Ahead, the slope kited out into broken ledges and small shelves where roots had caught enough soil to allow stubborn things to grow. He went shelf to shelf, taking the crowd's path rather than the lone line: deer had worn a narrow run where the cliff face backed gently from the air. He followed because they were better cartographers than men.
On the second shelf he paused. A line of scat dotted the edge where the shelf fell away, dark and shiny, still warm enough to give steam if you watched. The seeds told the story—a heavy berry year, apparently—and the coarse hair knitted through said the one who left it walked in armor of its own making.
He stepped away from the edge. Far below, water talked itself to froth at a bend he couldn't see. Above him, a raven dropped from a higher current and cut once across his line like a dark remark, then angled toward silence.
The day went to its narrowest light and began to rebound. He ate two mouthfuls from what berries he could find that didn't require a sermon and chewed them into something like fuel. His stomach wasn't impressed. It asked for meat and bread and a hot pan. He told it to be patient and kept moving.
The world rose until his ears told him he'd crossed some unmarked line—the air thinned and tasted cleaner, and the wind carried needles with more dryness to them. He came onto another exposed place, this one not a single slab but a quilt of plates forced up and left to harden. Lichen took advantage of every geography question it could answer. He watched his feet and didn't step twice in the same way if he could help it. That felt right, and the rock agreed.
At the far end of the plates, the earth pitched up into a shoulder of dark soil sprinkled with granite. A trail cut diagonally along it—narrow, consistent, no human craft in it, but certainty nonetheless. It held to the contour the way a thought clings to a truth stubbornly learned. He set his boots on it and let his hips manage the sway.
The scent found him while he walked that line: not rot, not fear, not blood—just wolf in its cleanest word. The wind kept it for two breaths and gave it over. It came from above and ahead, but scent lies when the land is complicated, and these ridges and bowls told riddles to the nose.
A scatter of bones worked into the trail caught his eye. Not many. A bird's ulna, light as a sliver of old moon. A tooth that had no business there unless something had carried it and lost interest. He felt the pause in his body more than he chose it, then moved on because there was nothing to be done with the idea except walk through it.
Midafternoon brought the kind of heat you can't see—no glare, no shimmer, just the feeling that the space around your body had taken to crowding you. He stopped where a trickle cut the path and pooled in a stone cup. The water had found iron in the seam somewhere, or something like it — a coin taste. He drank anyway and let the excess wash over his wrists.
"Still here," he said quietly, more to the path than to himself. The path did not disagree.
On the far side of the trickle, the trail turned under a low overhang where the mountain had offered its brow to the wind and been scoured for the trouble. He stooped to fit. The ceiling had been polished by years of deer backs and perhaps a few bears giving themselves a scratch on the way by. The stone smelled honest: wet mineral, cold dust. He felt a brush of something across his scalp—maybe only the awareness of how close the world was above him, maybe the edge of that not-quite-sense again, the one that told him the ground beneath his boots was paying attention.
When he came out the other side, the sky had widened a fraction, and the trees gave him a thin-panel view to the lower country. It startled him how far the day had carried him. The place where the bear had watched him from the river yesterday was a run of green with brightness stitched into it. The ridge he'd used to look down at it was now just a thought the land had had once. He was somewhere else entirely.
He took that with a nod and a swallow and another two berries he had no business wasting now and then moved on, because the wind had shifted and the faintest thread of a howl braided itself into it. Not a call that demanded. Not a warning either. A line drawn and then softened, as if the speaker wanted to hear how the land would throw it back.
He stopped where the trail decided to consider being two trails before changing its mind. He waited for the echo that wasn't an echo to die. Then he turned his body to a course that didn't chase and didn't flee. Parallel, respectful — honest about where his day had laid its feet.
He walked with that decision and gave the ground exactly the degree of weight it asked for. There was a satisfaction in that, the kind you get when a knot yields or a stubborn jar lid turns. It had nothing to do with victory. It had everything to do with listening.
The ground seemed to meet him more willingly now, as if his steps were not taken on it, but with it. Roots and stones yielded just enough for his weight to pass cleanly, each stride falling into a rhythm he hadn't set but somehow kept. He didn't question it — not yet — but part of him recognized the feeling, the way a body knows the shape of water long before it learns to swim.
Late day brought him into a stand of younger fir where sun fell like coins someone had scattered years ago and never returned to collect. He chose one of those coins and sat where it warmed the bark behind him and the back of his neck. He took off his boots not because he needed to, but because the skin of his heels asked him to. He cleaned grit from the seams. He turned the sword half a hand and felt sand whisper under the bindings and shook it out. He did these things because small maintenance was a better use of time than fear.
The forest kept speaking in its usual grammar—creaks, a distant jay with opinions, a single tick of expanding bark as the sun touched and then left. Somewhere downslope a branch let go of the idea of holding and came to earth. He catalogued the sounds and found no heavy step within them.
He put his boots back on and set the sword where it lived. He stood and faced the path again. The air chilled the skin where sweat had lived, but not enough to be cruel. He moved and let the small cold become small nothing.
Near evening he found the hollow that would be his, not by design but because the land offered it at the right time. A windfall had made a lean of its own trunk against a patient neighbor, and the lifted root mat had pulled a shallow cave from the ground. He checked the angles and the smells. Upwind was clean. Downwind held old fox and the ghost of something else—too faint to fret over, but he noted it anyway.
He gathered nothing larger than a finger and struck until heat became alive in the bark curls. The ember took and settled, as if it had been waiting for the work. He kept it stingy. He dried the damp from the day in his sleeves and along his collar. He ate what was left of the berries and told his stomach he'd make it up to it later. It believed him as much as it ever had.
As the light narrowed to its last blade, a howl laid itself across the ridge again. Closer now, but not unkind. Another answered it, shorter, finished with a descending fall that felt like punctuation—a full stop at the end of a sentence.
He didn't rise. He didn't reach for the sword either. He let the sounds belong to the place that had made them.
"Parallel it is," he said into the low fire, and the ember gave up a soft breath in agreement.
Night didn't rush him. It arrived the way a careful friend does, without surprise, with a blanket and a look that asked if you needed anything else before silence. He set the sword across his lap and closed his eyes and counted his breaths until the counting went on without him.
Somewhere out past the root lip, something moved lightly through needles, paused, and moved on. He didn't wake. He didn't need to. He had set his weight well for the day, and the ground remembered.