Caledonia was trying to kill him.
Not metaphorically. The mountain range in the northern shelf of Hyperborea was home to seventeen documented monster classifications and at least three undocumented ones, and in the first four days of training Ervalen had encountered six of them — two ice-drake packs, a stone-colossus, what the local hunters called a VOIDHOUND but which was technically a subspecies of void-predator that hunted by sensing Soul-Brand emissions, and something on the third night that had no classification at all and departed when he drove a full-output Lance through its central mass.
The "Caledonia training grounds" that Straze had described turned out to be a general designation — a loose term covering approximately three hundred kilometers of mountain terrain where the ambient Soul-energy was dense enough to accelerate Brand refinement and the constant monster pressure meant you were either always improving or eventually dead.
There were no instructors.
There was no facility.
There was the mountain, and the cold, and the work.
Ervalen found this perfectly acceptable.
---
He had been at it for eleven days. He rose before dawn, ran the ridge lines for two hours — not exercise, navigation, mapping the terrain in his body so he could use it without thinking. He spent the mornings on Lance precision work: distance, angle, kinetic approach, the specific calculation of output-per-meter he needed to close the gap between where he was and where Solomon's number said he needed to be. He spent the afternoons on whatever the mountain sent at him, which was usually enough to constitute a complete training session on its own.
In the evenings he ate, reviewed, slept.
He was, on the eleventh day, crouched on a ridge above a frozen valley floor, eating dried provisions and watching the valley below with the specific attention of someone who had noticed something wrong about the snow pattern and had been trying to determine what for the past four minutes.
The snow in the valley's center was wrong.
Not disturbed — displaced. Large, regular sections of it compressed down to the rock in a pattern that didn't match any wind dynamic. The compressions were roughly circular, each one about two meters in diameter, spaced approximately four meters apart.
Footsteps, Ervalen realized. That's footsteps. Something that weighs—
The valley floor moved.
Not an earthquake — not the random seismic shift of geological activity. The snow in the valley's center erupted upward in a single clean column as something beneath it stood up, and Ervalen had one second to register that what he was looking at had been sleeping under four feet of snow and had just casually risen to its feet before the thing turned its head and looked directly at him.
---
Seven feet, three inches.
He estimated it automatically, the same way he estimated every threat — height, mass, posture, visible capability. Seven feet three. Built like something that had spent eight centuries refusing to stop fighting. Long silver-white hair matted with ice. Amber eyes — not the amber of his own Soul-Brand but something older, the amber of something that had been burning so long it had settled into a coal-glow. Heavy furs over a frame that made the furs look inadequate for the job.
No armor. No weapon.
The hands, hanging at its sides, were larger than Ervalen's head.
The thing looked at him the way a whetstone looks at a blade.
Oh, Ervalen thought, very calmly. That's Fenris.
He had read the file.
Every coalition member with sufficient clearance had been briefed: FENRIS, WORLD-EATER, eight hundred years of continuous soul-combat evolution, Rank 8 Primordial-Class, last confirmed location the Caledonian range, does not affiliate with any political authority, has declined all previous coalition contact attempts, treat as neutral variable.
"Neutral variable" was doing significant work in that briefing.
The neutral variable was now walking toward him across the valley floor, each step compressing the snow a full foot deeper than it should have gone, moving with a loose unhurried quality that Ervalen's body immediately registered as the unhurried quality of something that had never once needed to hurry.
Ervalen did not move.
Running was theater. Running from a Rank 8 entity was also just running, in the sense that the running would not accomplish anything, so eliminating it as an option simplified the situation.
He waited.
---
Fenris reached the base of the ridge and looked up at him. Up close the amber eyes were extraordinary — not the flat assessment of a predator reading prey, but something more engaged than that. Curious. The way you looked at something that had interrupted a very long routine in an unexpected way.
"You threw a Lance," Fenris said.
His voice was deep in the way of something that had been used for eight centuries. Not rough — worn smooth, the way stone wore smooth under long water.
"Yes," Ervalen said.
"At him." Not a question.
"Yes."
Fenris looked at him for a moment. "How far did it go?"
"Four meters."
The amber eyes moved. Something in them shifted — the specific shift of someone receiving information they found interesting. "Through the fire."
"Through suppression-depleted fire," Ervalen said. "The Sage King ran a suppression field for ninety seconds before—"
"I know what Solomon can do," Fenris said. He reached the ridge in two steps that shouldn't have covered the vertical distance they covered, and was suddenly on the same level as Ervalen, close enough that the size of him required recalibration. Up close, the sheer physical density of the man — the way he occupied space, as if the space had been compressed slightly to accommodate him — was its own kind of pressure. "Four meters. Through depleted fire. At Rank 4."
"Yes," Ervalen said.
Fenris crouched down. Sitting now, looking at Ervalen at eye level, the amber glow of eight centuries of refinement visible just beneath the surface of his skin. He tilted his head.
"Throw one," he said.
Ervalen blinked.
"Now?"
"You're standing here," Fenris said. "I'm sitting here. Throw a Lance."
Ervalen looked at him. Calculated. A full-output Lance at this range into an entity who had been fighting continuously for eight hundred years was the kind of attack that would either be professionally instructive or completely ignored, and either way the entity in question had shown no hostility, and sometimes you were handed a situation that had exactly one productive response.
He threw.
Full-output. Point-blank. Thirty centimeters.
---
The Lance hit Fenris's right shoulder and — stopped.
Not deflected. Not dissolved. Stopped. As if it had struck something with no intention of yielding — not resistance but simple absolute solidity, the way dropping something against bedrock stopped it. The amber light of the Lance scattered. Fenris looked at where it had hit.
"Hm," he said.
Then he raised his right fist and drove it into the ridge face beside Ervalen.
The ridge — solid Caledonian granite, four hundred million years old — cracked. Not a hairline fracture. A split, running from the impact point down to the valley floor and up to the ridge's crest, the entire face of it shifting two inches to the east with a sound like the world changing its mind about something.
Snow cascaded. Ice chunks the size of cart wheels fell into the valley. The ground under Ervalen's feet lurched.
He caught his balance. Looked at the cracked ridge. Looked at Fenris.
Fenris was looking at his own fist with a slightly evaluative expression. "You didn't move," he said.
"No."
"Most people move."
"Moving wouldn't have helped," Ervalen said.
The amber eyes returned to him. That same interested quality — more of it now. "You're going back," Fenris said. "When you're stronger. You're going back at him."
"Yes."
"Why?"
Ervalen looked at him steadily. "Because someone has to."
"Straze is going to try," Fenris said.
"Straze is building something. I'm part of what he's building."
"Straze is going to fail," Fenris said. Not cruel. Not dismissive. The flat accuracy of a man who had seen eight centuries of battles and could read a trajectory. "Not immediately. Not without cost. But the configuration he's assembling — the suppression field, the multi-vector pressure, the single outside-pattern strike—" The amber eyes were quiet for a moment. "He will get further than anyone before him. But the math doesn't close."
Ervalen felt something cold move through him that had nothing to do with the Caledonian wind.
"You've assessed it," he said.
"I've been watching," Fenris said. "From here. I can feel high-level combat at considerable distance." He gestured vaguely south — toward the Prussonian mountains, toward the road where ninety seconds of suppression had bought a line of blood and four meters of penetration. "I felt the Lance."
"And?"
"And I came to see who threw it."
---
The valley was very quiet. Just wind, just cold, just the settling of the cracked ridge under its own newly redistributed weight.
"You could fight him," Ervalen said.
"Yes," Fenris agreed.
"Will you?"
Fenris was quiet for long enough that the question seemed to settle into the snow between them and wait. He looked out over the valley — at the frozen surface, at the three moons still visible in the pale daytime sky, at the place where he had been sleeping under four feet of snow until a Lance had woken him up.
"I haven't decided," he said.
"What would make you decide?"
The amber eyes came back to him. That quality of interest again — sharpened now, directed.
"Him," Fenris said simply. "He would have to make me decide. By being interesting enough." He looked at Ervalen with that same professional assessment he had applied to the Lance. "He burned a city in an afternoon. He walked into an imperial palace and killed the Emperor in eleven seconds. He absorbed a coalition assault and walked home to read documents." A pause. "That's impressive. That's not yet interesting."
"What's the difference?" Ervalen said.
"Impressive is what something is," Fenris said. "Interesting is what something does when it meets something it hasn't accounted for." The amber eyes moved south again. "He hasn't been surprised yet. Not really. What Straze built came close. What you threw came closer. But he adjusted. He adapted. He filed it and walked home." The enormous hands folded in his lap. "I want to see what he does when he can't adjust. When something lands that he doesn't have a category for."
"You want to be the thing that does that," Ervalen said.
"I want to see if anything can do that," Fenris said. "Including me."
---
The wind moved through the valley. Somewhere below, an ice-drake pack was moving — Ervalen could track the sound of it, the specific disruption pattern in the snow-settling noise. He catalogued it automatically and decided it was far enough away to be irrelevant to the current conversation.
"You came to see me," Ervalen said. "Not to assess whether he's interesting. You already did that from here. You came because the Lance woke you up and you wanted to see the person who threw it."
The amber eyes returned to him.
No response. Which was, Ervalen had learned from six days of Straze and fifteen years of reading people, a specific kind of confirmation.
"Train me," Ervalen said.
Fenris looked at him.
"You've been doing this for eight hundred years," Ervalen said. "Soul-combat refinement, extreme-condition advancement, fighting things that can actually push back. You know what it takes to close the gap between Rank 4 and Rank 5 faster than natural progression." He met the amber gaze directly. "I have six months. Help me use them."
"Why would I do that?" Fenris said. Not hostile. Genuinely asking.
"Because I threw a Lance at a man you want to find interesting," Ervalen said. "And in six months, if you help me, I'll throw it again. Better. Further. And you can watch from here and see if that makes him interesting."
The valley was quiet.
Fenris looked at him for a long time with those ancient amber eyes.
Then he stood — all seven feet three inches of him rising in a single movement that made the cracked ridge groan — and walked to the edge of the overlook, and looked down into the frozen valley, and was silent for a moment.
"Tomorrow morning," he said. "Before dawn."
Ervalen's chest did something complicated. He kept his face even.
"What should I bring?" he asked.
Fenris looked back over his shoulder. The amber eyes had a quality now that Ervalen didn't have a precise word for — something between entertainment and anticipation.
"Yourself," Fenris said. "What you bring won't survive the first hour."
He stepped off the ridge.
He fell the full forty meters to the valley floor, landed with a compression that sent snow flying in a perfect circle outward, and walked away without looking back.
---
Ervalen stood on the cracked ridge in the Caledonian wind and stared after him.
His hands were not shaking.
Good, he thought. That's progress.
He looked at the valley floor where Fenris had fallen forty meters and walked it off.
Then he looked at his own hands. At the amber light of his Soul-Brand, steady, familiar, the power he had been carrying for four years and had spent eleven days calculating the exact dimensions of.
He thought about twelve meters.
About twenty-five.
About thirty for reliable penetration.
He thought about six months and an eight-hundred-year-old teacher who had just told him that everything he owned wouldn't survive the first hour.
He sat down on the cracked ridge in the cold and watched the three moons track across the pale sky and ate the rest of his dried provisions and did not allow himself to feel the scale of what he had just agreed to until he had finished eating, because some things were better processed on a full stomach.
Then he let himself feel it.
It was enormous.
He sat with it for twenty minutes.
Then he organized it into something he could carry and stood up.
Before dawn, he thought. And whatever I bring won't survive.
He looked at the moonlit valley where an eight-hundred-year-old war engine had been sleeping under four feet of snow until eleven days ago.
Right, he thought. Good. That's exactly what I need.
He went to find somewhere to sleep that was sheltered from the wind.
Tomorrow was going to be a long day.