Alaric listened to Aina's report with the particular, deliberate stillness of a man mentally recalculating every assumption he'd made about his own territory's safety. He trusted her judgment completely — she had never once, in all the months she'd lived under his roof, behaved like the child she still technically, on paper, was — and her account left no room to write it off as imagination or exaggeration.
He assembled a company of veteran knights that same evening, despite the gathering dark, and led the search himself, combing the forests and hidden valleys around Blackwood for a full, grueling week.
They found nothing at first — no tracks, no disturbed earth, no lingering scent of anything wrong — until the final evening, when Knight Commander Eddie Gable knelt beside a gnarled old oak and felt it: a patch of ground where the ambient Flow had been siphoned unnaturally thin, a cold radiating up from something small and half-buried in the roots. A blue scale, frost already crawling visibly up his gauntlet the instant his fingers closed around its edge.
"It was here, my Lord," Eddie said, low. "And it was powerful."
Alaric took the scale, studied it a long moment, and crushed it in his fist. "It's retreated."
An Awakened Beast, they concluded together — a creature that had absorbed enough ambient Flow to graduate from mindless, animal instinct into something with genuine intelligence, and with it, a far more dangerous unpredictability than any ordinary monster. Its presence this close to Blackwood, this recently, with no reports of missing hunters or drained corpses to explain how it had grown strong enough to Awaken in the first place, left considerably more questions than it answered.
'Did this happen by chance,' Alaric wondered, riding home in grim silence, 'or was it—'
He didn't finish the thought, even privately. He issued new patrol orders instead the moment he reached the Keep, doubled the standing watch across the region, and went home to a family he was, for the first time in years, genuinely and quietly worried about.
A week of jumpy silences followed the encounter. Elias avoided the garden entirely, taking his lessons indoors instead, and offered no explanation that anyone pushed him to give. Sleep offered little real relief — vague, formless dreams of shadows and an ancient, patient gaze he couldn't quite shake off even while fully awake, hours later, sitting at breakfast with a spoon halfway to his mouth.
Aina watched him without comment, privately relieved she'd insisted on the pause in training rather than pushing through it. He was still a child, whatever else he also happened to be underneath that.
Over tea one afternoon, Alaric relayed his findings to her directly — the week-long search, the frost-rimed scale, the working theory of an Awakened Beast now retreated to parts unknown. Aina listened, absorbing all of it in careful silence, and noticed the tension still riding visibly in his shoulders long after the report itself was finished.
"Are you alright, Uncle?"
He waved it off with a practiced, easy smile, reaching out to ruffle her hair with an affection that still, faintly, surprised her every time.
"Nothing you need to worry about. And — how many times must I say it? Uncle. Not Lord Alaric."
"My apologies, Uncle. I will endeavor to remember, from now on," Aina said, and the ghost of a genuine smile crossed her usually composed face.
He noticed, not for the first time, how easily she'd claimed Elias as her little brother without a second thought — and how much more visible effort it seemed to take her to call her own uncle simply uncle, even after months of gentle correcting. He filed the small, faintly comical jealousy away with the rest of the week's worries and went back to the city, Eddie Gable falling into step behind him.
Aina watched them go from the window, then turned her attention to the quiet garden beyond the glass, a determined glint settling slowly into her eyes.
Elias had had his week to steady himself. He'd had his rest.
Training would resume tomorrow, malevolent forest presences or no.