Axilla was waiting for her again, as if the two of them had simply agreed without words to keep walking together, and Winterland found a comfort in that she hadn't quite let herself feel the first time. She learned to cook from Zerril Softbreeze in Shen'dar Village before the boots were even properly on, a small practical thing, and then the highlands opened up in earnest — prideclaws falling until her seventh level came almost before she noticed it, marked by a photograph taken in the village she'd started calling familiar.
Chuleta joined her briefly among the hippogryphs, a new face for an hour's hunting, and between them they put down youth and protector and matriarch alike until the grove quieted. Stabooty rode alongside her just long enough to trade blows with a highlands bandit before peeling off toward his own road, and the Bandit Hideout gave her "Badwind" Bennic's end and, with it, her eighth level — another small mark, another small pride, taken without ceremony in a den that smelled of old campfires.
Falaath Village was new ground, and it did not go easy on her. Fiasko and Evil fell in with her there against the Al'Aketh's lightning and stormcallers, and somewhere in that scramble the village killed her outright — a quick, unremarkable death, the kind the isle seemed fond of handing her. She came back among the living and kept at it, and the highlands finished the job a second time not long after, a death as plain and unceremonious as the first. Two in one night, she thought, was becoming something of a pattern out here, though Commander Cyclas's head went to her all the same before the supplies were recovered and the dead given their last request — a feather, a signet, a cultist's head for Raani's sake.
By Valanaar the ledger of quests had grown long again — crab season, blood tithe, a grand skyseer, a broken construct — more threads than she could follow in one sitting. The Shriekling Den gave her a matriarch's end before she reached the town proper, and her ninth level found her back in Shen'dar Village, the third photograph of the night. Fiasko and Evil had already gone their own ways by then, and Axilla, as on the nights before, was the one constant thread through all of it. Winterland logged off at Valanaar's edge, the night unfinished, the list of errands longer than her legs could carry before morning.
