Bigger than any wolf had a right to be.
The prints were old enough that the edges had softened a little, but Awareness let him see what he might have missed before. The way the stride had changed near certain trees, as if the beast had slowed. The way it had cut close to Hollow, hungry and bold.
The memory of his last death was a map burned into his nerves. He could see the path he'd taken, the spot he'd chosen, the stupid little tune he'd hummed like a man trying to pretend he was not about to squat in snow while surrounded by teeth.
He swallowed.
He did not go to the exact spot.
He circled, wide, giving the trees respect.
The wolf's tracks led away, angling toward higher ground, toward the ridges where stone broke through the pine roots.
Edrin followed.
The Gift rose in ugly steps. Snow clung thinner on the slopes where wind worried it away, leaving hard crust and exposed rock that cut boots. The pines grew sparser as he climbed, replaced by scrub and stubborn, twisted things that looked like they had learned to live by being hard.
He kept stopping to listen.
A man's instinct, sharpened by the system's new cruelty: Do not die stupidly if you can avoid it.
Still, the thought kept gnawing at him as he moved.
Sleep.
He had died. He had woken in his hut. It had felt like waking from a dream, except the pain had been too real. The teeth. The tearing.
He had woken before the death.
Before he had stepped out.
Before he had gone to the trees.
As if the world had rewound to the last time he'd closed his eyes in safety.
A checkpoint.
He hated that his mind kept reaching for modern words, but the concepts fit too well.
"So sleep works as some kind of checkpoint," he whispered to himself as he climbed, "and I respawn when I die."
The word respawn made him grimace.
He stared at the wind-scraped snow and tried to translate it into something he could say in this world.
"Return," he muttered. "I return."
Still sounded like a spell.
The bigger question was worse.
"How many times?" he asked the cold air. "Indefinitely?"
The system had not answered. The system rarely answered in full sentences.
It gave him chimes. It gave him words like a knife tapping glass.
It gave him rewards.
The thought of rewards made his stomach twist with that deeper hunger again.
He stopped and pressed a gloved hand to his belly as if he could hold it down.
"No," he told himself. "No chasing death. Not for a number."
He pictured himself dying over and over, grinding out gains like a madman. And he pictured the moment one day where he did not wake.
Because of course there would be a moment. Nothing in Westeros was free. Not food. Not mercy. Not magic.
He remembered the warning at the weirwood.
[EACH PATH INVITES CONSEQUENCE.]
There were things in this world older than kings. Older than castles. Things that could trap a man in ways worse than death.
His mind, always hungry for worst cases, offered him one.
Brynden Rivers.
The Three-Eyed Raven.
A man rooted into wood, half-dead, half-not, existing in a place where time did not flow like it did for everyone else.
Edrin's breath fogged.
"I have to be careful," he whispered, "because there can be a thing that kills me permanently."
Or worse.
"A trap," he said. "Where neither I die nor can do anything."
He shuddered.
It was too easy to imagine. Being stuck. Being conscious. Being unable to move. Unable to end it. Unable to reset.
That was the kind of cruelty this world offered without blinking.
He tightened his grip on his knife and kept following the tracks.
The wolf's trail grew stronger as he climbed. Less softened. Fresher.
And then the smell hit him.
Not the clean scent of pine and cold. Not smoke from Hollow's fires.
Rot.
Old blood.
Wet fur.
A stink like a butcher's yard left untended in summer, except here it was half-frozen, preserved by winter in a way that made it worse.
Edrin slowed.
He found the place where the ridge broke into a shallow cleft between two boulders. There was an opening, dark as a mouth. The stone around it was stained in places, darker where something had brushed past, leaving greasy smears.
The stench rolled out.
Edrin's nose wrinkled. His eyes watered from the cold and the smell both.
"Ooowh," he breathed, unable to help himself. "That looks like that beast's dwelling."
His stomach did something strange; half revulsion, half pull. Hunger that was not his own. Or maybe it was.
He swallowed hard.
"Here I come," he whispered, voice low, and the words that followed were for himself, not for any god listening. "You fucker."
He grimaced. Even alone, it sounded too modern, too… casual.
He corrected it in his head the way he always did now, translating thought into something that fit the world.
You damned beast.
He stepped into the mouth of the cleft.
The cave swallowed light. It was not deep at first, but it bent, and the bend ate what little grey daylight remained. He moved carefully, feeling with his feet before he put weight down. Ice made liars of stone.
The stink thickened.
Then he saw them.
Carcasses.
Not one. Many.
Some half-eaten. Some stripped to bone. Some still with scraps of hide clinging, like clothing torn away.
Deer, he thought. Maybe. The bones looked too small for an elk. A fox skull. A rabbit. Something bigger that might have been a dog.
He crouched near one and touched the rib with his knife.
It was cold, but not frozen solid. There was still wetness. Recent.
The wolf had been feeding here.
His fingers tightened on the hilt.
Awareness caught something else, marks on the stone. Claw rakes. Fur caught in a crack. A place where the floor was scuffed like something large had turned, circled, paced.
A den.