Cassidy found him again at Mirkfallon Lake, as if Stonetalon's dust had never quite left either of them from the night before. The wyverns wheeled and dove there in numbers, and Rambleon learned quickly that haste only got him clawed for it — patience is key with pridewings, he noted to himself, and kept to it through a dozen more of the creatures and their consorts before the lake finally yielded its tally. A basilisk fell along the way, gray and stone-still even in death, and Stonetalon Peak itself asked little more of him than the climb.
From there the night unspooled into an old, familiar wash of geography — Ashenvale's paths bending down into Darkshore, the Long Wash walked again, Auberdine passed through without much pause. At Remtravel's Excavation he picked up two new faces, Raín the hunter and Is the warrior, and the three of them broke golems and gravelflint diggers together for the better part of half an hour before curiosity pulled them all toward Blackfathom Deeps. The Drowned Sacellum did not welcome strangers. Rambleon died there once, then again, and a third time before the party gave up on it properly — an unglamorous end to an otherwise easy evening, and one he shrugged off the way a hunter learns to. Is and Raín peeled away after, back to whatever roads had brought them, brief companions and no less pleasant for their briefness.
He crossed the sea to Teldrassil and on to Stormwind almost on a whim, and once there the city opened one favor after another into his hands — errands for Alexston, for Mauren, a stack of dusty volumes to be fetched from the Royal Library shelf by shelf. Westfall took the middle of the night from him: the Jansen Stead, Saldean's farm, Sentinel Hill's tower with its bandana-wearing Defias trouble, gnoll paws counted eight of eight at Stendel's Pond. The Riverpaw gnolls there cost him two more deaths in quick succession, careless work against a den he underestimated, and he came back to it more carefully the second time. A tram ride under the mountain, a marked moment in Cathedral Square worth a picture, a scroll delivered for a goblin named Gaxim who wasn't even in the same country yet — the errands piled up faster than he could clear them, and he let them, one after another, until Shelf Picked closed out with the last book back on its stand.
By the time he found his way back to Astranaar, Cassidy still walking beside him, a shaman named Val fell in step just long enough to say hello and goodbye in the same breath. Then Cassidy was gone too, and the road was his alone again.
