He led it up. Up. Up.
His lungs burned. His legs screamed. Snow slipped under his boots and nearly sent him sprawling twice.
Awareness kept saving him in small ways, seeing a patch of ice before he stepped on it, hearing the wolf's breath and knowing when it was about to leap.
Still, it caught him.
It hit his shoulder, claws raking through cloth, tearing skin. Pain flared hot.
Edrin screamed and kept moving.
He staggered into the narrow shelf where he had stacked stones near the crack.
The wolf bounded after him, and for the first time it hesitated—because the crack was blocked, and the path was narrow, and the prey had led it somewhere it did not like.
Edrin turned.
Knife up.
His hands shook.
His shoulder bled.
He was a fifteen-year-old bastard with hunger in his belly and death in his head.
The wolf took a step.
Edrin took a step.
And then the wolf lunged again,
Edrin did not try to meet it.
He threw himself sideways and drove the knife into the wolf's hind leg where it was already stiff.
The blade sank in.
The wolf howled; an ugly, raw sound that made the hair on Edrin's arms rise.
It snapped at him, missed, snapped again.
Edrin ripped the knife free and scrambled back, panting.
The wolf limped now, wounded and furious, but still deadly.
It circled him on the narrow shelf, trying to find angle, trying to get his throat.
Edrin's mind raced.
Claim, he thought wildly. Consumption. Death.
He did not want Death again.
He had used Death twice now and it had hurt both times, and the system had rewarded him like a cruel teacher tossing a coin to a bleeding student.
He wanted to test something else.
He wanted Claim.
He wanted the moment in stories where the system recognized a kill, recognized a victory, recognized that the protagonist had done something meaningful.
So he fought.
Not like a hero.
Like a starving boy with a knife.
He kept his back to stone. He kept his eyes on the wolf's shoulders and legs, not its teeth. He waited for it to commit, because every time it lunged, it had to plant a foot.
It lunged again.
Edrin stepped in close, too close; feeling hot breath on his face.
He drove the knife up under the jaw.
It hit bone.
It skidded.
The wolf's teeth closed on his forearm.
Pain flared like fire.
Edrin screamed and used his other hand to stab, again, again, again; into the soft place behind its ear, into the side of its neck, into anything that gave.
The wolf shook him like prey.
His arm felt like it was being torn off.
He kept stabbing.
Because if he stopped, he died.
The wolf's body slammed into him. He went down in snow and stone.
Its weight pinned him. Its jaws snapped near his throat, slick with his blood now.
Edrin's vision narrowed.
Not again, he thought. Not again.
He found a scrap of strength from somewhere ugly and deep and drove the knife up with both hands into the wolf's throat.
This time the blade went in.
Warm blood poured over his hands.
The wolf shuddered.
Its jaws slackened.
It tried to rise, failed, and collapsed heavier onto him.
Edrin lay there for a moment, gasping, half-buried under fur and death.
He shoved the carcass off him with shaking arms and rolled away, coughing.
He stared at the direwolf.
It lay still.
Dead.
Really dead.
Edrin's whole body trembled. His forearm bled. His shoulder throbbed. His breath came in ragged clouds.
He waited.
For the chime.
For the system to say something neat like:
[ CLAIMED: DIREWOLF KILL ]
[ GAINED: SOMETHING AWESOME ]
Nothing.
No chime.
No pane of information.
Only the wind and the stink of blood.
Edrin's face tightened.
"Where is the claim," he rasped. "Where is the--"
He stopped, swallowing pain and frustration.
Maybe it did not work like that.
Maybe Claim required witnesses.
Maybe Claim required oaths, words spoken, roles taken, names assigned.
Maybe Claim was politics.
Of course it was politics.
Everything in Westeros was.
He laughed once, bitter.
"Maybe it doesn't work like that," he muttered.
He looked down at his blood-slick hands.
His stomach turned again not from nausea, but from that deeper pull.
Consumption.
The system had said Consumption was a method.
He had a carcass.
He could not drag it back to Hollow. Not without questions. Not without fear. Not without the village seeing him with a direwolf and deciding he was cursed or blessed or worth killing for whatever power they imagined he'd stolen.
He needed to test Consumption here.
Alone.
He stared at the wolf's body.
Raw meat. Cold. Hair. Blood.
He swallowed hard.
"Alright," he whispered, voice shaking. "I'm gonna do this."
Not revenge.
Not victory.
Experiment.
A man's mind in a boy's world, trying to build rules out of pain.
He crouched by the carcass and placed a hand on its chest.
The fur was thick. The body still warm beneath it.
He hesitated, then drew his knife and cut.
The hide resisted like leather. He sawed, grimacing, hands slick.
The smell hit him worse as he opened it.
Steam rose faintly.
Blood pooled in the snow.
Edrin gagged once, hard, and forced himself to breathe.
"You don't have to eat the whole thing," he muttered, talking to himself like a man talking to a horse that was spooking. "Just… a part."
Brain? Lungs? Heart?
His mind flicked through the old myths he remembered, the half-remembered stories of men eating the hearts of beasts to gain strength, eating the eyes to see, eating the tongue to steal words.
He looked at the wolf's ribcage.
The heart would be there.
He cut deeper, prying ribs apart with his knife and fingers. His hands shook, not from cold now.
He reached in.
His fingers closed around something slick and hot.
He pulled.
The heart came free, dark and heavy in his palm.
For a moment he just stared at it.
A piece of the beast that had killed him twice. A thing that had pumped blood through a predator built for winter.
He felt the system's hunger in his own belly like a low tide pulling out.
He swallowed.
"Maybe heart," he whispered. "Yes. That has to be one."
He lifted it.
His mouth opened.
His teeth touched flesh.
He froze.
Everything in him screamed no.
Not because it was human. It wasn't.
Because it felt like crossing a line you could not uncross.
Because once you taught yourself you could eat raw heart in the snow, what else could you teach yourself?
He thought of monsters.
He thought of men who did not flinch.
He thought of what repeated death would do to his mind.
He forced himself to breathe.
"I'm doing this to survive," he told himself. "Not to become something."
Then he bit down.
Blood filled his mouth, hot and metallic. The texture was wrong, rubbery, resistant then it tore.
He chewed, gagging, forcing it down.
His stomach lurched in protest.
He swallowed anyway.
The world held still.
For a heartbeat, he thought nothing would happen.
Then--
DING.
The chime rang inside his skull, clean and bright.
And the system's presence pressed close, as patient as winter, as certain as hunger.
Edrin's breath caught as the next words began to form behind his eyes…