Rambleon met Bird at Dolanaar a little before nine, and the druid fell into step beside him as easily as if they had always hunted together. They pushed out through Teldrassil into the green hush around Wellspring Lake and the river that fed it, and the night's work began in earnest — webwood spiders, nightsabers, timberlings breaking apart under his arrows, the first of each kind falling in that particular way a hunter remembers, if only because it was the first. At the Oracle Glade the fighting turned graver: Lady Sathrah, then the Bloodfeather harpies in their fury and their witchery, and at last Witchmother Arysa herself, whose amulet he claimed for what the glade's keepers called darkness set right. He picked up a shimmering frond there too, a small green errand tucked inside a larger one, meant for a man named Denalan by the water.
Back through Dolanaar the night grew busier with small kindnesses and small tasks — a beast tamed, a fire built, cooking learned at Zarrin's hands, a recipe of the Kaldorei gathered thread by spider-leg thread out along Lake Al'Ameth. Rambleon liked the rhythm of it, quest folding into quest, Bird's steady company at his shoulder through Gnarlpine camps and nightsaber dens. When the eleventh level came to him near Dolanaar's lamps, it arrived quietly, the way most true things do — no fanfare, just a settling-in, a sense of having grown a little more sure of his bow.
It was Darnassus that stayed with him longest. He and Bird crossed into the city near half past ten, through the Warrior's Terrace and the Cenarion Enclave, and something about the moonlit quiet of the place made him stop and mark it, take a picture he'd want later. Standing there he found himself thinking, and wrote it down before the thought could wander off: he really did like Darnassus — calm, he called it, never overcrowded, and he meant it as praise for the whole tree-lit city after a night spent in animal dens and glades that answered violence with violence. He carried word of tears shed for the moon up to the Temple, and came away with a new charge, Sathrah's sacrifice weighing on him now the way unfinished things do. The last stretch of the night he spent simply walking Darnassus's terraces with Bird, in and out of the tradesmen's stalls, in no hurry at all, before he finally logged out among the lamplight.
