The request took approximately four minutes to become a yes, which was faster than Snow had expected and slower than Sira had apparently anticipated.
She had mentioned the expedition the way she mentioned everything — as a piece of information she was delivering because she had already decided he would want it, dropped into the middle of a conversation about the settlement's water channel system with no preamble and no indication that she considered it a transition. An afternoon hunt, eastern tree-line, standard territorial clearance. The domain ran them regularly. Seven wardens, half a day, back before the evening meal.
Snow had said, "I want to join."
Sira's face had done the thing it did when she encountered something she was immediately and completely in favour of, which was to say it had done approximately nothing on the surface while her eyes said everything. She had gone to find Eraen before he finished the sentence.
He heard the conversation from across the cultivation platform — not because he was listening for it but because Sira's version of a quiet professional argument was not particularly quiet.
Eraen's first answer was no.
Sira's response to this was to produce, in rapid and organised succession, the Thornback incident, Snow's demonstrated ability grade, the specific language of guest status as she apparently had it memorised, the fact that the eastern tree-line was not a restricted area, and the fact that an extra body with a confirmed Flashstep and Smite-class divine output was not a liability on a border hunt regardless of the body's origin.
Eraen, Snow could tell from the texture of the pause that followed, had identified the argument's structural validity and did not enjoy that fact.
She went to find Davan.
She came back four minutes after she had left.
"You're coming," she told Snow, in the tone of someone who had been overruled by their own logic and intended to be professional about it.
"Thank you," Snow said.
Eraen's expression suggested that gratitude was not the appropriate response to being informed of something. She turned back to the platform's railing and resumed watching the cultivation work below, and Snow went to find his boots.
---
They assembled at the settlement's base at the second afternoon bell — seven of them, gear checked and distributed with the efficient minimum of motion that distinguished people who did this regularly from people who were preparing for something novel. Davan was already there when Snow arrived, a broad-shouldered Sylvari with close-cropped silver hair and the particular build of someone who had been running through forests for decades and had the structural memory of it in his whole body. He was the tallest of the group after Eraen, which was saying something, and he looked at Snow the way he might look at an interesting piece of terrain — not hostile, not welcoming, just assessed.
"Thornback, eastern clearing," Davan said. Not as a question.
"Yes," Snow said.
Davan nodded once. Whatever conclusion he had drawn from the Thornback incident, it apparently satisfied him, because he turned back to his equipment check without further comment.
The rest of the group arrived in ones and twos. Three wardens Snow had seen on the hunter platform and not spoken to — one female, two male, all with the lean efficient build of the Sylvari and the particular quiet of people whose work required them to be quiet often enough that it had become their default register. Sira arrived last, slightly breathless, with her short blade at her hip and a compact bow over her shoulder and her silver hair pulled back in a braid that was considerably more organised than her usual arrangement, which suggested she had redone it specifically for this.
And Fael.
Snow identified him from the previous day — the silver-haired warden who had given him the nod on the hunter platform. He revised that memory now. The nod had been from a distance. Up close, the quality of Fael's attention was different — he was perhaps thirty years old by Sylvari reckoning, which put him at a human equivalent of something considerably older, and he carried himself with the particular confidence of someone who was very good at what they did and was accustomed to that being known. He looked at Snow once, at the beginning, with the flat comprehensive assessment of someone categorising a variable they had not requested in their equation.
Then he looked away and did not look back.
The look had said everything it needed to.
Sira appeared at Snow's left elbow. "That's Fael," she said, at a volume that was technically a whisper but technically was also audible to at least two of the people between them and Fael.
"I gathered," Snow said.
"He's the best hunter in the domain after Davan. He thinks outsiders on domain hunts are—" she appeared to search for the diplomatic phrasing and then gave up on it, "— a bad idea."
"That's a reasonable position," Snow said.
Sira looked at him sideways. "You're not bothered."
"I'd think less of him if he wasn't sceptical," Snow said. "I showed up from nowhere three days ago. Being fine with that would be the odd response."
Sira considered this and then filed it with the expression of someone adding a data point to an ongoing assessment. Then Davan said something brief and directional and the group moved.
---
The forest east of the settlement was different.
Snow had been into the Ilveth Forest twice now — once walking in from the clearing where the wardens had found him, once in the pre-dawn dark for his ability testing — and both times the character of the place had been old and dense but managed, the forest of a domain that had been in relationship with its people for eighty years. This was different. The further east they moved the less the managed quality persisted, the canopy growing less deliberate overhead, the undergrowth thickening between the trunks in the competitive, uncurated way of forest that had not been shaped or encouraged in any direction. The trees were still enormous — this far into the Verdant Reach nothing was small — but they were enormous in a rawer way, less inhabited, less continuous with human or elven presence.
The system annotated quietly as he walked. Eastern boundary territory, transitional zone between the Ilveth Domain's managed forest and the open Verdant Reach beyond. Predator density higher than the settlement's immediate surroundings. The domain ran clearance expeditions in this direction every twelve days to maintain the boundary's integrity — without them, the territory that pressed against the domain's edge would eventually press into it.
Snow watched the group move and revised his assessment of several of them in real time.
Davan read the forest the way Snow read text — automatically, continuously, the information arriving and being processed without apparent effort. He was looking at everything and you would not know it from his face, which carried the same unhurried composure it had carried at assembly, but his route through the undergrowth reflected a continuous intake of information — he adjusted direction twice for reasons that were not obvious until Snow looked where he had looked and saw, three seconds after the fact, what Davan had seen first.
Eraen moved like she always moved in the forest, with the economy of motion that had no wasted component. But she was different out here too — more alert, the composed severity of her settlement bearing replaced by something more active, more distributed. She was the group's second read on everything, Snow realised. Not redundant — complementary. Where Davan read the forest ahead, Eraen read the group's flanks.
And Sira.
Sira in the settlement was warm and communicative and enthusiastic and occasionally more candid than her professional context warranted. Sira in the forest was none of those things. Not a different person — the same fundamental intelligence, the same pattern of attention — but the expression of it had changed register entirely. She was quiet. She was watching. She moved with a precision that her settlement self did not particularly advertise, and she covered her assigned position on the group's left flank with the consistency of someone who had been drilled in this until it was reflex.
Snow looked at her and thought: she is better at this than she lets on in the settlement.
She glanced at him sideways, caught him looking, and raised one eyebrow with the efficiency of someone who could not speak but had opinions about being observed.
He looked forward.
Fael was on the right flank, positioned between Snow and the group's eastern exposure, and his movement through the forest was extraordinary — genuinely extraordinary, the kind of physical fluency that Snow's system logged as high B-tier at minimum, possibly A. He did not look at Snow. He did not need to. His body language communicated its opinion through the texture of everything he did, and what it communicated was: I am watching. I am measuring. I have not yet decided what to do with what I find.
Snow noted this with the calm of a man who had twenty-nine days and considerably more pressing concerns than a territorial warden's professional scepticism, and kept walking.
---
They had been moving for approximately forty minutes when Davan stopped.
Not gradually — a complete stop, one step and then stillness, his right hand dropping to a flat-palm gesture that communicated hold to every member of the group simultaneously. They held. Nobody spoke. The forest around them was doing the quiet thing again — the specific withdrawal of ambient sound that Snow had learned to read as information.
Davan crouched. He was looking at the base of three consecutive trees to their north — great old trunks with bark as deeply furrowed as cliff faces — and Snow looked at what he was looking at.
Claw gouges. Deep ones, three to four centimetres into the bark of each tree, in parallel sets of five. The resin at the wound edges was still moving, still in the process of the tree's slow response to damage. Recent. The lowest marks were at approximately Snow's shoulder height, which meant whatever made them had been standing at something between two and a half and three metres, reaching up.
Davan touched one mark with two fingers, very lightly, the way you confirmed information you had already arrived at. He looked east. He looked at Eraen. Something passed between them in the compressed language of people who had worked together long enough to have developed shorthand.
Snow drifted to the nearest marked tree. He reached out and pressed his palm flat against the bark, steadying himself in the casual gesture of someone pausing to look, and activated Life Reading.
The tree arrived first — one hundred and forty years old, healthy, the slow metabolic processes of deep-rooted ancient wood moving through his palm like a distant pulse. Then the residue. Two separate contact points, two separate biological signatures, large and warm-blooded and carrying the particular density of something with significant physical mass and a high-grade musculature. The system identified both signatures in the same moment.
Orcs.
Two of them. The system elaborated without being asked — Yvaran orcs were not the genre-standard variety Snow's reading history had prepared him for, not simply large humanoids with clubs and poor impulse control. They were large, yes, considerably larger than any human or elf, averaging two and a half metres and built with the structural density of creatures whose evolutionary history had included things considerably more dangerous than other orcs. Their hide was thick enough to qualify as natural armour at the skin level. Their physical grade averaged high B to low A depending on age and conditioning, and territorial adults defending a marked zone pushed toward the higher end of that range. Their intelligence was genuine — not complex, not linguistic, but genuine, the intelligence of apex predators who understood geometry and timing and the concept of coordinated action.
Two of them. Recent marks. This was their territory and the hunting group had walked into it.
Snow pulled his hand from the bark and stood up and looked at the forest ahead with adjusted attention.
Davan had arrived at the same conclusion through decades of experience rather than a divine system, and was in the process of communicating the threat assessment to the group in his compressed gesture language. Positions redistributed slightly — the wardens fanning wider, Eraen moving to cover the north flank, Fael taking east with the fluid certainty of someone who knew exactly where he should be in this configuration.
Sira was left-flank, covering the approach from the southwest. She had her bow up and an arrow nocked, her attention on the undergrowth with the focused quality Snow had been revising his assessment of for the past forty minutes.
They moved forward. Slowly now. The group's energy had changed from transit to active presence, every member running a continuous read of their assigned sector.
Snow stayed behind Davan's right shoulder, where he had been placed by the group's implicit geometry, and watched everything.
The forest was very quiet.
And then it was not.
---
The first orc came from the north.
It came fast — faster than Snow's pre-briefed expectations had suggested, the undergrowth to the north simply erupting into movement and then it was in the open, two and a half metres of forward momentum and muscle and territorial fury running at the group with the directness of something that had decided on a course of action and was committing to it completely. It was enormous. Snow had read the system's description and believed it and was still recalibrating in real time as the thing covered ground with a speed that was briefly alarming for something of its mass — a heavy-browed face with tusk-protrusions from the lower jaw, hide the colour of dark stone, hands that were not quite hands and not quite paws but were currently accelerating toward Davan with the closing speed of something that had done this before.
Davan met it without retreating a single step.
What followed was not elegant and was not meant to be. Davan drove in low under the first swipe — a horizontal sweep that would have removed a lesser combatant from the engagement immediately — and put his blade into the orc's right side with the practised precision of someone who had been doing this long enough to know exactly where to put it. Not a killing blow. The hide was too thick and the angle was wrong for a killing blow, and Davan knew that, because what he was doing was not trying to kill it in the first pass but establishing contact, forcing a response, creating the geometry that the rest of the group could work with.
The orc responded by swinging again, the second swipe lower and corrected, and Davan took it on a bracer that rang like a bell and stepped back one pace and two of the wardens came in from the flanks with the timing of people executing a practised pattern.
It was good. It was genuinely good, and Snow watched it with the appreciation of a man who had consumed enough of this genre to recognise competent coordinated combat when he saw it. They had the first orc contained if not resolved, working it in a triangle with enough pressure to prevent it from disengaging and enough caution to avoid the ranges where its physical advantage was absolute.
Eraen was covering the north with her bow, tracking above the engagement for any approach from that direction.
Fael was east, bow up, watching his sector with total concentration.
Sira was southwest. She had her arrow drawn, covering her approach angle, doing exactly what she was supposed to do.
The forest held its breath.
And then the second orc came from the east.
---
It did not come the way the first one had come.
The first orc had been declaration — direct, forward, territorial fury expressed as a straight line between itself and the nearest target. The second orc came at an angle, cutting across the eastern approach at a low trajectory that covered ground fast and put it into the gap between the main engagement and the group's left flank before anyone had fully registered the geometry of the thing.
Before Fael had registered the geometry of it, because he was covering east and this one had come from a diagonal that split the difference between east and south-east, the precise angle that maximised the ground it covered before anyone could respond.
It was between Sira and the rest of the group in approximately two seconds.
Sira reacted correctly. Snow noted this even as he moved — she dropped the bow because the range had collapsed to nothing and drew her blade in the same motion, no wasted transition, her stance hitting the right geometry for the space she had, and she was genuinely trained and her technique was genuinely correct and none of that was going to be sufficient because the orc was A-tier physical grade and she was not and the gap between correct technique and adequate power was about to express itself in one direction.
Snow was already moving before she drew the blade.
He had seen the geometry before she had. He had seen it the moment the second orc's trajectory became legible — the angle of approach, the distance, the time — and some combination of Godspeed and the particular quality of attention he had been running since entering the forest had produced the decision before he was consciously aware of making it.
Flashstep.
Fifteen metres, collapsed to nothing, the sensation of displacement arriving after the fact as it always did, and he was between Sira and the orc with approximately one metre of closing distance remaining between himself and two and a half metres of territorial fury at full sprint.
The orc hit him.
The impact was — significant. Even with Aegis of the Chosen active the force of it communicated through the barrier as a full-body shove, the barrier lighting gold on contact in the brief unmistakable flash of divine energy meeting physical force, and Snow's feet left the ground for approximately a quarter of a second before he planted them and converted the backward momentum into a lateral step that kept him between Sira and the orc rather than staggering away from both.
The orc pulled back — not retreating, assessing, the brief pause of something that had hit something it had not expected to hit and was processing the new information. Its eyes found Snow's with the flat focus of an apex predator recategorising its target.
Snow raised his right hand.
Smite. Impact version. Full divine output at point-blank range, no hesitation, no building, just the immediate discharge of everything the ability had available — and the effect was not quiet. The sound was a crack, short and absolute, and the orc went backward with the kinetic reality of something that had just been struck by a force that significantly exceeded its expectations, its feet losing the ground, its considerable mass moving through the air in the wrong direction, crashing into the undergrowth behind it with a sound like a falling structure.
The undergrowth was still for a moment.
Then it moved, differently — not the forward explosive movement of a charging predator but the slower, less committed movement of something deciding, with the particular pragmatism of creatures that survived by accurately assessing threats, that this was not a situation it intended to continue.
The second orc retreated into the eastern forest and did not come back.
---
Snow lowered his hand.
His palm was warm, the afterglow of the discharge fading slowly. The Aegis had taken the impact and was recharging — he could feel it, the faint hum of it settling back into its baseline. He took one breath and then turned.
Sira was standing exactly where she had been when he appeared in front of her, blade still raised, in the correct stance, completely unhurt. She was looking at him with an expression he had not seen on her face before — not the warm curiosity of the settlement, not the focused professional attention of the hunt. Something quieter and more settled, the expression of someone who had had a moment in which the situation's direction had been genuinely open and was now processing the fact that it had closed in a specific way.
She lowered her blade slowly.
"You were already moving," she said. Her voice was even but slightly different in texture from its usual register. "Before it turned toward me. You were already moving."
Snow said nothing. She was right and they both knew it and stating it would not add anything.
She looked at him for a moment longer, something working behind her eyes that was not yet finished working, and then she looked at the undergrowth where the orc had been, and then back at him, and she said, very quietly: "Thank you."
Just that. No performance in it. The clean, direct gratitude of someone who did not use the word unless they meant it completely.
Behind them, the sound of the first engagement resolving — Davan's voice, brief and conclusive, and the particular silence that followed when a threat had been removed rather than merely displaced.
Snow turned toward it.
---
The first orc had not retreated.
What remained of the engagement was the aftermath of something that had been resolved by three experienced wardens and a lead hunter working in the tight coordination of decades of shared practice. Davan was standing with his blade lowered, breathing hard in the controlled way of someone managing exertion rather than being managed by it. Two of the wardens were checking each other. The third was looking at the undergrowth to the north with her bow still raised, covering the possibility of a third approach that did not materialise.
Eraen was looking at Snow.
She had seen all of it. Snow understood this without needing to confirm it — Eraen was the kind of person who saw everything in her operational environment, and her operational environment currently included everywhere Snow had been for the past forty minutes. She had seen the trajectory of the second orc. She had seen Snow's timing. She had seen the Aegis light gold on impact and the Smite's discharge and the orc going backward into the undergrowth.
Her expression was not flat.
That was the thing. For three days the quality of Eraen's face in Snow's presence had been a consistent professional flatness — not hostility, not warmth, the careful neutrality of someone withholding judgement while they gathered information. That flatness was gone. What was in its place was harder to name but it was present, real, the expression of a reassessment that had been running since the Thornback incident and had just reached a conclusion.
She said nothing. She looked at him for three seconds and then looked at Davan, and something passed between them in their shorthand.
Davan looked at Snow with the expression of someone who had just watched something he had been curious about answer his questions thoroughly. He nodded once, the same nod as the hunter platform but with more weight behind it, and turned to address the group.
From the group's right flank, Fael had turned.
He was looking at Snow with an expression that had changed. The cold neutrality was gone — Snow had expected that, had expected that the intervention with Sira would at minimum produce a revision in how Fael categorised him. What he had not expected was what had replaced the neutrality. It was not gratitude. It was not revised respect. It was colder and more specific than either of those things — the particular expression of a person who is excellent at what they do and has just watched someone else do something they could not have done, in the space they were responsible for, in the time they did not have.
The problem was not that Snow had saved Sira. The problem was how he had done it. The geometry, the timing, the Aegis and the Smite and the orc going backward. Fael had covered east. The orc had come from east-southeast. In a different kind of person that gap might have been a mistake, a coverage error, the moment of hesitation between processing a threat and responding to it. Fael did not make mistakes and did not have moments of hesitation and he knew that. What he had been given was an angle that split his sector, a second threat simultaneous with the first engagement, and a reaction time problem that had a correct answer that was physically outside his range.
Snow had been in the wrong place by any tactical logic and had gotten there in zero time anyway.
Fael turned back to his sector check and said nothing.
Snow noted the change in his expression. Filed it accurately. Moved on.
---
Davan called a boundary check — a sweep of the immediate area to confirm no additional territorial markers and no further approach indicators — and the group ran it in their standard configuration, Snow slotting into the pattern that had been created for him and covering his assigned sector with the quiet attention that he had found, over the past hour, was the thing this group responded to most directly from an unknown quantity. Not performance. Not assertion. Just presence, and competence, and the absence of the things that made an unknown quantity a problem.
The sweep took twenty minutes. The boundary was clean. Davan made a series of marks on the trees at the territory's edge with the domain's notation system — information for the next expedition, Sira explained quietly, the domain maintaining a continuous read of its boundary's condition through the accumulated record of what each patrol found and left.
Snow helped where he was useful and stayed out of the way where he was not, and by the time they turned back toward the settlement the group's energy had completed its reorganisation into something that included him differently from how it had started.
Not all of it. Fael walked at the back of the return formation and the quality of his silence was its own category of statement.
But most of it.
Davan fell into step beside Snow for a portion of the return walk, and said, without preamble, in the tone of someone getting directly to the thing they wanted to say: "The second orc's angle was good. Most people would have been deciding when you were already arriving."
"I had a clear read on the trajectory," Snow said.
"From where you were standing," Davan said, "you had half a second and fifteen metres." He looked at Snow sideways. "That's not a read. That's something else."
Snow said nothing.
Davan nodded, accepting the non-answer with the equanimity of a man who had asked the question he wanted to ask and received the information he was looking for even in the absence of a direct response, and returned his attention to the forest ahead.
Sira walked beside Snow for the entire return. She was quieter than her usual self by a significant margin — not subdued, not distressed, just processing, the internal work of someone revising something important. Twice she looked at him from the side, and both times looked forward again before saying anything. The third time, about halfway back, she said:
"I've been on fourteen expeditions. I've been in the Greenwatch junior division for two years." A beat. "That's the first time I've been in a position where the outcome was genuinely — open."
"You did everything correctly," Snow said.
"I know," she said, without vanity, simply as a statement of fact. "That wasn't the part I was thinking about."
Snow looked at her.
"The part I was thinking about," Sira said, "was that doing everything correctly wasn't going to be enough. And you were already there." She looked forward. "I don't know what to do with that yet."
"You don't have to do anything with it," Snow said.
She walked with this. Then, quietly, with the directness that was her most consistent quality: "I'm glad you came on the expedition."
"So am I," Snow said, and meant it.
---
The Ilveth Seat was gold in the late afternoon light when they emerged from the tree-line, the bioluminescent lanterns not yet lit, the settlement's living wood catching the low sun in warm tones that made the whole vertical structure look like something that had grown from the light itself rather than from the earth below it.
Snow was looking up at it when he became aware of movement at the settlement's lower edge — to the left of the main staircase, where the outer root system of one of the great trees created a natural workspace at ground level. Luveth was there, crouched at the base of the trunk with her hands in the soil, directing the installation of a new water channel guide with two domain-keepers. Her silver hair had fallen forward over one shoulder with the total indifference of someone who had stopped noticing it long ago.
She looked up when the hunting group came out of the trees. Snow had noticed she did this — the automatic headcount of someone who cared about the people in her domain in a specific, grounded, non-political way, counting heads and noting conditions with the instinct of a person who had accepted responsibility for a living system and took that acceptance seriously.
Her gaze moved through the group and found Snow near the end of it.
The hunting group continued toward the staircase. Snow slowed at the base of it, in the way of someone who had not made a decision but whose feet had made one on his behalf.
Davan went up without looking back. Eraen passed Snow with a look that was not the flat professional neutrality it had been this morning — she held it for a half-second longer than she needed to, and what was in it was something she had not put there before. Then she went up.
Sira went last of the wardens. She looked at Snow, then at Luveth, then back at Snow, with the expression of someone connecting two pieces of information and deciding not to comment on the connection. She went up.
The domain-keepers Luveth had been working with gathered their equipment and carried it to the storage alcove at the tree's base, leaving the space.
Snow walked over.
Luveth was still crouched, pressing the water channel guide into its bed with the attentive precision of someone ensuring alignment before the soil was packed around it. She did not look up immediately — she finished what she was doing, which Snow had come to understand was simply her nature, and then sat back on her heels and looked at him with those blue eyes that carried their particular quality of open assessment.
"You went on the afternoon expedition," she said. Not accusatory, not surprised. Noting.
"Sira vouched for me," Snow said.
The corner of Luveth's mouth moved. "That sounds right." She looked at the tree-line he had emerged from, at the particular quality of the group's return energy, the way settlements read their people coming back. "Something happened."
"Two orcs," Snow said. "Eastern boundary."
She looked at him with the expression of someone who understood that two orcs at the eastern boundary was not a remarkable statement on its own and that the something she had read in the group's return energy was not about two orcs. She let the silence ask the question.
"Everyone came back," Snow said.
"I counted," she said quietly. Something in her expression settled — the particular release of a tension that had been held without being acknowledged. She looked at the water channel guide in the earth and then back up at him. "Sira?"
"Unhurt," Snow said. "She handled herself well."
Luveth nodded. She was quiet for a moment, her hands resting on her knees, the late afternoon light moving through the canopy above and catching the silver of her hair in the way it caught everything silver in the Ilveth Forest — warm, particular, more alive than silver had any right to look.
"She talks about you," Luveth said. The tone was simple, informational, without implication. "Since the morning you arrived she has had opinions about you that she shares with reasonable frequency."
"Good opinions or complicated ones?" Snow asked.
"Evolving ones," Luveth said, and this time the corner of her mouth moved further, briefly, into something that was genuinely a smile before it settled back. "She said you were observant. She said you asked better questions than most people. She said—" she paused, something considering in the pause, "—that you looked at the settlement like someone who was going to need to know it."
Snow held her gaze.
She held his.
The late afternoon light moved between them in the slow way light moved through the Ilveth Forest, unhurried, continuous, belonging to a timescale that had no particular interest in the smaller urgencies of the things living within it.
"She's perceptive," Snow said.
"She is," Luveth agreed. A beat. "So am I."
She stood — not abruptly, not as a statement, simply with the easy movement of someone who spent most of their time at ground level and was used to getting up from it — and dusted the soil from her hands with a few careful brushes.
"Thank you," she said, and like Sira's gratitude earlier it was clean and without performance, direct and entirely meant, "for making sure everyone came back."
"It's what I'm here for," Snow said, which was more true than she knew.
She looked at him once more with the blue eyes that had stopped being purely evaluative sometime in the past several minutes and had become something else that neither of them was naming yet, and then she turned back to the water channel guide and the remaining work, and Snow stood there for one more moment in the last of the afternoon light before turning to the staircase.
He went up.
He thought about twenty-eight days, and two red pulses, and a smile that had appeared and retreated before either of them had acknowledged it.
He thought about a group of wardens who had reorganised their understanding of him in the space of a single afternoon.
He thought about Fael's expression in the aftermath, and the particular category of problem that was.
He thought about Eraen's silence on the return walk, and how different it was from the silence she had carried for the three days before it.
The settlement closed around him as he climbed, warm and lit and alive, the bioluminescent lanterns beginning their evening cycle as the natural light faded, the Ilveth Seat becoming the version of itself that Snow suspected would take a long time to stop being extraordinary.