The fire crackled low, throwing long, unsteady shadows across the cavern walls.
For a while, no one spoke.
Gabriel sat across from the others in a disciplined, cross-legged posture, spine straight, hands resting lightly on his knees. To anyone watching, he might have seemed still enough to be sleeping.
He wasn't.
The static in his mana channels remained—less violent than before, but still present, a low internal tension moving through him in small, restless pulses. Not pain.
Pressure.
Something new trying to settle into structure.
Across the fire, the old man held a rough wooden bowl of broth Genevieve had scraped together from what little the cave and the goblin camp had provided. His hands shook badly enough to ripple the surface of the liquid. The shattered silver symbol hanging at his throat caught the firelight each time the tremor worsened.
Genevieve sat nearer the wall with one knee raised, a whetstone drawn slowly along the edge of one dagger. The sound was soft.
Regular.
Controlled.
She had recovered enough to sharpen steel.
Not enough to relax.
Finally, the old man looked up.
The firelight caught the wetness in his eyes.
"My name is Thaddeus," he said, voice roughened by cold, fear, and too much swallowed grief. "I am…" He stopped, corrected himself with visible effort. "I was a Brother of the Silver Noon."
Gabriel opened one eye.
Not dramatically.
Just enough to study him.
Elevated heart rate.
Inconsistent breathing.
No deception markers.
Shock genuine.
"You were part of a caravan," Gabriel said. "High-value movement."
Thaddeus blinked. "How did you—"
"You wear ceremonial white and carry a broken holy symbol made of worked silver," Gabriel said. "Your hands show neither labor calluses nor combat adaptation. You were protected infrastructure, not armed escort." A pause. "Why were you in the High-Pass?"
The old man stared at him for a second longer than necessary, then looked down into the bowl as if the answer might be there.
"We were transporting tithes," he said quietly. "Offerings. Sacred texts. Relics bound for the High Sanctum." His mouth tightened. "The pass was supposed to be clear."
Genevieve's whetstone stopped.
The silence that followed it was sharper than the sound had been.
"It wasn't a raiding party," Thaddeus continued, voice thinning as memory overtook control. "Not the usual kind. There were too many of them. Too organized." His grip tightened around the bowl until broth sloshed over the rim onto his fingers. He didn't seem to notice. "And they had a leader."
Gabriel's attention sharpened.
"Define."
Thaddeus swallowed.
"A Shaman," he said. "Grey-skinned. Taller than the others. He carried a staff made of bone, and the thing…" His expression twisted. "The thing bled green fire."
Genevieve's head came up at once.
"A Shaman this far south?" she said.
The disbelief in her voice wasn't theatrical.
It was local knowledge colliding with bad news.
"That's a Tier-Two threat," she said. "Goblins in the crags don't usually have command structure that deep. Not unless something has changed."
"It has," Thaddeus whispered.
He lowered his head, eyes fixed on the fire.
"He did not fight like a beast," he said. "He directed them. Sent them where to strike. Broke the guards apart first, then the wagons, then the horses." His voice faltered. "My High Priest knew immediately what it meant. He grabbed me by the shoulders and told me to run."
The old man's hands started shaking harder.
"He said I was the youngest. The fastest. That someone had to reach the monastery and tell them what happened here. That something was stirring in the dark."
His next breath came in broken.
"I hesitated."
The words were barely sound.
"For a heartbeat, I stayed."
Genevieve looked down at her dagger.
Did not interrupt.
Thaddeus stared into the flames as if they were showing him the scene again.
"And in that heartbeat, I watched them die," he said. "All of them. The guards. The drivers. My High Priest." His voice dropped to a ragged whisper. "The Shaman saw me run."
A pause.
"He laughed."
The fire popped between them.
A single coal shifted.
Then Thaddeus spoke again.
"He sent hunters after me. Not to kill me quickly. Just to drive me. Turn me. Keep me afraid." His grip slackened slightly. "They'd close in, then vanish. Let me think I'd escaped. Then I'd hear them again."
He looked up at Gabriel then.
"They were herding me."
No one spoke for a moment.
Gabriel watched his face the way he had watched the labyrinth, the goblins, the wyvern's glide path.
Not for emotion.
For pattern.
The old man was telling the truth.
More importantly, the truth had structure.
"A Shaman implies centralized command," Gabriel said at last. "Which means the attack on your caravan and the attack on Genevieve's hunting party are unlikely to be isolated incidents."
Genevieve's eyes shifted to him.
He continued.
"The wyvern forced displacement. The goblins applied pressure in the aftermath. Your caravan was ambushed in transit by organized goblin leadership moving outside expected territory." His gaze settled briefly on the priest. "That is not random predation. It is area denial."
Thaddeus looked lost.
Genevieve didn't.
Her expression tightened in the way it did when someone said something she already feared.
"They're clearing the pass," she said quietly.
Gabriel inclined his head once.
"Most likely."
The old man's face drained further.
"But why?"
Gabriel leaned back slightly, not away from the conversation, but deeper into thought.
"Unknown," he said. "For now."
That answer hit harder than a false reassurance would have.
Good.
False reassurance wasted time.
Gabriel looked at Thaddeus directly.
"You want to honor your High Priest's last order."
It wasn't phrased as a question.
Thaddeus nodded once.
Too quickly.
Emotion overriding caution.
Gabriel continued.
"Then you need to reach the monastery."
The old man's grip tightened around the bowl again.
"Yes."
"I need terrain data," Gabriel said. "Settlements. Roadways. choke points. Monastery position. Known creature zones. If organized goblin activity is expanding and a wyvern has entered the same operational space, then local geography stops being background and becomes leverage."
Genevieve gave him a look halfway between irritation and reluctant acceptance.
"You make everything sound like a problem to solve."
Gabriel looked at her.
"It is."
That should have annoyed her more than it did.
Instead she looked back at the fire.
Thaddeus stared at him with the uncertain awe of a man too exhausted for skepticism but too frightened for trust.
"You speak of the Monastery as though it were…" He searched for the word. "A vault."
"An information hub," Gabriel said.
The phrase clearly meant nothing to the priest.
So he clarified.
"A defensible location containing people who know more than I do."
That, at least, translated.
Genevieve slid the whetstone once more down the dagger's edge, slower this time.
"You're assuming they'll let us in."
Gabriel's expression didn't change.
"I'm assuming they'll prefer living visitors with warning over dead silence."
Thaddeus looked between them, his breathing finally starting to even out under the weight of purpose.
"If we leave at first light," he said, "and avoid the lower bog route, we can make the outer rise by nightfall." He hesitated. "If the roads are still safe."
"They are not," Genevieve said.
"No," Gabriel agreed. "But roads are for volume, not survival."
That drew a faint crease between Genevieve's brows.
"You already have a better route?"
"No," he said. "I have a better question."
He looked at her.
"What route would a wyvern avoid?"
She held his gaze for a moment.
Then, reluctantly—
she answered.
And that was close enough to agreement.
The fire settled lower.
Thaddeus finally drank from the bowl in his hands, small careful sips now that the shaking had lessened. Genevieve sheathed one dagger and kept the other across her knee. Gabriel rose in one smooth motion, the new density in his frame moving under the black cloth without wasted effort.
The priest looked up at him.
Still wary.
Still uncertain.
Still alive.
That was enough.
Gabriel looked toward the cave mouth, where the waterfall still poured silver and red under the light of the twin suns beyond.
"Get some sleep," he said.
Thaddeus blinked.
Genevieve narrowed her eyes slightly.
Gabriel's voice remained flat.
"Tomorrow we begin correcting the forest."
The old man swallowed.
Genevieve stared at him for another second.
Then she gave the smallest shake of her head.
"Wrong," she muttered.
Gabriel glanced at her.
She met his eyes across the dying fire.
"For some reason," she said, "I know exactly what you mean."