Thendal Grove opened to Winterland Dew a second time, and this time she was not alone in it. Axilla found her within minutes of setting foot back on Zephras Isle, another hunter come to test the same green tangle of grass and vuldren, and the two fell into step as easily as if the isle had arranged it. It was, Winterland thought, a different kind of walking than the solitary kind she remembered from her first hours here — someone at her shoulder, someone to notice when a claw was finally in hand.
The grove was not gentle with her. The ursera thinned under steady work until Aggressive Encroachment closed itself out, but something in the grove answered back hard enough to put her down once, and later the Al'Aketh thugs did the same — neophytes and brutes falling in numbers, until one of them, or something among them, finished what the ursera had started. She returned to her feet each time in Thendal Village without much ceremony. Two deaths in one grove was a poor showing, she supposed, but no worse than honest.
Denna and Gryp crossed her path in quick succession, a shaman and a druid each lending an hour's worth of company before peeling away toward their own business, and somewhere in the overlap of the three of them her fifth level arrived — quiet, unheralded, marked all the same with a picture taken in the grove she was coming to know by heart. Thendal Cave took her next, alone again, into the den of the ursera's foul matriarch, and Urs'anah's head came back with her as proof of the thing done.
By the time she'd reported it all in the village and turned herself toward Shen'dar Highlands, the isle had widened. Shen'dar Village was new ground entirely, and Illaya Amberwind gave her the name for what she was becoming — a windshaper — before handing her on to a thickening stack of errands: mages to meddle with, prideclaws to thin, larders to restock. She sat by the campfire when asked, and felt the Boosted Rest settle over her like something earned rather than given, and her sixth level came not long after, another photograph, another small marker of distance travelled. Prideclaws and galestriders and a half-dozen High Order Apprentices fell to her in the highlands before the night wore itself out near Windsong Standing Stones, the list of open quests longer now than her legs could cover before logout found her.
