The survey expedition wrapped its work at the ruins within the week, Professor Aldiss cataloguing enough material to keep her scholarly society occupied for years, and the party made the return journey to Wolfsbane Crossing without further incident, the guardian at the threshold remaining motionless the entire time they finished their documentation nearby.Garrick collected his share of the commission payment at the guild hall, considerably more substantial than the rat contract that had started everything, and found himself, for the first time since fleeing the palace, holding enough coin to actually consider what came next rather than simply surviving day to day."You've got that look again," Wren said, joining him near the notice board as he studied the postings with fresh interest. "Like you're already three steps ahead of the rest of us.""Just thinking about training," Garrick said, which was true enough. The Flowing Current had given him a real foundation to

The formal position Zephar had promised, all those weeks ago in the garden, had finally arrived, and Darian Mordaine settled into his new office within the Chancellor's wing with the particular satisfaction of a young man who believed he had earned something rather than simply been handed it."Junior Advisor to the Chancellor," he said aloud, reading the freshly lettered plate on his door for perhaps the tenth time that morning, savoring the words. "Has a proper ring to it."His first assignment, modest by the standards of real governance, involved reviewing minor trade disputes between merchant guilds, tedious work that most senior officials considered beneath their attention. Darian approached it instead as an opportunity, quickly discovering that the authority attached to even minor decisions could be leveraged into something considerably more useful than the position's formal scope suggested.A merchant named Corbin Whitlock arrived at his office within the firs

They reached Emberfall on the evening of the third day, the punishing pace Ilvara had set leaving every member of the party exhausted, and the sight that greeted them past the final ridge stopped Garrick cold despite his tiredness.Smoke rose from several points along the city's outer wall, thick columns visible even from this distance, and the sound of distant fighting carried faintly on the evening wind, shouts and something else, a low, guttural roaring that didn't belong to anything Garrick recognized from his months of survival across two kingdoms' worth of wilderness."That's worse than the reports suggested," Fenn said grimly, studying the scene with a tracker's practiced assessment."Move faster," Ilvara ordered, and the party broke into a hard run down the final stretch toward the city's main gate, weapons drawn, exhaustion forgotten in the face of what was clearly an active, ongoing crisis rather than a siege already stabilized.The gate guards recogni

Garrick woke before dawn, every muscle aching from the previous night's fighting, and found Fenn already awake near what remained of their small camp inside the city walls, studying something laid across his knees by the gray pre-dawn light. "Couldn't sleep either," Fenn said, without looking up. "Wanted a look at this before anyone disturbed it." Garrick approached and saw what held the tracker's attention: a fragment of chitin, clearly cut from one of the fallen creatures, its surface marked with something that didn't belong on any natural hide. Scorch marks, deliberate and patterned, arranged in a shape too regular to be accidental. "That's not from the fighting," Garrick said, crouching for a closer look. "No," Fenn agreed. "This mark was already here before it died. Someone branded this creature, or something like it, deliberately." He turned the fragment over, revealing more of the pattern. "I've tracked plenty of wild packs in my time. Never seen one marked like livestoc

They reached Emberfall as evening settled over the walls, the militia's repair efforts visible along the breach where fresh timber and stone had already begun closing the gap the chitterlings had torn open two nights before. Ilvara met them at the gate, reading the urgency in their pace before they'd said a single word. "Report." Fenn laid out the findings quickly and clearly, the abandoned camp, the empty cages, the armed soldiers who'd emerged from the command tent. Garrick let him carry the account, offering only confirming details when asked, careful to keep his own reaction as measured as everyone else's. "Organized," Ilvara said, once Fenn had finished, her expression grim. "Trained soldiers, proper cages, real coin behind the operation. That's not opportunistic banditry. Someone wanted this city to burn specifically." "Any theories on who?" the militia captain asked, joining them with fresh bandages wrapped around one forearm. "Plenty of enemies could want a frontier c