He walked faster.
Not from courage. From the need to outrun his own thoughts before they turned into something useless, like fear dressed up as caution. The pines tightened around him, and the wind died in their needles until the world became a room with a thousand listening ears.
Awareness made it worse.
Every sound had edges now. Every scrape of branch against branch, every distant crack of ice, every whisper of his own breath felt like a warning delivered in a language his bones understood too well.
He had gone to the heart tree to learn. He had learned.
Consumption / Claim / Death.
A neat little triad, like a priest's sermon. Like a maester's list. Like the universe pretending it had rules a man could bargain with.
Edrin hated that it did.
He kept his hand near his knife as he moved, though he knew what that knife was worth against the thing that had torn his throat out as easily as a man snapped a twig.
Not much.
Still… he walked.
The village did not see him when he slipped back through the trees. Or they saw him and did not care. A bastard boy came and went. Hollow measured worth in wood carried, snares checked, meat brought back. Not in what storms a boy kept inside his skull.
He took a half-hour to do the motions expected of him. He checked the nearest snares. He brought back a thin rabbit and a handful of winter herbs. He let Old Rusk see him with something in his hands, because Rusk's eyes were dull but his mouth was sharp and he liked to talk.
Then he went to his hut and shut the door.
Only then did he let himself sit.
Only then did he let himself breathe.
His throat itched again, phantom pain where teeth had closed.
He could still feel the weight of the direwolf on him. The cold intelligence in pale eyes. The humiliating, animal certainty of it.
And worse than the pain was the memory of the moment after.
The dark.
The absolute certainty that this was the end.
Then waking whole as if the world had shrugged and said, Not yet. Try again.
He stared at the low fire until the embers blurred.
"Okay," he muttered to himself in the hut's stale stink. "So. First step."
He swallowed.
"First step is I kill that damn wolf."
The words sounded ugly in the air. Petty. Small. Revenge-shaped.
He shook his head, as if he could shake the motive loose.
"I'm not, not doing this for revenge," he told the empty room, like the empty room cared. "Why would I, when the beast caught me in a compromising position."
His mouth twisted.
If he lived long enough in this world, that might become the most humiliating way he'd ever died.
But it was not revenge that pulled him. Not truly.
It was testing.
A lever had been put in his hands. He needed to know the limits before the world's real knives arrived. Before lords and Watchmen and whatever old thing smiled behind weirwood faces decided to take an interest in the bastard boy with a strange new hunger in his belly.
He leaned forward, elbows on knees.
"Devouring," he said quietly. "Consumption. Claim. Death."
Death he understood now, in the worst way.
Claim… was murky. How did you "claim" something in a place where even a man's name could be taken?
Consumption was obvious in theory and disgusting in practice.
He imagined tearing into raw meat, cold and iron-stinking, and his gut turned not from squeamishness alone, but from something deeper. From that new pull he'd felt at the heart tree. Hunger wearing a different face.
He exhaled slowly.
"Alright," he said. "We're doing this like a rational person."
He almost laughed at that.
In Westeros.
He tried again, more honestly. "We're doing this like a person who wants to live."
He looked down at his hands. Fifteen-year-old hands. Callused, cracked. They belonged to a body that had survived cold and hunger for years, but the mind inside them had read too many stories and played too many games that promised neat outcomes if you were clever.
This world did not reward cleverness.
It rewarded timing. It rewarded brutality. It rewarded luck.
And now it rewarded death.
He stood and began to gather what he could without drawing notice.
A length of cord. A small sack. A strip of dried meat for the road. His knife, of course, and a second blade he kept tucked under a loose board, rusted and ugly, but a blade was a blade.
He hesitated, then took a strip of cloth and wrapped his hands.
Not armor. Just friction. Something to keep skin from splitting if he had to grip fur or stone or bone.
He paused at the doorway, listening.
Hollow's sounds drifted in. The scrape of wood. The low mutter of voices. A cough that sounded like it might never stop.
No alarm. No screams. No horn.
Good.
He stepped out into the grey day and kept his head down, moving like he belonged to the routine. A boy going to check traps. A boy going scouting.
Only he knew he was hunting something that was not a rabbit.
He moved toward the trees with the same practiced ease he always used. Scouting (Basic), the system had called it, which felt like an insult until he remembered the system did not care about pride. It cared about categories.
Once he was under the pines again, the world tightened into cold and shadow.
Awareness sharpened everything.
He found the old patch of woods near the village where folk went when they needed privacy—when they needed to piss, shit, whisper, kiss, fight, stab.
He did not go far into it.
Not this time.
Not like a fool.
He crouched at the edge and studied the snow.
Tracks.
Not the village dogs. Not deer. Not rabbits.
Wolf.