The smoke over the valley floor gave way to grey ash and falling frost.
Where the high plateau had once stood, a vast, jagged scar tore through the mountain spine, exposing pale granite and shattered subterranean roots. Below it, the ruins of ancient stone shelves, collapsed watchtowers, and splintered pine logs lay scattered across the frozen earth.
The mountain wind swept down through the canyon, carrying the tang of iron, ozone, and crushed spruce. Along the eastern rock shelf, the eleven giant elites who had survived Mihawk's precise strikes sat in utter silence. Their heavy wooden shields were cracked down the center, their iron pauldrons dented, and their broad shoulders draped in furs stiff with dried blood. None spoke; none raised a blade. They simply watched the grey fog drift across the stone floor.
In the center of the valley floor stood three empty wooden litters, carved from thick white birch and draped in dark, unpatterned Elbaf wool.
They held no bodies. Only the heavy iron axes, leather aprons, and worn boots of the three woodcutters whose shadows Gecko Moria had severed in the dark beneath the lower canopy. Cut off from their shadows, the pale Arctic sun had consumed their flesh, turning them to ash before the avalanche ever broke over the basin.
Elder Jarul stepped forward from the edge of the assembled crowd, the heavy brass rings bound in his long white beard dragging against the crusted frost. Behind him stood the full council of elders, their ceremonial cloaks heavy with ice, flanked by hundreds of giant civilians, women, and young warriors who had marched up from the lower basin in absolute silence.
The old warrior stopped ten paces from Giovanni. His right hand, thick and weathered as sea-wrack, gripped the carved head of his ironwood staff, but he did not lean on it for authority or leverage.
"We built our judgment on a lie," Jarul's voice boomed across the silent canyon. It carried no royal thunder, no divine weight, only the dry, rasping draft of plain shame. "We saw black iron marks upon our dead and named the human who carried black steel. We did not examine the depth of the cuts. We did not question why a master of the sword would tear flesh with serrated shade."
Jarul turned his eyes slowly toward the elder who had raised the first cry for blood. A towering giant whose shield bore the blue wolf crest of the northern watch.
The gray elder's jaw tightened. His massive hands trembled against his belt as he felt the silent, suffocating gaze of his entire village settling upon his shoulders. Step by step, his heavy boots crunching against the hard ice, he forced himself to advance until he stood beside Jarul. He looked down at the dark mud near his feet, his broad back slumping.
"The wounds upon the woodcutters were ragged, torn from behind by shapes that had no weight," the gray elder stated, his voice cracking against the stillness of the valley. "They were not the work of the man standing before us. I swore upon the ancient hearth that he was our murderer. I was blind. I was wrong."
Jarul unclasped the heavy iron brooch at his collar, letting his mink mantle fall directly into the red-stained snow. Before the vanguard, the council, and the silent families of the dead, the eldest leader of Elbaf unbent his knees.
The frozen earth groaned beneath his massive frame as Jarul knelt. He planted both palms flat in the freezing mud and pressed his forehead directly against the stone, level with the human's boots.
"I am Jarul of the Northern Hearth," the old giant said into the frost. "I locked an innocent guest in our deepest vault. I sent the vanguard of Elbaf to hunt a man who came in peace, while the true vermin slithered through our woods and stole our kin. The council's prejudice leaves us disgraced."
A heavy, absolute silence fell over the length of the valley. No giant moved. No iron ring clinked against armor.
Giovanni stood quietly near a shattered boulder, his left hand resting lightly near the pommel of Ace. He did not offer a magnanimous gesture or tell the old man to rise with honor.
"Get up, Jarul," Giovanni said. His voice was flat, dry, and carried easily across the quiet glade. "Your apology doesn't bring back those three men, and it doesn't fix what your vanguard done coming after me. Keep your honesty, I have no use for your regret."
Jarul inclined his massive head slowly against the mud, taking the blunt rejection without a word of protest. "Nor should you."
From the edge of the southern tree line, heavy, uneven footsteps crunched against the crust of ice.
Ida walked into the clearing, her long two-handed battle-axe sheathed flat across her back. Beside her walked Prince Loki. The giant prince dragged his feet through the snow, his bare hands bound in thick, torn linen where the sharp stone edges of the Adam Tree root had carved his palms to the bone. His broad chest bore the dark, shallow stroke left by Mihawk's blade, and his gold-trimmed coat hung ragged around his ribs.
Loki opened his mouth, his eyes darting nervously toward the gathering of his people. "I only meant to—"
"Quiet," Ida cut him off. "Do not speak of what you intended, Loki. The dead do not hear your motives. The families only live with what you actually caused."
Loki's jaw clamped shut. A flush of deep, burning dark red rose up his thick neck, but under Ida's level, unblinking glare, he could not turn his eyes away.
She planted her palm against his hip and shoved him forward, driving him toward the front of the gathering where Hiyori, Gerd, and the families of the injured woodcutters stood beside the ruined stone ridge.
"Look at them," Ida said softly.
Loki looked. He saw Gerd kneeling in the mud, carefully wrapping splints around the leg of a child whose foot had been crushed by the tumbling rock of his initial advance. He saw Hiyori applying crushed herbs and linen around the burnt, torn hands of a young giant warrior who had tried to hold back the cliff's collapse. He saw the widows standing in rigid, unbroken silence beside the three empty birch litters.
Loki dropped to his joints in the snow.
He lowered his head until his curved horns pressed into the frozen mud, his massive shoulders locked tight as his broad back shook in total, wordless silence.
Giovanni turned his back on the kneeling prince and walked slowly toward the outer edge of the valley floor. His boots left deep, dark prints in the white snow as the horn for the dead raised its low, mournful wail, echoing across the high, frozen peaks of Elbaf.
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