Invisible String - Cregan Stark

Twelve~ Flattened

Visenya

The woods were beautiful in the morning—quiet, haunting, and sacred.

Trees wore their coats of frost like proud armor, and mist clung low to the earth like a secret waiting to be spoken. The snow muffled all sound, a blanket over the world.

Inns and farmland had slowly become much more scarce the past few days-- replaced with giant blue-grey mountains that carried snow on their jagged shoulders.

Cregan walked ahead, his long stride steady and unhurried, the faint crunch of his boots marking the rhythm. I trailed a few paces behind—not enough to lose him, just enough to watch.

I have always found comfort in observing from that slight remove. There's an unspoken language in the way people move when they think no one is reading them.

Words lie too easily, but a man's gait, the angle of his shoulders, the way his head tilts when listening for something distant—those speak the truth.

Cregan's truth was a quiet one. Focused, deliberate. His eyes tracked the faint depressions in the snow, searching for the thin wire of a snare hidden beneath frost.

Yet every few steps, he glanced over his shoulder, as if to make certain I was still there. Not calling to me, not urging me closer, just... checking. As though the reassurance of my presence mattered.

When he knelt to check the first trap, I crouched a little behind and to the side, watching his hands work with a precision born of habit.

He loosened the noose, checked for signs, reset it with a twist of his wrist. I didn't speak. I didn't need to. There was more to learn in silence.

He moved on with that quiet surety Northerners were born to — grounded and solemn as old stone, but with the precision of someone who had long studied what the land could give... and what it could take away.

I think of how different the men of this land are from the knights and lords of court. In the South, strength was a show. Here, it is simply lived.

We had passed another small Inn by the Last Hearth this morning, a squat timber hall with a thatched roof bowed under snow. The innkeep's wife had pressed steaming bread into my hands before we left, her palms rough and red from labor. No curtsy, no titles—only kindness, simple and unadorned. I had thanked her by name, and she'd looked at me with mild surprise, as though she had not been spoken to as an equal in many winters.

We have passed fields long fallow, cottages shuttered against the cold, smoke rising from chimneys like whispered prayers. I have seen smallfolk sweeping snow from each other's paths, men sharing axes and firewood, women carrying bread to neighbors without being asked. Their unity is not shouted from banners nor written in songs—it breathes in the spaces between them, quiet as the snow itself.

Perhaps that is why I have come to love this land, these people who do not yield to cold or darkness but move through it, shoulder to shoulder. Their honesty humbles me, their quiet strength steadies me. They remind me that power need not roar—it can whisper, it can breathe, it can last.

The North endures.

And perhaps, if I listen long enough, I will learn to endure as it does.

Cregan slows his steps until we walk side by side. His hair was a little darker today beneath the clouded light, pulled back with a leather tie, though a few strands had fallen free to brush against the nape of his neck.

His shoulders were broad, strong, yet never stiff—like the kind of man who carried heavy things so long he no longer noticed the weight.

There was a quiet dignity to how he walked through the woods. He knew this place. He belonged to it, and it to him.