It had been more than a few moons since the boar's tusk tore his thigh.
The scar was a pale rope now, pulling faintly when he bent too far, but it no longer ruled his steps. The first weeks after had been a cage — limping, binding and re-binding the wound, rationing meat so he could spend his strength on healing instead of hunting. He'd hated the stillness more than the pain. But the forest had not let him stay idle. Wolves passed near camp more than once in that time, sometimes a shadow between trees, sometimes a flash of eyes in the dusk. Once, they'd taken a haunch from a kill he'd left as an offering. Another time, he'd woken to find a fresh kill dropped less than thirty paces from his shelter, steam still lifting from its open belly.
They never stayed. Never approached. But they watched.
And somewhere in that month, his mind had begun to shape itself to theirs. He caught himself circling open ground instead of walking straight through it, moving low when the wind shifted, gauging distance less by measure of paces and more by how many bounds it would take to cross. When his thoughts wandered, they wandered in arcs and scent trails.
He ate better now. More meat, more often. His shoulders had taken on new weight, not just bone and sinew but the kind earned by work repeated until it became as much a part of the body as blood. His grip on the sword no longer trembled after long practice. The calluses on his palms were thick enough that the hilt felt almost smooth in them.
This morning, the air was cool and dry, the kind that made breath vanish almost before it left the lips. He rose early, bare feet sinking into the pine needles as he stepped into the small clearing he'd beaten flat over weeks of training.
The sword felt light in his hand.
He began slow — the old forms his father had drilled into him until they could be done with eyes closed. Steps measured, weight forward, heel soft. Each motion folding into the next without a break. The memory of Regnar's voice was still there, a gravel-edged murmur correcting, adjusting: Lower your shoulder. Don't swing — cut. Let the ground carry you.
The ground did carry him now. He felt its give and rise in every step, knew without looking where a root lay beneath the soil or where stone waited under moss. His Earth training had crept into the sword work without him noticing. The zoning his father had taught — controlling where an opponent could be — had new teeth when his own feet moved as if the forest itself had planned the path.
He pivoted hard on one foot, slashing low, the blade's weight pulling him into a spin. His trailing heel slid into the next step without thought. When the cut ended, he was already moving to the next position, his stance balanced enough that he could have struck again in any direction.
It felt right.
Not perfect — he was not Regnar — but closer than it had ever been.
He kept at it until sweat ran into his eyes and the muscles along his ribs burned. Each pass was cleaner than the last, the edge hissing faintly as it cut air. Even the pauses between strikes felt sharper, coiled with something ready.
A shadow passed over the clearing.
He slowed, glancing up through the high canopy. Clouds were rolling in over the ridge, dark and heavy-bellied, their undersides flickering pale in the distance. The air had thickened without him noticing, the kind of pressure that made skin feel too tight.
The first rumble reached him low in the chest, like a drum heard from far off.
And with it came a prickle along the nape of his neck, then down his arms to the backs of his hands.
He froze.
It was a feeling he knew. Not exactly, but enough that memory stirred — the night on the slave ship when the storm raged so close he thought the sky itself might split. Back then, it had been a wild thing, too vast to grasp, a roar in his blood that left him shaking. Now, it felt closer. Focused.
Calling.
He sheathed the sword and stepped out from under the trees into the open slope. The wind carried the smell of rain and something sharper, a scent like burning metal before it burns. Another flicker lit the sky, and the fine hairs on his arms stood.
The fire in him — the Elementum Matteo had shown him how to tend — stirred in response. But this wasn't fire's heat. It was fire's cousin: quicker, hungrier, with no patience for a slow build.
He closed his eyes, let his breathing slow. Not the deep, still calm that fire asked for, but something tighter, more alert — a coil rather than a pool. The air around him seemed to press inward.
A faint shift in the treeline drew his gaze uphill.
Two shapes stood against the gathering dark — wolves, their forms still and sharp-edged in the flickering light. They did not move toward him, nor away. Simply watched, as they always had.
The next lightning strike hit the ridge less than a hundred paces from where they stood. The sound cracked the world open.
Neither wolf flinched.
He didn't either.
Instead, he stepped toward it.
The static in the air bent with him, like grass toward wind. He felt it in his teeth, his fingertips, the base of his spine. A shiver ran through him, not from cold but from the sense that this force — raw, reckless — was aware of him.
When the next bolt came, it landed in a pine just downslope, splintering the trunk with a scream of wood. The flash left his vision white, but he kept his eyes on the place it had struck, watching smoke curl from the wound in the bark.
The fire in him flickered, reached for that heat. And for a moment, he understood. They were not strangers — flame and lightning. Two branches of the same tree, both born of heat and hunger, one drawn out over time, the other striking all at once.
Another bolt cracked, closer still, and he lifted his hand without thinking. The air between his fingers tingled, as if it wanted to leap.
The wolves had shifted now, circling slowly to the slope above him. Their silhouettes moved in perfect silence, paws finding ground without breaking a twig. Their eyes caught the next flash and for a moment reflected it, twin sparks in the storm.
He stayed until the rain began to fall in hard, cold sheets, soaking him through. Even then, he kept moving through his father's forms, each cut and pivot timed to the thunder's rhythm, feeling the way his steps and the storm began to share a beat.
Somewhere uphill, a wolf howled — not the full-throated call to the pack, but a low, drawn note that seemed aimed only at him.
When at last he stopped, chest heaving, the clouds had begun to move on, their trailing edge lit with fading fire. His muscles ached, but not from strain alone. Something in him had shifted.
The wolves were gone from the slope.
He didn't have the words for it yet, but he knew: this was the beginning.