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.