Morning came thin and slantwise, less an arrival than a reminder — light creeping into the world the way stiffness had crept into his bones.
He rose before it, more out of discipline than rest. The ridge had turned colder in the night, and the damp had crept up from the gullies to take his bones by quiet degrees. He flexed stiffness from his fingers, rolled his shoulders until the small pains shook loose, and set his satchel high, away from the river's bruises. The sword hung right — comfort enough.
"North and up," he said under his breath, angling toward where last evening's howl had stretched the air. He didn't expect the place to let him keep a straight line. The land had its own opinions.
Pine shadow held the ground in green twilight. Needles had drifted into faint ridges, guiding his steps whether he wanted them guided or not. He stepped with his weight soft and ready to adjust, letting the floor of the forest say yes or no to each pace. His father would have approved the economy of it: no extra noise, no sudden declarations where a murmur would do.
The slope asked for care, so he gave it. He learned—again—that stone said more than it showed if you didn't force the conversation. A flat looked sure until you listened and felt the grit roll under it; a low slab looked unfriendly until your balance found the subtle lip that wanted to catch and hold the boot. He wasn't training. He wasn't calling anything. But his body was starting to move like it knew there was a conversation to be had with the ground, and that it should be polite when it spoke.
The first sign came by a seep where water had chosen the slow path. Moss made a bright stripe through the needles, vivid as a wound. He knelt where the earth had softened, and the prints were there waiting: the front pad wide and clean-edged, the claws neat, the heel ridges distinct. Fresh. The cups had collected a skin of water so thin he could see it shiver when he breathed on it.
Two wolves for certain. Maybe three. One heavy, one light, the third a shadow of prints when the moss and soil agreed to show him. They'd come from downslope, cut across the seep to drink, then fanned into the trees and up. He traced their leaving path with his eye, not moving his head.
"They know all the water," he said softly. "I'm late to the party."
Beside the prints, a scattering of hare fur lay clumped against a tuft of grass. Further on, the curved front half of a rib, scraped smooth. He didn't see the rest of it. The kill had been clean, no stomp-crushed earth, just the blades of grass leaned one way and then the other, as if a wind had learned to walk. He held the rib in his palm for a breath and set it down where he'd found it.
He stood without hurry. The forest asked for that too.
The trees thinned to a shoulder of exposed stone—a long, flat back with lichen penciled into it, old frost-cracks like wrinkles at the corners of a narrowed eye. He stepped onto it carefully. Open places told stories fast. He made his feet read the rock before trusting it, spreading weight from heel to toe in a glide rather than a stamp.
That was when the first small slide betrayed him. Scree shifted under the edge of the slab, and a handful of pebbles went clattering down into the brush. Their argument with the slope was loud enough to bring other voices: a deep grunt, then the tearing rush of something heavy taking the short way up. He didn't let panic choose for him. He moved three quick steps left and folded into a shallow scoop of the stone, knees loose, torso low, like a thought slipping under a low door.
The boar burst through the brush where he had been, head low, eyes wide with danger. The animal took the line the slope offered, not the one the boy had taken from it. He watched bristles stream with mud and breath smoke from the long, wet mouth. The boar caught the trail of the tumbling rocks, found nothing to fight, and carried itself uphill toward a place that didn't include him.
"Don't be there when the blow lands," he said, half to the stone, half to his father.
The slab ended in a short drop where roots had pryed a seam apart and made a shelf. He sat there a moment and listened to the forest close the book on the boar's passage. Birds resumed their small talk. Resin warmed where the light found it, and the air began to carry a sweeter note behind the pitch. He flexed his toes inside his boots until heat let go of the ache.
The land took him back under trees then, this time into a narrow gully where old water had argued its way through. The gully turned and turned—sharp angles first, long bends after—until he came into a hollow that felt made rather than fallen into place. Cedars leaned inward like a handful of green fingers half-curled. Their roots strapped the earth, thick as a man's thigh, twisted with age's patience.
The hollow floor was level and cool, the air quiet enough that a broken twig might have sounded like a shout.
He did not love it. He could love the craft of it—the way stones had settled into each other, the way the soil kept a temperate heart even when the day outside went harsh—but he did not love the idea of being the only thing that did not belong there.
Wolf musk lived in that cool air, low and certain. Not fresh like breath. Fresh like bedding: fur flattened a hundred times in the same shape, oils given over to bark, the clean animal taking of a place. He crouched and found no obvious den hole. Nothing tunneled, nothing worked with the claws of something that liked to sleep under, not on top.
He left the hollow without forcing his boots to tell a story. He planted each step with the intention of not telling one. Some places deserved that much respect.
Back under open sky—for a given measure of open—he felt a pressure build somewhere inside his ribs and down through the bonework of his legs. He thought at first it was the carryover of the hollow, the way particular air clings to you after you leave it. But it didn't sit like scent. It sat like the idea of weight: the knowledge that each footfall had a direction beneath it, and that the ground was not only ground but a partner to place it.
He didn't plan to call it anything. Calling things names too early made them behave like names in his experience—limited, slippery. But the sensation made his jaw unclench, made the swing of his arms fall into agreement with the slope, made his steps land inside the quiet rather than on it. The earth answered each placement with a little echo up his bones: not sound, more like a small reassurance that it had met him where he meant it to.
It wasn't power, not in the way fire could be coaxed into a flame. This was quieter, slower, like the ground had begun to notice him and was choosing, piece by piece, to let him pass. Sometimes his feet found holds he hadn't seen, his balance settling before his mind had measured the slope. If it was anything, it was the faint suggestion of a conversation — one he wasn't sure he was ready to admit he was having.
Somewhere ahead, the slope waited to finish the thought.