Rambleon spent the evening close to the roots of Teldrassil, back and forth through Shadowglen and Aldrassil so many times the paths must have felt worn into memory. Cassidy, a druid, fell into step with him early and stayed the whole night through, on and off, the two of them threading Shadowthread Cave for a webwood egg, hunting down a fang, filling a crystal phial for Tenaron's errand. It was quiet, patient work — the kind that fills a young hunter's evening without ever quite becoming a story, until Corithras Moonrage's tasks carried them out past Dolanaar to Lake Al'Ameth, where an oakenscowl and its timberlings fell, and briefly a warrior named Aurel walked with them before peeling off his own way.
At Ban'ethil Hollow the work turned rougher. Gnarlpines — shamans, defenders, augurs — fell in numbers through the Barrow Den as Rambleon chased down relics for the wakening druids: a rune of nesting, a black feather quill, a raven claw talisman, a sapphire of sky. He reached his twelfth level there, in the dim of the den, and had just enough time to feel the small satisfaction of it before the Gnarlpines answered in kind and put him down. Twice, in fact — he woke once, went back in, and died again before the fight finally went his way. He said nothing more about it than the ledger allows; some nights ask to be shrugged off rather than dwelt upon.
The back half of the evening brought company thick and fast — Vamshi and Dread, priests both, Titania and Kaeds, druids, and briefly Abbey — a knot of adventurers converging on the same sleeping druid and the same claw-marked business, then scattering again to their own paths within the hour, the way strangers do in Shadowglen. Cassidy alone endured, rejoining him near Dolanaar for one last stretch that carried them through Starbreeze Village, back to Corithras with a filled jade phial, and finally against Ferocitas the Dream Eater and a stand of Gnarlpine mystics and warriors near the Oracle Tree, seven mystics falling before Tallonkai's jewel was won.
By the time he returned to Dolanaar past eleven, the night's work was mostly done — a couple of quests still open, waiting on tomorrow. He marked the moment there in the village, tired in the particular way that comes from a night spent in one small green corner of the world, turned over and over until it gave up what it had to give.
