The first few days after that were an exercise in humiliation.
Power did not translate neatly into a fifteen-year-old body. Awareness could tell him a fox was there, a heartbeat of movement under snow, the faint warmth of fur tucked into a drift, but his legs still slipped. His arms still shook. His lungs still burned.
He tracked a red fox through powder snow. His Awareness screamed there, there, there, but his feet failed to obey. He lunged too early, slipped on a hidden shelf of ice, and tumbled ten feet into a bramble patch.
The thorns tore his cloak and his cheek.
The fox didn't just escape. It lingered for a second, golden eyes watching him with what looked like mockery, before it vanished.
Edrin lay in the snow, bleeding a little, breathing hard, and felt something like rage rise.
Not rage at the fox.
Rage at his own body.
In his old life he'd hated his body sometimes, in the way men did when they wanted it to be different. Bigger. Stronger. Faster. Cleaner.
This hatred was different. This hatred was practical. If his body failed, he died.
He got up and kept moving.
Then came the wild dog.
It wasn't a wolf. Wolves in the Gift were wary, smarter than hunger. This was a dog gone feral, mangy and desperate, ribs showing, eyes too bright. It didn't run when it saw him. It charged.
Edrin tried to swing his rusted blade, but his timing was off by a fraction, too slow, too wide. The dog hit him like a thrown stone and took him down into the snow.
Teeth sank into his forearm, tearing through wool and into meat.
Pain exploded.
Edrin screamed, a raw, human sound he hated himself for making and hammered his fist into the beast's snout until it let go, then grabbed it by the scruff and slammed its head into a rock.
It yelped, tried to twist free.
He drove his knife into its ribs in a frantic, ugly thrust.
The dog shuddered, went still.
Edrin sat back on his heels, shaking, blood running down his arm.
He wasn't a hero.
He was a boy who had nearly been killed by a starving mutt.
He forced himself to perform the ritual anyway.
He cut the heart out, small, tough, bitter and choked it down.
[ GAINED: MUSCLE RESPONSE +1 ]
[ MINOR TRAIT: PREDATORY TIMING ]
The shift was subtle.
A twitch in his calf that settled into a steady rhythm. A way of breathing that didn't puff his chest so high. A sense of when to move that felt like being pushed gently from behind.
Edrin flexed his hand, and the pain in his forearm seemed… less.
Not gone. But less urgent.
So that's how it is, he thought.
He didn't know whether to feel grateful or sick.
Probably both.
The seasons didn't turn in the Gift.
They ground.
Edrin spent the next year in a cycle of blood and ice, living more in the ridges and hidden gullies than in Hollow. He'd go back when he had to, because Hollow was where information lived. Hollow was where bodies gathered. Hollow was where you could watch people without being watched too closely, if you played small enough.
But the ridges were where he became something else.
The deer came first.
He tracked a buck for three days.
It wasn't the tracking that was hard. Awareness made tracking feel like cheating. The hard part was patience. The buck moved with the slow confidence of a creature that had survived winters by being careful. It didn't run blindly. It didn't expose itself.
On the fourth day, Edrin saw it in a clearing, head down, scraping snow away to get at lichen.
He did not lunge.
He waited.
He waited until the buck lifted its head, ears twitching toward a distant sound.
Then he moved.
He didn't sprint like a boy. He burst forward like a thrown knife, body suddenly light.
His blade found the throat.
The buck kicked and thrashed, and Edrin held on, grim, until the life left it.
He took the heart and ate.
[ AGILITY +3 ]
[ TRAIT UNLOCKED: BURST MOTION ]
Afterward, his legs felt different. Not stronger, exactly. More… responsive. Like the delay between thought and movement had narrowed.
The next came Boar
The boar nearly killed him.
It lived near the warm stream he'd found above the ridge, where the snow melted into slush and the ground stayed black. The boar was huge, tusks long, eyes small and mean. It charged when it saw him, not out of fear, but out of anger.
Edrin tried to sidestep and strike, but the boar's shoulder caught him and threw him into a tree.
His ribs cracked.
Pain stole his breath.
The boar came again.
Edrin got his knife up just in time. The tusk grazed his thigh, tearing flesh. He screamed again, hated himself again, then used that hatred like fuel.
He waited until the boar's head dipped.
Then he drove the blade into the soft place behind the jaw, twisting.
The boar squealed, a sound like metal tearing.
It thrashed, crushed his leg under its weight.
Edrin gritted his teeth and kept cutting until the boar went still.
He ate the heart, heavy and stubborn.
[ ENDURANCE +3 ]
[ TRAIT UNLOCKED: DAMAGE IGNORE (MINOR) ]
After that, pain became… negotiable. Not gone. Never gone. But something he could push through with a kind of cold focus.
The hawk was almost a joke.
He found it downed after a winter storm, wings broken, feathers plastered with ice. Its heart was tiny, a bitter scrap.
He ate it anyway.
[ PERCEPTION +4 ]
[ TRAIT UNLOCKED: FOCUS LOCK ]
Afterward, the horizon seemed to pull closer. Trees became distinct even in a gale. He could see the twitch of a rabbit's ear from farther away. He could read the land like a map.