Cassidy found him at Astranaar again, as easily as if the road between them had never really closed the night before. They dropped down together into Ashenvale and on into Darkshore, Maestra's Post giving way to the long, looping paths of Twilight Vale that Rambleon was coming to know by heart. Grizzled thistle bears fell along the Wildbend, a giant foreststrider and a moonstalker sire near the Master's Glaive, the kind of steady work that asks little of a hunter but patience and a good eye.
Blackwood Den drew him in deeper than he meant to go — warriors, ursas, shamans, one after another — and for a while the company around him kept changing shape. Andria the hunter rode with him the longest, the better part of a quarter hour; Fanaandel and Koiya, both druids, drifted in and out almost as quickly as they'd arrived, Koiya three separate times, never for more than a few minutes. He took up the thread of Escape Through Force there and chased it hard enough that the vale caught him twice — he died once, and died again moments later, the kind of careless end a hunter learns to shrug off and move past without dwelling on it. A hunter named Artemisa joined him not long after, and it was in her brief company, at the Master's Glaive, that he crossed into his twentieth level — no fanfare, just a flicker of satisfaction worth a picture before she, too, went her own way.
He closed out Escape Through Force back in Auberdine, then let the night pull him east and north — across the Veiled Sea to Teldrassil, pausing at Rut'theran Village long enough to mark the water with a picture, and on again to Stormwind. The city gave him its usual small errands: Speaking of Fortitude settled at the Cathedral of Light, the Royal Library yielding a new task from Brother Paxton. From there the Dwarven District funneled him down into the Deeprun Tram, and Rambleon noted it plainly to himself — *1st train ride* — marking the strange, rattling passage under the sea with two pictures, the kind of small first a character only gets once.
Ironforge opened the way Stormwind had, errand after errand handed to him almost before he'd found his footing — Techbot's brain, a dwarf named Bingles, chemicals best left to someone less careless than their owner. An old colleague's business was already settled by the time he reached the Forlorn Cavern, where he handed Gerrig Bonegrip the book that closed out the Powers Below. He logged off from the High Seat not long after, Cassidy's company and the night's long wandering both still settling in him.
