Ludger didn’t look up imdiately. He kept writing one more line, finished the sentence cleanly, then capped the charcoal with his thumb.
Only then did he lift his eyes.
The steps grew closer, echoing faintly against stone.
Whatever was in the cave had finally decided he was worth acknowledging.
Ludger rose smoothly, brushing snow from the back of his cloak as the figure erged. He’d been expecting a mage.
An old man wrapped in robes, beard full of frost, eyes glowing with “wisdom,” stepping out like he’d just finished a week-long ditation and a lecture on patience.
What he got was… the opposite. The person leaving the cave filled the entrance like a boulder deciding it wanted a walk.
Two and a half ters tall. Shoulders like carved stone. Arms thick enough that Ludger’s mind briefly started calculating how much at and calories a body like that needed just to exist. He wore rough pants, no shirt, no cloak, no armor, and his feet were bare on the snow as if the cold had signed a peace treaty with him years ago and never dared break it.
The only thing on his upper body was a helt.
Not forged tal. A skull. Half of so beast’s skull, cleaned and shaped into a brutal headpiece. The back of it was lined with dense fur that spilled down like a mane, dull and thick, warm enough, probably, even up here. The bone looked old, cracked in places, stained by ti and smoke.
It was… effective. It was also disgusting. Ludger’s eyes flicked over the skull helt, then returned to the man’s silhouette.
“Nice hat,” Ludger said, voice mild. “Doesn’t seem very hygienic, though.”
The giant stopped. His face was half-hidden in shadow beneath the skull’s brow ridge, the setting sun behind him turning him into a dark shape edged with pale light. Ludger couldn’t see his eyes clearly, but he could feel them, heavy, assessing, like a predator deciding whether sothing was food or entertainnt.
For a long mont, the man just looked at him. Then, without saying a word, he turned.
And started walking away from the cave. Not back inside. Away.
Across the snow, toward the open distance, as if Ludger wasn’t a visitor at all—just a bit of scenery that had spoken out of turn.
Ludger stood there, watching the hulk of a man move with slow, inevitable steps into the fading light. For so reason. So test. So rule. Or maybe the old goat simply didn’t talk until you proved you could follow. Ludger’s expression stayed calm, but his eyes narrowed slightly.
“…Alright,” he murmured to himself.
Then he stepped forward after him, boots crunching, because if the north wanted to play gas, Ludger had already decided he couldn’t afford to lose.
Ludger didn’t chase. Not this ti.
He watched the giant’s silhouette lt into the distance until the wind and the dimming light swallowed it, then sat back down where he’d been, right in front of the cave mouth—and opened his notebook again.
If the north wanted patience, it could have patience.
He kept writing.
The world darkened around him as the last light bled out of the sky. Snow turned from white to gray to almost-black, a flat, endless sheet broken only by the faint glow of steam drifting from the vents. The cave beca a darker shape against darker stone, its warmth a quiet presence rather than sothing you could see.
Ludger wrote by touch and mory more than sight, occasionally feeding a thin thread of mana into the page to sharpen the contrast, nothing flashy, just enough to keep his own handwriting from becoming a sar.
Ti passed in the steady way it did when you stopped fighting it. Then, deep into the dark, he heard footsteps again. Slow. Heavy. Returning. Ludger paused, closed the notebook gently, and looked up.
The giant reappeared at the edge of the steam, a moving shadow with fur and bone on his head. This ti he wasn’t empty-handed.
A dead animal was slung across his back, thick-bodied, shaggy, sothing built for cold and stubborn survival. The creature’s legs hung limp, swaying with each step. Blood had darkened the fur in places, but the cold had already started to stiffen it.
Dinner. Probably.
The giant didn’t acknowledge Ludger. Didn’t grunt, didn’t nod, didn’t even glance.
He walked straight past him and into the cave, the carcass scraping lightly against the stone as it disappeared into the dark.
Ludger waited a heartbeat, then spoke anyway.
“Want help preparing that?” he asked. “Cooking too. I can—”
No answer. Not even a pause. The cave swallowed the last of the giant’s shadow and returned to its steady hiss of warm air and silence.
Ludger stared at the cave mouth for a long mont, then let out a slow sigh.
He understood the situation. Walking in out of nowhere and demanding to be taught was already bold, maybe even rude, by northern standards. He wasn’t expecting a welco feast and a handshake.
But this? This deliberate refusal to respond to anything that wasn’t violence or endurance?
It was starting to grind on him. Politeness was getting him nowhere. And for the first ti since he’d left Lionfang, Ludger felt sothing close to fatigue, not in his muscles, but in his patience.
He rubbed the bridge of his nose once, then looked at the cave again, eyes narrowing.
“Alright,” he murmured into the dark. “We’ll do it your way.”
He didn’t say what that ant yet. But the north was running out of chances to pretend he had infinite ti.
Ludger waited for three breaths after the giant disappeared. Then he heard it.
Wet chewing. Bone scraping. The steady, unbothered sound of at being eaten by soone who didn’t care about manners, cooking, or the concept of parasites.
Ludger closed his notebook, slid it back into his pouch, and stepped into the cave.
The warmth hit first, damp, vent-fed heat that made the air feel thick. The darkness swallowed everything else. Ludger lifted two fingers and flicked a thread of mana into the air.
“Tinder.”
A small, controlled fla blood to life, hovering just above his hand. It didn’t roar. It didn’t smoke. It simply existed, enough light to paint the cave walls in orange and reveal the shape of the space.
The cave widened a few ters in. There was a rough sleeping mat in a corner, a pile of old bones near the back, and a flat stone that served as a table if you were the kind of person who didn’t believe in furniture.
And there, sitting like a statue that had learned to eat, was the giant.
Two and a half ters of muscle and old scars. Bare feet planted on stone. The skull helt still on his head like he wore it to bed out of spite.
He held a chunk of at in one hand, barely skinned, still ragged with fur in places, and he was chewing through it like it was bread.
No fire. No salt. No care. Just teeth and will. Ludger watched him chew and felt a faint, instinctive disgust crawl up his throat. That was a quick way to get his stomach upset. Or worse.
The giant didn’t stop. Didn’t speak. Didn’t even acknowledge the fla.
He simply watched Ludger from under the skull’s shadow while his jaw worked steadily, the at disappearing one brutal bite at a ti. Ludger stepped closer, careful not to crowd him, close enough to be heard, far enough that if the man decided to swing, Ludger had room to move.
“Sigrid sent ,” Ludger said, voice calm. “She said you have an unusual art. I ca to learn.”
No reaction. The giant kept chewing. Ludger stared at him for a heartbeat, then exhaled softly through his nose.
“Fine,” he muttered, more to himself. “We’ll start with not dying of food poisoning.”
He turned back toward the carcass in the corner, half dragged inside, still stiff with cold. Ludger crouched beside it, held out his hand, and let mana flow.
Wind gathered at his fingertips, not a gale, not a show, just a thin edge of pressure, like an invisible knife.
He sliced.
Clean, precise cuts. Skin separating from at without tearing. Fur peeled away in broad sheets instead of sticking in clumps. He worked fast, letting the wind do the sharp labor while his hands guided it.
In minutes, the carcass looked like sothing a sane person would cook.
He ford a bowl from the stone floor with earth magic, smooth-sided, thick enough to hold heat without cracking. Then he pulled water from his pack, poured it in, and set the bowl into a shallow depression he shaped to stabilize it.
A second flick of mana.
Tinder shifted, and he fed the fla under the bowl until the water began to tremble.
Soon it was boiling, bubbles rising steadily, steam thickening in the cave’s warm air.
Ludger dropped chunks of at into the water, watching the surface cloud and the sll change, from raw iron to sothing richer, safer.
He worked like it was routine, like he’d done it a hundred tis. Because in a way, he had. Survival was mostly repetition. While he cooked, the giant finally stopped chewing long enough to swallow.
Then he tore off another piece and kept going, staring at Ludger the entire ti as if trying to decide what kind of creature he was.
Not a threat. Not prey. Sothing else. Ludger didn’t look up right away. He stirred the boiling at with a carved stone paddle, voice even.
“You don’t talk much,” Ludger said.
No answer. The only response was the slow grind of teeth.
The man just watched, silent, heavy, and unreadable, while Ludger turned raw at into sothing edible, as if the act itself was more interesting than any words.
Ludger’s eyes narrowed slightly. The water kept boiling.
Steam curled up toward the cave ceiling, collecting on stone and dripping back down in slow, fat drops. The sll of cooked at finally started to push out the raw iron stink, turning the cave into sothing closer to a shelter than a den.
The giant chewed for a while longer, eyes fixed on Ludger with that sa slow, predatory patience. Then, finally, he spoke. His voice was deep and rough, like gravel rolled in a barrel.
“Sigrid should know,” he said, “that I don’t want visitors.”
Ludger didn’t look surprised. He didn’t even look up right away. He stirred the pot once more, then set the stone paddle down carefully.
“It should be obvious,” Ludger replied, tone flat, “that Sigrid doesn’t care much about what others wish for.”
The giant’s jaw paused mid-chew.
Ludger continued anyway, because the truth didn’t need permission.
“She does what she wants for her people,” Ludger said. “And she decided your knowledge is useful.”
He glanced up then, eting the shadowed gaze beneath the skull helt.
“She also doesn’t want your knowledge to die with you.”
For the first ti, sothing like amusent flickered in the giant’s posture.
He snorted, short, dismissive.
“I have a lot of winters ahead of .”
Ludger held his gaze for a beat, then looked past him, out through the cave mouth.
Outside, the world was a sheet of dark snow and wind, peaks cutting the horizon like broken teeth. Even in the fading light, the north looked the sa as it always did, cold, empty, endless.
An endless winter. Ludger stared at it, quiet, and the thought ca uninvited.
A lot of winters ahead… it doesn’t seem like winter ends around here?
He didn’t say it out loud. He didn’t need to. His eyes stayed on the snow beyond the cave like he was weighing the aning of the phrase. Because up here, “winter” wasn’t a season.
It was the default. And if the world was always winter, then saying you had “many winters ahead” didn’t sound like a promise. It sounded like a challenge.
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