Rowan visited first.
She didn't praise his roof. She didn't care about the platform. She walked around the cabin, kicked at the slush near the base, and frowned.
"Your drainage is shit," she said, and her bluntness was almost comforting. "First thaw, you'll be sleeping in a pond."
Edrin stared at the ground.
She was right.
He fixed it. He dug channels. He stacked stones. He learned how water moved when snow melted.
Lysa visited later.
She didn't look at the drainage.
She went straight to the stream.
She knelt, dipped her hand in, and started to cry silently, because it was the first time in years she hadn't felt the cold trying to take her fingers.
Edrin watched her and felt something twist in his chest.
Responsibility again.
He didn't like it.
He didn't get to refuse it.
The raid came on a day with a sky like dirty wool.
No horns. No warning. Just the smell of burning peat and the scream of a woman.
Wildlings.
Thirty of them.
Edrin moved.
Death One: He tried to hold the gap between two huts. A giant of a man with a bone-club smashed Edrin's skull before he could even draw his second blade. Darkness
DING
[ GAINED STRENGTH +4 ]
He came back in his hut with the taste of blood still in his mouth, heart hammering, breath ragged. The firelight looked the same. The screaming sounded the same. For a heartbeat he couldn't move because his mind was trying to reconcile the fact that he had just died.
Then the modern part of him, the part that loved rules, latched onto the only thing that mattered.
Data.
He had new data now. He had seen how the giant moved. He had seen where the first blow came from. He knew which hut gap was death.
He ran.
Death Two: He respawned in his hut. He ran out, saved a child from a spear-thrust, but got caught in a pincer move. A wildling woman slit his throat from behind. Wet choking. Darkness.
[ GAINED ENDURANCE +3 ]
This time the death was intimate. Hot. Wet. The sound of his own breath bubbling through a cut throat. He came back gagging, hand flying to his neck, fingers finding skin intact, and for a heartbeat he almost retched.
He didn't have time.
He ran again.
He didn't go where he'd gone before. He didn't stand where he'd stood. He moved differently, used the new endurance like a shield, pushed through smoke that made eyes water and throat burn.
Death Three: He anticipated the pincer. He killed the woman. He saved the child. But then he saw the village was already gone. Hobb was down. The fire was jumping from roof to roof.
[ GAINED: TACTICAL AWARENESS – AWARENESS ( ADVANCED )]
That last gain hit like a cold bucket.
It wasn't just seeing more.
It was understanding more.
He saw the raid not as chaos, but as pattern, how the wildlings moved in groups, how they drove people toward fire, how they cut off exits, how they used fear like a weapon.
And he realized, with a coldness that surpassed winter:
I can't win this.
Not alone. Not with Hollow's half-starved men. Not with no walls, no discipline, no plan.
He stopped fighting for Hollow.
He switched objectives.
Survival.
Extraction.
He sprinted through smoke, felt heat on his face, heard the crack of beams collapsing. He found Lysa hiding under a grain cart, her eyes huge, hands over her mouth to keep from sobbing.
He grabbed her by the arm.
Her skin was cold even in the fire's heat.
He yanked her out.
Rowan was in the open, knife in hand, blood on her face, fighting two raiders like a cornered cat.
Edrin grabbed her shoulder.
"Leave," he barked. "Now!"
"We can hold!" Rowan shouted back, slashing at a wildling's forearm.
"Where?" Edrin pointed at the burning ruins. "There is no 'here' left. I have a place. Move!"
Rowan's eyes flicked to the fire jumping roof to roof. To Hobb's shape down in the mud, not moving. To Mara's hut already collapsing.
Something hardened in her gaze.
She spat blood.
Then she nodded.
They ran.
They ran because he sounded like a man who had already seen them die and refused to let it happen again.
He led them through paths only a wolf knew, through a dense thicket of thorns that tore clothes and skin but hid heat, along a ridgeline where the wind covered scent, across rock where snow couldn't hold tracks.
He didn't stop to look back.
Looking back was how you died with regret in your mouth.
Two boys from the wood-line followed. Tym and Jory, faces streaked with soot, eyes wide. They clung to Edrin's wake like drowning men to driftwood.
Maybe more followed too, at first.
But the Gift did not let many keep up.
Behind them, Hollow burned.
Ahead, the ridge waited.
They reached the warm stream as the sun began to grey behind clouds.
Rowan was breathing hard, one hand pressed to her side where a wildling spear had grazed her. Lysa was shaking, looking back toward the distant pillar of smoke as if her eyes could pull the village back into existence.
There were five of them.
They stood by the cabin, sturdy, warm, hidden by steam rising from water like a ghost's breath.
For a moment no one spoke.
The only sound was the stream and the wind and their own ragged breathing.
Edrin looked at the four people who now depended on his Awareness to stay alive.
"Hollow was survival," he said, voice grounded, stripped of the boy he used to be.
"This…" He swallowed. Tasted smoke still. "This could become something else."
And in the silence that followed, Edrin felt it; the foothold.
Not in stone.
In people.
They were still alive.
For now.
And now he had to turn that for now into long enough.
Because the Gift did not forgive.