He ate the apple on his way out.
The flesh was soft and half-fermented, sweet in a weak, sad way. It tasted like a memory of summer. It made his throat tighten.
He hated that too.
He left Hollow at first light.
The sky was the color of old tin. Snow fell in thin, needling sheets that never quite became a storm, but never quite stopped either. The land had decided to skin them slowly, one cold layer at a time.
Edrin moved through the scrub and rock of the Stony Shore's inland edges, where the Gift began to show its teeth in earnest. His breath steamed. The wool at his mouth grew stiff. His boots, patched and re-patched, soaked through within an hour, and the wet cold bit down.
He wasn't just surviving anymore.
He was harvesting.
That thought came, and with it a flash of something ugly and modern: the mental image of a resource node in a game, a map marker, a route optimization problem. He strangled it before it could bloom into anything too clean.
This world wasn't a screen.
This world bled.
Still, his brain did what brains did. It tried to make sense of pain by turning it into process.
He reached the ridge by midday and climbed.
The ridge wasn't a mountain, not like the ones he'd seen in pictures in his first life. It was just a long spine of rock and stunted pine that rose above the sheltered hollow, exposed to every wind that came off the sea. Up there, the snow was thinner, scoured away in places to reveal dark stone. The pines grew brittle and twisted, branches bent forever in the direction the storms pushed.
Hobb had called it suicide.
Hobb had been right, if you climbed it like a Hollow boy.
Edrin climbed it like a wolf.
At the top, the world opened. He could see the grey line of sea far west. He could see the white and brown patchwork of frozen scrub. He could see Hollow's faint smoke thread, thin as hair.
And he could see the shadow.
It moved between the trees, low and heavy. Not a bear. Too lean. Not a wolf. Too big.
A winter-cat, maybe. Or something worse.
Edrin's Awareness did not scream.
It sang.
Every hair on his arms lifted beneath wool. His heart slowed. His breath steadied.
The creature was hunting.
So was he.
He moved downwind. He moved slow. He moved like he'd learned from dying: never lunge first. Never assume you were faster. Never assume anything.
He found its tracks. Big. Deep. The claw marks clear. The drag of a heavy tail.
He followed for an hour, then two.
The shadow led him into a stand of pines where the ground dipped. There, the snow lay deeper, soft. A trap in itself.
The beast waited.
Edrin saw the moment, not with eyes, but with that tight shift in the air, that change in pressure like the world drawing breath.
He threw himself sideways just as the shadow came.
It hit where he'd been with the weight of a falling tree. Snow exploded. Something dark and furred flashed past his face, close enough he smelled its breath; meat and rot and hunger.
He rolled, came up with his knife in hand.
The beast turned on him.
It was a great cat, larger than any lynx should have been. Its fur was grey mottled with white, perfect for snow. Its ears were torn. Its mouth was scarred. One of its eyes was cloudy.
Old.
Experienced.
It did not roar. It did not scream.
It only moved.
Edrin barely had time to raise his arm before it was on him. Claws raked his forearm through cloth. Pain flared hot.
He stabbed, low and fast, and felt his blade slide along rib, fail to find purchase.
The cat snapped at his throat. He jerked back, felt teeth scrape wool.
He was going to die.
The thought was not fear. It was cold arithmetic.
Then the part of him that remembered dying twice did something strange.
It calmed.
He stopped trying to win with strength.
He tried to win with timing.
He let the cat lunge again, and this time he stepped in instead of back, letting the beast's weight carry it past. He drove his knife up under its jaw.
Steel bit.
Warmth spilled over his hand.
The cat jerked, claws scrabbling, and Edrin held on, bracing his feet, pushing until the blade sank deep.
The cat shuddered.
Then it went limp.
Edrin stood there panting, blood on his hands steaming in the cold, and felt his legs threaten to give.
He hadn't died this time.
That was… new.
He knelt.
His hands moved with the ritual he'd learned the hard way. Not prayer. Not reverence.
Mechanics.
He cut the beast's chest open and took the heart.
It was large, heavy, still warm.
He looked at it for a long moment, then shoved it into his mouth and forced it down.
It tasted like iron and wet fur.
His stomach turned.
He swallowed anyway.
The world seemed to sharpen, edges crisping. The wind sounded different. Less like noise, more like information.
He waited for the chime.
It came, soft and internal, like a bell heard through thick walls.
[ GAINED: AWARENESS ( 60 %) ]
[ MINOR TRAIT: PREDATORY STILLNESS ( basic) ]
No fanfare. No joy.
Just… more.
Edrin wiped his mouth with his sleeve and stared at the dead cat.
He wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry. He wanted to vomit.
Instead he stood, dragged the carcass into a hollow, and covered it with snow.
Not for respect.
For secrecy.
Then he walked.