The unfinished threads from Ban'ethil Hollow were still waiting for him, and Rambleon meant to see them closed before the night went anywhere new. He was back in Teldrassil before the sky had properly darkened, a Warrior named Lepoof falling in with him just long enough to see Ursal the Mauler brought down near the Pools of Arlithrien and a phial filled at Lake Al'Ameth, then peeling off as strangers do. Cassidy found him again in Dolanaar not long after — familiar as ever, the two of them picking up where the Barrow Den had left off, filling another phial at Wellspring Lake before the trail bent toward the Oracle Glade. There, among the Bloodfeathers, Hatescreech and Windmistress Gaedress both fell to him, and with their amulets in hand he crossed into his thirteenth year of adventuring, a small quiet pride that he barely had time to sit with before Corithras's business with the Oracle Tree called him onward.
Fandral Staghelm's errand carried him to Darnassus, and from there — the inscribed bark delivered, a message from the Arch Druid tucked away for a furbolg elder named Onu — south, past Rut'theran Village, over the Veiled Sea itself on hippogryph-wing. Darkshore opened beneath him unfamiliar and vast, and he marked the crossing with a picture, the way a person does the first time a new stretch of coastline becomes theirs to know. Auberdine gathered errands to him like driftwood to a tide line — bones and turtle remains for Gwennyth, crawler legs and thresher eyes for a buzzbox, a red crystal somewhere on the eastern peaks — and he and Cassidy worked through Long Wash and Twilight Shore and the Grove of the Ancients until Onu's task, too, was done.
Twilight Vale and Mist's Edge were less forgiving than the coast had promised. He went down there more than once, and again near Remtravel's Excavation, and later, working alone through Mist's Edge, death found him with a persistence that stopped being remarkable and simply became the shape of the hour — he shrugged it off each time and went back in, the way Ban'ethil Hollow had already taught him to. A Hunter named Banne kept him company through the worst of that stretch; briefly, too, another named Strafhe. Fourteenth level came quietly in Darkshore proper, almost an afterthought after everything the mountain had already asked of him, and he pressed on regardless — into Bashal'Aran, where satyrs and grells fell in their scores and a moonstone seal was won, the crystal on the mountain found at last as the night wore past midnight and toward its close.
