The summons came four days after their return, delivered by a Guild runner to the room above the cooper's shop with the kind of formal wax seal that made Bren go very still the moment he saw it.
"Guild board wants Coale's expedition team to appear before them," he read aloud, frowning. "Witness testimony regarding irregular findings at the Greymantle Hollow. Voluntary, technically." He set the letter down. "Nothing about a Guild summons is ever truly voluntary, Kael. Not when it comes sealed like this."
Be careful today, Starlight said, quiet and watchful, as they made their way toward the Guild hall's upper chambers that afternoon. A board is not one mind, novice — it is several, often with several different reasons for wanting the same information. Some will care only about the beast pattern, honestly, because a coordinated threat inside a sealed ruin genuinely threatens every city that relies on the Hollow's training cycle. Others may care about it for reasons that have nothing to do with beasts at all, and everything to do with a border-village boy whose sensing range keeps producing results nobody can fully explain.
The chamber, when they entered, held seven board members seated behind a long curved table — Guild administrators mostly, weathered veterans past active duty, their badges ranging from Bronze to a single Gold pin worn by the board's presiding chair, a stern, silver-haired woman named Director Halloway who wasted no time on pleasantries.
"Instructor Coale," she said, "your report describes a coordinated predation pattern inside the Hollow unlike anything logged in the ruin's recorded history. Walk us through it plainly."
Coale did, with the same brisk professional economy she'd shown in the field — the Hollow-rat pack's unnatural discipline, the fourth-tier beast's deliberate targeting of the strongest available prey, the structural tremor that had shaken walls untouched for centuries. The board listened without interruption, several members making careful notes, until Halloway's gaze finally shifted down the table to Kael himself.
"Novice Ashford. Your registration notes an unclassified sensing discipline of unusual range. I understand you called warnings that materially shaped the engagement's outcome, both in the Hollow and previously at the Wormwood Narrows." Her eyes were sharp, assessing, entirely professional — and yet Kael felt his pulse quicken regardless. "I'd like your account of what your sensing specifically registered, in your own words."
Narrow truth, Starlight reminded him, steady in his chest. The pattern, honestly described. Nothing more.
"It felt organized," Kael said carefully. "Not like normal beast behavior. Like something was directing the pack toward a specific target rather than just hunting whatever was nearest. I've felt something similar before — outside my home village, and on the road to Thornwick. It's why I mentioned it to Instructor Coale immediately."
"Three separate incidents, then, that you personally have witnessed exhibiting this pattern." A man near the table's end — younger than the rest, his badge a deep burnished bronze, his tone carrying a studied casualness that didn't quite match the sharpness in his eyes — leaned forward slightly. "That's a remarkable coincidence for one novice's short career, Ashford. Almost as if the pattern's been following you rather than the reverse."
The chamber went very quiet.
There it is, Starlight said, tight and immediate. That is not an idle observation, novice. Answer carefully.
"I've been on the road a lot in the last two months," Kael said, keeping his voice level despite the sudden cold weight settling in his stomach. "Ashvale to Rushford, Rushford to Thornwick, Thornwick to the Hollow. If something's spreading its influence south the way Warden Vane's reconnaissance suggests, I'd expect anyone traveling that same stretch of country to notice the same pattern eventually. I just happened to be the one whose discipline lets him notice it early."
It was, he thought, watching the bronze-badged man's expression flicker with something he couldn't quite read, both entirely true and carefully incomplete — exactly the kind of answer Starlight had spent two months teaching him to give.
Director Halloway's sharp eyes lingered on him a moment longer before moving on, apparently satisfied, and the board's questioning shifted back toward Coale's tactical assessment — but the bronze-badged man, Kael noticed, did not stop watching him for the remainder of the session, and Starlight's quiet, careful stillness never fully eased.
"Councilman Draeus Vell," Coale said afterward, once the board had dismissed them and they'd made their way back out into the hall's main corridor. "Sits on the board representing merchant-guild interests, technically — but everyone in this hall knows his real coin comes from a private arrangement with Baron Corrigan's household in the lower districts. He's not Guild-loyal the way the rest of the board is. He's Corrigan-loyal wearing a Guild badge."
Bren's jaw tightened. "And he was asking pointed questions about my son's travel history in an open board session."
"He was," Coale agreed, grim. "Which means Baron Corrigan's household has an interest in exactly the kind of pattern your son's been noticing — or an interest in your son specifically, and used the pattern as convenient cover to ask. I genuinely don't know which, and I don't like not knowing." She looked at Kael with something that had shifted, over the last week, from professional wariness into something closer to real concern. "Barons collect useful things the way Houses do, Ashford. Different methods, same appetite. You handled that answer well today. Better than most grown hunters would have under Vell's particular flavor of scrutiny. But I'd start assuming every room you walk into in this city has at least one set of ears listening for exactly the kind of thing you almost said today."
She is not wrong, Starlight said, once Coale had taken her leave, quiet and grave in the space her warning left behind. Vell's interest was not idle curiosity, novice. Whether it traces back to Baron Corrigan's genuine concern about the beast pattern, or something considerably more personal aimed at you, I cannot yet say. But the world you feared reaching Ashvale one day has, in its own quiet way, already reached you here. The question now is only how much further it intends to reach before you're ready to meet it properly.
That evening, back at the training yards for what had become a regular ritual, Wren nearly took Kael's head off with a wind-blade strike that arrived faster and sharper than anything Kael had felt from them before — and stopped, mid-follow-through, staring at their own hand with an expression of genuine, startled wonder.
"That felt different," Wren said slowly, flexing their fingers as though testing whether the sensation would repeat. "That felt—" They tried again, a smaller gust this time, controlled and precise in a way Kael hadn't seen from them even during the Hollow-rat fight. "Bones. I think I just moved into mid stage."
Petren, watching from the ring's edge, straightened with genuine interest. "Show me."
Wren did — a series of quick, controlled wind strikes that carried noticeably more precision than the wild, enthusiastic bursts Kael remembered from their first training session weeks ago, each one landing exactly where intended rather than a hand's width off. The change was subtle to an untrained eye, but Kael's sensing read it plainly: something in Wren's Spark had settled, deepened, found a new and steadier balance within the same second tier they'd occupied for years.
"The Hollow-rat fight did it," Wren said, half to themselves, working through the realization aloud. "Real combat, not just yard drills. Instructor always said mid-stage breakthroughs come from genuinely testing a level's power under pressure, not just repeating the same forms a thousand times in a safe ring. I didn't think it'd actually happen to me. Not yet."
Growth is rarely a straight line for anyone, Starlight observed quietly, watching Wren's small, delighted triumph with something that felt, to Kael, almost wistful. Some wielders spend a decade at the edge of a breakthrough and never quite cross it. Others cross without warning, the moment genuine pressure finally asks something real of them. Remember this, novice — not simply for what it teaches about Wren, but for what it promises about the road still ahead of you. Every trial that nearly breaks you is also, quietly, building toward the moment it finally doesn't.
Kael watched his friend test the new precision of their Wind affinity with open, unguarded joy, and felt, despite Councilman Vell's cold scrutiny still sitting heavy in his chest, a small honest warmth take root alongside it. Whatever Thornwick's deeper currents were quietly deciding about him, some things — a friend's hard-won breakthrough, an evening spent simply training together in the fading light — remained entirely, uncomplicatedly good.