Each step was an effort now. The climb had steepened, the wind had sharpened, and the weight across his back had grown heavier. The mountain did not care for him—it did not care for the dead thing he carried, nor for the wounds that bled beneath his fur. It had never cared for anything at all.

The cold gnawed at him, biting through the thick of his coat, into flesh already torn open, into a soul already worn thin. His breath rose in pale ribbons against the darkening sky, slow and steady, but the ache was there all the same—coiled in his ribs, pressing deep into the marrow of him.

The snowfall did not wash away the stink of death. It only smothered it, dulled it, pressing icy fingers into the gashes carved across his chest, into the bruises blooming beneath his skin.

Then, another howl.

It came from above, winding through the rock and ice, shaking loose the silence that had settled thick around him. Raum did not stop. Did not change his pace. But something inside him settled, the finality curling at the edges of his thoughts.

Northfall.

He did not know them, not personally. Had never stood among them, never spoken their names aloud. But he knew what she had been to them.

Their Queen.

And now he carried what was left of her back home.

The snowfall thickened, stretching in slow, drifting veils. It softened the jagged edges of the world, dulled the sharp rocks and skeletal brush to pale silhouettes. It veiled him, too. A shadow in the mist. A harbinger. A bringer of death.

Then, through the shifting white, movement.

At first, they were no more than dark figures against the snow, blurred shapes bent low to the earth. But as he neared, details sharpened—paws raking at ice-packed ground, shoulders coiling with effort, breath rising in misting clouds. The air carried the scent of exertion. Of sorrow.

And at the center of it, half-buried in the ruin of stone and snow, lay a body.

Raum stilled.

For a long moment, he only watched. The wind carried their murmurs, the scrape of claws against frozen ground, the slow exhale of breath as they worked to unearth their dead.

The weight on his back suddenly seemed heavier.

He had thought himself prepared for their anger. Prepared for the weight of their eyes when they turned and saw him—saw her—and the truth of what had happened. Of what he had failed to prevent. But they had not yet seen him. Had not yet turned from their grief to face the shadow that approached, to see the second corpse the mountain had claimed.

Raum took another step forward.

He did not speak.

He only walked, slow and steady, the drifting snowfall still veiling him, still granting him these last few moments in which he was nothing more than a specter in the mist. But he did not stop.

He moved toward them.

Toward the edge of their grief, toward the moment that would break the quiet and set their eyes upon him.

They would hate him, he knew.

He deserved nothing less.

---

He stopped at the first growl.

It came from a woman near the front, unfamiliar, sharp-eyed, with her hackles raised and her stance shifting forward, prepared to intercept him if he moved a step too far. He didn’t. Raum stilled beneath the weight that draped across his back, the scent of blood thick in the air, unmoved by the suspicion that gathered in their throats like teeth behind a snarl. Others followed—more voices, one snarling an accusation, another snapping their jaws with warning—but Raum heard them only distantly. They circled him like wolves were meant to do, cautious and closing, yet his gaze remained fixed elsewhere.

He had thought, somewhere on the long climb through snow and silence, that when he reached them, the words would find him. He had turned them over in his head, tried to shape them into something passable. Not kind, but clean. Something true. She’s dead. A bear. I brought her back. But now, standing among the cold and the wind and the sound of digging, they scattered like brittle leaves.

He could not seem to hold a single one.

Jasmine shifted with the weight of his stillness, her broken form jostled gently where it clung to his spine. Blood had dried along his ribs. Her fur, stiff with cold, clung to him like the draping of something ruined, a burden he could neither shed nor lay down.

They were already grieving another. Raum could see it in the strain of their limbs, in the way their bodies braced beneath the snow-drenched tree. He watched them dig, lift, strain to reclaim the man buried beneath the ruin. He did not need to ask who the corpse belonged to, for it was in the shape of their grief. In the way one daughter bared her teeth, and another boy whispered a name. Raum had seen mourning like that before. A father, maybe. A king.

One death should have been enough.
But the mountain had demanded more.

He might’ve said something then, if his voice had not been caught somewhere deep beneath the weight of it all. Raum shifted once, the ghost of a breath rising between his teeth, but nothing came. Not the facts. Not the names. Only the silence that had carried him this far. And then his eyes found the boy.

Young. Pale beneath the shadow of sorrow, yet strong in the way a young wolf could be strong—out of obligation, not yet certainty. Raum didn’t know him, had never met him, but the resemblance was unmistakable. The colors. The lines of the face. The bone-deep familiarity that landed in him like a blow, dull and absolute.

He didn’t mean to speak.

The words formed before he could stop them, half-formed, dragging themselves raw across his throat.

You have her face.

His voice cracked—just once.