Cassidy was waiting for him in Astranaar again, as easy and familiar as she had been three nights running now, and together they turned back toward ground he already knew — Darkshore's twilight coast, the Master's Glaive with its moonstalkers and its old grudge against him. The place took him down twice before the afternoon was half spent, and he rose each time the way he had learned to, without much complaint left in him for it. Fire Scar Shrine gave him worse: Ilkrud Magthrull did not fall easily, and the felslayers and their lesser felguard would not let him try twice without cost, but the ogre mage went down at last and his tome came away for the Tower of Althalaxx tally, one more small debt to that ruin repaid.
Eighteenth level found him at the Shrine of Aessina, though the shrine made him earn it twice over afterward, killing him there more than once before he learned its rhythm. A druid named Karis joined him partway through the worst of it and stayed the better part of an hour, steady company while ghostpaw runners and ashenvale bears kept falling around them. A priest called Papa crossed his path twice more that evening, brief as Darkshore's currents, and a warrior named Kancho would do the same near midnight, gone almost as soon as he had arrived.
An errand for Thaelrid sent him wandering Darnassus's terraces longer than the errand itself deserved, and back at Auberdine he picked up Hollee's note and the promise of research on some corruption before setting out again. It was on the Long Wash, walking it once more in the gathering evening, that he stopped and let himself feel it plainly — a long walk on the long wash is in order, he wrote, and there was something almost restful in saying so, in letting the walking be the point.
The walk did not stop there. Ashenvale opened east into country he had not properly crossed before — Nightsong Woods, the Falfarren River — and beyond it, for the first time, the dust of the Barrens, where Chud the hunter rode with him a few minutes before their roads parted. The Barrens gave way to Stonetalon's rising slopes, unfamiliar and welcome for it, and it was there, at Blackwolf River, that nineteenth level came to him, quiet as the others had. Cassidy was still beside him when the night finally let him go.
