The wind off the cliff had teeth.
It skinned sound down to essentials—rope groaning, a lantern's glass ticking, snow hissing sideways like sand. It forced most people to hunch, to fight for each step.
The man on the ridge below did neither.
Draven watched him through the outpost doorway and felt recognition land in him with a weight that had nothing to do with rumor. It was not the simple certainty of a hunter seeing prey.
It was the cold snap of a designer seeing his own mechanism walking loose.
The demon contract in his pocket went quiet. The multiple disappearances, the "thin voice," the frost cliffs—background noise. Work. Predictable. A problem with a shape the guild already understood.
This was different.
This was a timeline fracture.
