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.

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