The story captures Seoraj's attention and imagination sufficiently that he doesn't question it as a continuation of their conversation - gods are a strange, alien thing to him but spirituality isn't entirely and he thinks of that man's smile and the cold and he remembers Langler telling him they had to walk (asking him if he could walk) and it's not himself he remembers seeing but a man growing up before his eyes, still at once a worried boy watching him not die from the other side of a campfire.

And it's different, but the familiarity is fascinating; it's all life and something else, separate but not inaccessible. And isn't that why he is the person that he is? When he remembers this story, years from now, when the details have begun to blur into other stories and when he's forgotten where he was when he heard it, he will remember that the last pilgrim smiled, and he'll remember the look on Bruce's face as he told him so.

"Good man," he says, mirroring the smile in the story with one of his own. "What did you learn?" About himself; about the mountains; about springtime. Whichever. He was there - what did he learn?