrow and repelled by the Demon. A recurring storm pattern added another variable, weather severe enough to challenge even the behemoth.
Killing something stronger than yourself was a problem he'd been trained to solve. The methodology was simple in principle, and the principle never changed regardless of the target's power: find the fulcrum and apply leverage until the world did the killing for you.
The Demon's fulcrum was the tree, and the leverage was the dark sea.
The application would require getting onto the Barrow undetected and surviving the night in the Demon's territory long enough to turn the sea creatures' aggression into a weapon. Every step in the sequence was dangerous enough to kill them on its own.
But the shape was there. For the first time since seeing the Demon descend from the Ashen Barrow with its chrome armor gleaming and its scarlet eyes sweeping the waste, Sunny could see a path that didn't end in retreat or death.
He needed more information before committing. The Demon's patrol patterns and the tree's layout were the starting point, but he also had to understand the timing of the sea creatures' nightly assault and whether the obsidian tree's branches could support their weight high enough to stay out of reach. All of it required direct observation.
Sunny looked at Cassie. "Can your visions show specific things if you try to focus on them, or are they random?"
The blind girl shook her head. "I can't control them. They come when they come."
He'd expected that answer, but the confirmation was worth having. Whatever else he needed would have to come from scouting.
Nephis was watching him. She'd been watching him since Cassie finished speaking, and the quality of her attention had shifted. It wasn't the evaluating mask she wore in combat or the careful distance she maintained in conversation. It was something closer to curiosity. She was waiting for the idea he'd promised her last night.
"The vision filled in what I was missing," he said. "I still need to scout the Barrow up close, confirm the Demon's patrol patterns and whether the tree can hold us, but the plan has a structure now."
"Tell me."
"The Demon is stronger than anything we can fight directly. But it's not the only dangerous thing out here. The dark sea is full of creatures that come to the Barrow every night. The Demon fights them off. If we can find a way to stack the fight in the sea creatures' favor, we might be able to let them do the killing for us."
Cassie turned her head toward him. "You want to use the sea monsters to fight the Demon?"
"I want to give the sea monsters a reason to fight harder than they normally would. The Demon survives every night, which means its current balance against the sea creatures is stable. We need to tip that balance."
Nephis was still watching him, and Sunny could see the tactical mind behind her grey eyes working through the same ideas he'd already mapped.
"Fire," she said.
Sunny blinked.
"What?" he replied
"The oil." She leaned forward slightly. "We've been collecting the centipede oil for weeks. It's flammable, and if we coat the Demon in it and light it, the fire won't kill it, but it would turn it into the brightest target on the Forgotten Shore. Every creature in the dark sea would see it."
Sunny considered the idea and felt a brief, sharp flash of admiration. Nephis had been the one to insist on gathering the oil in the first place. Had she seen this far ahead?
They looked at each other across the dead embers of the campfire, and Sunny felt the idea crystallize from a sketch into an actual plan.
"We'll need to scout the Barrow. Today, from as close as the terrain allows. I want to map the Demon's patrol routes and find the path up the tree. If we're going to do this, every step has to be planned before we commit."
Nephis stood. The grey dawn light caught the white armor and made it glow against the dark interior of the Bone Ridge.
"Then let's go map it," she said.
They packed camp in the grey morning light, moving with the practiced efficiency that weeks in the labyrinth had built into them. Sunny's mind was already running projections, layering the vision's intelligence over the observational data from the previous day, testing sequences and contingencies against the constraints of their abilities and equipment.
Sunny felt the Solemn Oath against his wrist. It wasn't quite as warm as he remembered, but he chalked it up to the cold morning and led them toward the Barrow.