Klaus’s POV
Victory had a strange taste.
It didn’t roar in your chest or leave you lightheaded with triumph. No, it came quietly, like a brief exhale after holding your breath too long. Relief, thin and fragile, that we had made it through another hunt alive. That our losses weren’t greater than they could have been.
The others felt it too. Our descent down the mountain was faster than the climb, though our legs ached and our arms were raw from carrying the wounded. We didn’t speak much, not even when the snow thinned and gave way to sharp stone and mud. The silence was born not of grief, but of exhaustion and that tempered satisfaction of having survived something meant to kill us.
When the jagged slope finally leveled into the low foothills, and the roofs of Severein’s outposts came
