Halvard had climbed above the tree line a hundred times chasing strayed goats, but he had never climbed into a sky like this one.
The storm didn’t come from the west, the way storms always came. It rose out of the valley itself, clouds the color of a bruise boiling up past the crags until the whole ridge was swallowed in purple dusk. Halvard should have turned back. Instead he stood in the wind with his lantern guttering, watching the clouds churn and part.
Something moved inside them.
At first he thought it was the storm folding on itself. Then he saw the shoulders — vast, golden, matted with rain — and the shape resolved into a bear the size of a longhouse, cresting the cloudbank the way a ship crests a swell. Astride its back rode a knight in armor hammered gold and black, a crown catching what little sunset bled through the clouds. Around the bear’s paws, small spotted shapes darted and leapt, quick as sparks, keeping pace through vapor that should have swallowed them whole.
The knight’s head turned. For one held breath, across all that distance and wind, Halvard was certain the knight was looking at him — not through him, not past him, but at him, the way you look at someone you’ve been expecting.
He lifted his lantern without deciding to. It was answered: a flare of storm-light along the bear’s flank, there and gone.
Then the wind closed over them, and the ridge was only rock and rain again.
Halvard climbed down at dawn, goats found, nothing to show for the night but a story no one in Ulvengard would believe. But some nights, lantern lit, he still climbs back up to that same outcrop and waits — certain, without knowing why, that the sky owes him a second look.