Rambleon's road tonight ran the familiar seam from Astranaar down through Darkshore's quiet coves to Stormwind's harbor, and south from there into Westfall, where Cassidy fell in with him before the evening had properly settled — her company no longer a happy accident but simply how these nights went now. Sentinel Hill set them loose on the Defias around Moonbrook and the Dust Plains, pillagers and knuckledusters and highwaymen falling in turn, and at the Dagger Hills he took up Thunderbrew, a promise for later.
It was the Deadmines that made the night, though — a sunken place entered at last through the hideout above Moonbrook. Cortonna passed through for a single minute, but it was Dire, a warrior, Jstermy, another hunter, and Emchetyre, a mage, who stayed and made the descent proper alongside him and Cassidy: past diggers and conjurers and evokers, through Sneed and his shredder, to Gnoam Sprecklesprocket and the finished business of Underground Assault, on to Rhahk'Zor and the goblins of the foundry, and Gilnid beyond them. The mines put him down twice — once in the Mast Room, once later in Ironclad Cove — and both times he walked back in through the hideout to finish what he'd started. It was in that cove, past the pirates and blackguards, that he felt the old familiar lift of a new level settle into him: twenty-one, earned in a place that gave up nothing easily.
The group scattered after Ironclad Cove, Jstermy and Emchetyre and Dire all parting ways within the same breath, but Cassidy stayed, as she always did now, to see him through the Dead Acre's harvest reapers and one great fleshripper before the pace of the night eased.
What followed was less a hunt than an accounting. Raven, a warlock, joined him for the long Westfall stretch of it — Stendel's Pond, Moonbrook, the Dagger Hills again — while he gathered red leather bandanas, answered Gryan Stoutmantle's summons, and stood over the Killing Fields at Alexston Farmstead until the last harvest watcher fell. In Stormwind he came away with Bravo's Armbands for his trouble; in Northshire he closed out an old errand with Brother Paxton and took on ink supplies for the abbey; in Cathedral Square, a simple compass found its way into the right hands at last. Cassidy rode with him through all of it, and when she finally peeled away past one in the morning, the ledger was clear and Westfall a little quieter for it.
