The mountains were quieter today. Not peaceful—never that—but wary, like a big animal pausing between breaths. Kaden felt it as soon as he passed the last fence post and stepped under the pines. Sound thinned. Even the wind seemed to listen before it moved.
He told Astrid he'd be scouting for deer sign along the ridgeline. He told Erik he'd be back before dusk. He told himself he was just checking the trails.
Frost glazed the world in thin glass. The path cut narrow between trunks, roots twisting like buried knuckles under the snow. Kaden shifted his bow, feeling the familiar comfort of its weight settle across his palm. He liked the silence of the woods when it was honest—birdsong fading, snow squeaking, branches ticking—but today the quiet felt… deliberate.
He followed the creek for a time, where ice hummed softly over black water. He paused at a bend and crouched, studying a mess of tracks pressed into the powder: hare, fox, something heavier pacing along the bank. The heavier prints weren't hooved. Not splayed like deer, not cloven like goat. Paws. Big ones. The claws had scored the crust.
"Wolves?" he murmured, but the stride was wrong. Too long. Too heavy in the forelegs. Too much weight there, as if pulled forward by a chest built to crush.
He rubbed his thumb along a print's edge. The ice stung. He straightened, listening.
Nothing. No jays cursing, no squirrels scolding, no little birds flitting branch to branch. Even the creek kept its secrets under the ice.
He left the creek and cut uphill.
The ridge path began as a suggestion, old stones sunken under snow where once a road had been. Pines crowded close, trunks going black where the sun never found them. Kaden stepped where the ground looked quietest, flexing his feet so snow wouldn't scream under his boots. Somewhere ahead, the birch waited, the one he'd been pretending not to think about since last week.
He smelt it before he saw it. Pine sap is sweet and sharp; birch sap has a bitter, wet edge. The gouges were darker now, edges ridged, ice beaded in the wounds like pearls. Too many gouges for a wolf. Too narrow for bear. Kaden's glove hovered over the marks, not touching.
"Whatever you are," he whispered, "you don't belong this close."
A jay would've shouted at him for talking to a tree. No jay answered.
He moved on, setting his course where the hill rose and the trees thinned. The light grew cold and gray. On the far side of the ridge, where the land tugged down into a shallow saddle, the woods broke into a clearing, and in it—half-buried under drift and time—stones.
Kaden stopped. The world seemed to hold its breath with him.
It wasn't a ruin the way stories paint ruins, with noble arches and heroic bones. It was a squat, stubborn shape of stacked rock, collapsed and weathered. A low wall still stood to the right. A corner of roof beam jutted at an impossible angle like a rib punched through skin. The place had sunk into the earth, and the earth had tried to forget it and failed.
An outpost, his mind named it, and the word landed with a weight he didn't expect.
He slid into the clearing, weight on the balls of his feet, eyes scanning for fresh sign. Nothing moved. The only tracks were his. He stepped to the doorway where two stones leaned toward each other, and put his hand against the left one.
Cold leached through the glove into bone. Lichen crackled under his palm. When he pulled away, a gray smear dusted the leather.
"Anyone home?" he said softly, because jokes were how you moved forward when your stomach told you to run.
He ducked inside.
The air was colder here, the kind that steals out of cellars and old wells. Dust lay where it could cling; in other places wind had scraped the floor clean. The room wasn't big. A single chamber with a smaller square tucked at the back, maybe once a watch nook or storeroom. The roof had mostly fallen, but beams crossed overhead like blackened spears, holding just enough of a lid to make the light sullen.
Kaden's breath fogged and drifted. He moved slow, paying attention to shadows, to places a fox might den. A broken shield hunched in a corner, rotten leather clinging to its boss. A spearhead rusted itself into the earth by the far wall, its shaft long gone. The stones themselves had been carved by hand—no one stacks rock this square by accident.
His boot kicked a pebble. The sound skittered across stone and died quick.
He took another step and froze.
There, carved waist-high on the right-hand wall, shallow and worn but still sure—two curved lines like fangs, and between them a straight scratch like a spear.
Kaden reached out before he could stop himself. He traced the emblem with his glove, feeling the grooves as if the stone still remembered pressure. Twin arcs above a spear.
He'd seen it drawn in ash on the longhall floor by the skald. Heard whispers that marks like it were stitched into cloaks and carved into old posts where the forest swallowed walls. Proof. Not a story told to make children sit quiet. A mark made by a hand with a knife who stood in this room and thought it mattered enough to cut stone.
He stared until his eyes stung.
"Okay," he said to the empty air. "You were real."
Silence agreed with him.
He searched the room the way Erik taught him to search for anything you care about: not with hurry, not with greed. Patience. Corners first. Then edges. Then the center, where everyone else looks first and so leaves for last.
He found a shard of pottery that flaked into dust the moment he lifted it. A buckle half-eaten with rust. A frost-stiff scrap of cloth he didn't dare unfold. And then, under a beam that had fallen from somewhere above and pinned a drift into a crusted hump—something dark that wasn't stone.
He set his shoulder and pushed. The beam shifted with a complaint that thudded through the floor. He pried snow out with his knife, flakes squeaking under the blade. Cold found the seams of his gloves and crept up his sleeves.
A chain slid into view, black and dull where ice had kissed it, a knot of links tangling around grit.
At the end of the chain, a disc the size of his thumb lay cupped in a pocket of frost.
It wasn't fancy. No runes carved to glow in hero-light. No jewels. It was plain, almost ugly—dark metal, round, edges a little nicked, the face smooth except for a faint ridge of raised metal circling halfway in from the edge. The kind of thing that would disappear on a soldier's chest and only matter to those who knew.
Kaden wiped his glove across it. Frost hissed and smeared. Beneath the grime, the metal didn't shine; it swallowed light instead.
A thrill ran up his spine, quick as a spark. He told himself it was the cold.
He turned the disc over. The back was flat, slightly pitted. Nothing there. No marks he could see. The chain links were sturdy despite rust, the kind meant to survive weather and sweat.
"Are you anything?" he asked the air, which was a foolish question, but silence leaves too much room in your head and he'd rather hear his voice than listen to the quiet press against his ears.
He waited for a shiver in the air, a whisper, a sign. Nothing answered.
Good. He didn't want answers he couldn't take back.
He considered leaving it where it lay.
If the elders saw it, it wouldn't be his anymore.
He closed his fist around the disc until his knuckles ached.
"Just for now," he told the empty room. "I keep it for now."
He slid the chain over his head and let the disc fall against his chest under his tunic. The metal slapped skin and made him hiss. Cold bit, then numbed. He half expected heat, a pulse, a trickle of magic. Nothing. The pendant lay there like any other bit of metal—stubborn, heavy, unhelpful.
"Figures," he muttered, smiling despite himself. "You're like Dorin."
Something creaked behind him. Kaden spun, bow up, arrow nocked before he knew he was doing it.
The doorframe ticked as a drift settled. Snow hissed down somewhere in the rafters. A small trickle of dirt sifted from between stones and pattered onto the floor. That was all.
"Jumpier than a hare," he told the room, and scowled when his voice came too loud.
He paced the outpost once more, slower this time, trying to picture it alive. Men—women maybe, too—sleeping shoulder to shoulder on pallets along these walls. Someone at the doorway with a spear across their knees. A pot simmering in that corner. A cloak hanging there with the mark stitched rough on its hem. Laughter. Boots stamping heat back into numb feet. Someone humming, someone cursing, someone writing a letter they would never send.
Kaden closed his eyes. For a heartbeat, the cold felt like a hand on his shoulder. He opened his eyes quickly and it was only air again, and he laughed at himself because the alternative was to look over his shoulder and he chose laughter when he could.
He stepped out into gray daylight. The clearing seemed smaller after the cramped dark. He moved along the outer wall, tracing his fingers over stones as if they would tell him how long they'd been waiting. A notch had been cut in one rock at knee height—functional, like a foothold for climbing to the roof. He wedged his boot there and levered himself up, gripping a beam until his glove stuck to sap. He wriggled onto the remains of the roof.
From here, the ridge rolled away like the backs of sleeping beasts. Snow lay smooth except where wind had combed it into ridges. The treeline cut across the slopes in a dark seam. To the west, cloud hung heavy, a single gray thought refusing to move.
He lay on his stomach and peered down the far side. No smoking chimneys, no other old walls. Just more woods. The pendant pressed cool against sternum and ribs, an unfamiliar weight. He felt suddenly ridiculous for wearing it. Equally ridiculous for taking it off.
He slid down carefully, boot heels searching for purchase. A splinter caught his sleeve and scratched. When he reached the ground his legs were all knee and awkward. He shook them out and laughed again because he couldn't seem to stop laughing at himself this morning.
He circled the clearing once more, following his own prints to be sure he was covering his tracks. He paused at the doorway, pressed his hand to the stone mark one last time—the twin arcs above the spear—and then turned toward the trees.
The woods met him with that same deliberate quiet. He broke it with his breath because someone had to.
He made good time down the ridge at first, his mind still at the outpost. Every few steps he touched the pendant under his tunic the way a man touches a new bruise just to be sure it's still there. It didn't warm. It didn't glow. It did exactly nothing, which felt like an answer all its own.
By the time he reached the lower trail, color had changed. The sky wasn't gray anymore; it was something flatter, the white of bone. Snow sifted down in a dust so fine it felt like breath on his cheeks.
He stopped at the birch again. The claw marks were the same, but the sap had stopped weeping. The ice beading in the wounds looked thicker, as if the cold had decided to hold the bleeding tree together by force. He lifted his hand, then lowered it. He didn't want to touch the marks now. He wanted to get home before the light died and the quiet put its hand on his shoulder again.
He moved faster across the flats. Twice he thought he heard a soft scrape off to his left, a sound like something heavy dragging just enough to whisper. The second time he heard it, he stopped dead and listened so hard his ears hurt.
Branches ticked. Snow dusted down from somewhere high. Under his breath, he counted to thirty the way Mira did when she hunted quail.
Nothing moved. He had to breathe again eventually and when he did his breath sounded foolishly loud.
"Fin," he said to the empty trees, "if you're playing a trick, I am going to sell every scrap of pork in your father's shop and blame a ghost."
The trees declined to answer.
He forced himself to keep a reasonable pace, the way Erik would, not running, not stumbling. The pendant thudded against his chest in a slow beat he tried not to match with his own. The first pale smoke of Frostvale came up through the trees like a promise.
The palisade loomed the same as it always did—logs dark with old weather, ice glinting between them. Erland stood at the gate. His beard had collected more frost, and his hands were wrapped in new wool. He lifted his chin. "You're later than you said."
"I'm earlier than I could've been," Kaden replied, which made the old hunter snort despite himself.
"See anything?"
"Sign," Kaden said. "Odd tracks by the creek. Strange marks on the birch we talked about."
Erland's mouth flattened. "More than wolves?"
"Feels like it."
Erland's gaze flicked to the trees over Kaden's shoulder, then back to Kaden's face. "Don't go alone if you can help it."
Kaden nodded as if that had been his plan. He ducked through the gate and let the village close around him—heat in gusts, goats complaining, the forge ringing its constant argument with iron. The sounds didn't ease the tightness in his chest the way they usually did.
He cut across the green, head down, because he did not trust his face not to tell a secret. Mira spotted him anyway because Mira always did. She paused in the act of roughing a goat's chin and raised an eyebrow that could have pinned a man to a wall. Kaden shook his head quickly—later—and she didn't press, which told him she read more than he wanted her to.
At the longhouse, Astrid's voice reached him before the heat did. "If that's my son, he's putting his boots by the door and his pride on the bench."
"I did that once," Kaden said as he ducked in, "and the dog stole it."
"There is no dog," Astrid said, but her eyes softened as they took his measure. "Food now. Then you can invent animals."
Erik glanced up from where he sat mending a net, and this time the small smile was real enough to touch. "You're back."
"Always," Kaden said. The pendant lay like a coin of ice against his skin, and he tried not to think of it as he reached for the bowl Astrid thrust into his hands. Stew scalded his tongue. He welcomed the bite.
"How far?" Erik asked.
"Ridge and down." Kaden sipped and let the heat go somewhere deep. "Tracks by the creek. Not wolf. Bigger."
Erik's fingers did not pause in their work, but his eyes flicked up once, sharp as a knife's edge. "We'll talk to Jorund."
"Tomorrow," Astrid said. "Tonight my son eats and sleeps and does not go chasing ghosts."
Kaden nodded into his bowl. He ate. He stacked the wood Astrid pretended he'd forgotten. He tightened a hinge at the door because it squeaked, and the squeak made him want to crawl out of his skin.
Kaden lay on his pallet and stared at the rafters until the rafters stared back. He slid the chain out from under his tunic and let the disc lie against his palm. In the lamplight it was the color of midnight and stubbornness. If he held it just so, the faint raised ridge around the face caught light and made a thin ring.
"Tell me I'm not making a mistake," he whispered.
The pendant answered exactly the way you'd expect a bit of old metal to answer: not at all.
He tucked it back under his shirt, turned on his side, and let exhaustion do what sense could not.
He dreamed of snow swallowing sound, and of cloaks the color of storm walking out of trees without footprints, and of eyes in the dark that didn't blink.