Nothing happened the first night. Nothing happened the second either.
By the third, the doubled watch had started to feel less like caution and more like a held breath nobody wanted to be the one to let out.
Henry didn't let it soften him. He kept the same rotation: check Dez at the tree break, cross the hollow, check Fenn on the eastern ridge, loop back.
The ground between the two positions ran uneven, scree and exposed root, the kind of terrain that punished anyone moving through it in a hurry.
Fenn had gone quiet these past two nights.
Not scared quiet. Focused quiet, the kind Henry recognized from his own first weeks at Fort Hope, someone trying hard not to be the reason something went wrong twice.
On the third night, Henry checked Dez first.
Nothing to report, same as always, though Dez's jaw stayed tighter than his voice let on.
Henry crossed the hollow toward Fenn's ridge.
He heard it before he saw it: a scrape of claws against stone, then a short, choked sound that wasn't quite a scream.
He ran.
The scree gave under his boots, and he let his weight fall forward into the slide instead of fighting for balance, the way Red had drilled into him a dozen times over.
Speed mattered more than form right now.
He broke through the last stand of pine and saw it.
Frost-grey fur, low and wide across the ground, built for crushing rather than running.
Its claws caught what little moonlight made it through the canopy and threw back a faint, cold blue.
Fenn stood between it and the drop-off at his back, sword raised, already breathing wrong.
The glow flared brighter.
Fenn's whole body flinched toward a block that wasn't going to matter.
"That's not-" Henry started, still too far to reach either of them.
The glow died as fast as it had come.
Fenn was already committed to the wrong defense when the real strike came in low and unlit, catching him across the side before he could correct.
The sound it made didn't belong in a hollow this quiet.
Fenn went down and stayed down.
Henry closed the last of the distance at a dead sprint, sword already in hand, every calculation he normally ran collapsing into one line.
'Don't get hit.'
His Vitality wouldn't forgive whatever mistake this thing's Strength could punish him for.
The wolverine turned on him instead of finishing Fenn off.
For one long second neither of them moved.
Then it lunged.
Henry didn't meet it. He let his boots do the one job they were built for, sliding off the line of the strike instead of trying to block something that outweighed him several times over.
Claws raked the space he'd occupied a half-second earlier and scored four pale lines into the boulder behind him.
"Henry!"
Hannah's voice, closer than he'd expected. Dez's shout right behind hers.
Hannah broke from the tree line at a dead run, blade already drawn, and planted herself at Henry's shoulder without breaking stride.
Two fronts now, both of them moving like they'd trained for exactly this.
The wolverine's head snapped toward her, weighing a calculation Henry could almost see it running.
One target down. Two more closing, neither hesitating.
It didn't like the math.
It broke off, wheeled, and vanished back into the tree line faster than anything that size had any business moving.
Gone before Hannah even reached him.
Henry didn't chase it.
He dropped to his knees beside Fenn instead, hands finding the wound before his mind fully caught up to what he was looking at.
Deep. Too deep. Blood already soaking dark through Fenn's shirt and pooling against the stone underneath him.
"Stay with me." Henry pressed both hands against it, for once with nothing tactical behind the words at all. "Stay with me, Fenn."
Dez arrived seconds later.
He made a sound Henry had never heard out of him before, something that wasn't quite a name and wasn't quite a prayer.
Wren was already moving by the time they got Fenn back to camp, some instinct in her cutting clean through the panic everyone else was drowning in.
She was digging through her satchel before anyone had to ask, hands steadier than her voice.
"Low-tier." She uncorked a vial and pressed it to Fenn's lips, tilting his head back. "It won't close something this deep. It'll buy him time. That's all it's for."
Fenn's breathing evened out, just barely. Just enough.
Dez was on his feet before Henry could get his own breath fully back. "We need to move. Now, tonight, not sitting here waiting for it to come back and finish what it started."
"Dez, I know, but-"
Hannah spoke over him, calm and flat. "Moving right now is exactly what it wants. Slow, half-blind, carrying someone who can't defend himself, through ground it knows better than we do in the dark. That's not getting ahead of it. That's handing it a second target."
Dez's jaw worked, but nothing came out.
"We hold what we can see," she said. "We move when we can actually watch where we're putting our feet. Not before."
Something in his shoulders gave, even if it didn't look like it made him feel any better.
Henry sat back on his heels, hands still red, and let himself feel it for exactly as long as it took to catch his breath.
Then he made himself stop.
Corbin and Silas had gone still at the edge of the firelight, the whole camp gone quiet around what was left of the night.
Wren didn't look up from Fenn's side.
"We're done here." She said it flatly, not a question. "Whatever's left in the ground can rot. I'm not losing anyone else to it."
"Agreed." Henry glanced toward the tree line the wolverine had disappeared into, still visible in his mind's eye more than his actual sight. "We move at first light. Fenn can't take a hard pace, so we go slow, and we go careful, but we go."
Dez hadn't moved from Fenn's other side since they'd gotten him back to camp, one hand still gripping his friend's, like letting go might undo whatever the potion had bought them.
"He's tough," Dez said, quiet, mostly to himself. "He's always been tougher than he thinks."
Henry didn't have anything to add to that.
He just kept his hand on Fenn's shoulder and stayed where he was, watching the dark past the firelight for as long as it took the sky to start turning grey.