Jericho didn't soften it.
He started from the beginning — the state of Dasos when they arrived, the hollowness of it, what Martin had told them about the three months prior. Then the forest.
What they found on the first day and how it escalated over four days. The coordination of the creatures. The elemental abilities. The evolution of prey and predator alike without distinction.
He spoke evenly and without dramatization.
Corvus listened without interrupting.
He didn't take notes. Didn't look at the maps on the wall for reference. Just listened with the focused stillness of someone filing everything in real time.
When Jericho finished, the room was quiet for a moment.
Corvus looked at the table briefly.
Then back up.
"How long before other border settlements face the same thing Dasos faced?" he asked.
"Some already are," Drako said. "They simply haven't reported it yet."
Corvus's jaw tightened slightly.
"Why not?"
"The same reason Martin hesitated," Erica said. "It sounds impossible until you've seen it. And by the time you've seen it you're already in crisis."
Corvus nodded slowly.
"So the reports will come in waves," he said. "Each one further behind the actual situation."
"Yes," Jericho said.
Corvus exhaled through his nose.
Not panic. Not denial.
Just a man absorbing the full weight of something and deciding what to do with it.
He stood and moved to the map on the wall. His eyes traced the border lines — the Darkburn Canopy's edge running along Valdis's southern territory like a wound that had just been reopened.
"Dasos isn't the only border settlement," he said quietly.
"No," Jericho said. "There are at least four others within range of the Canopy alone. And the Canopy isn't the only forest."
Corvus turned slightly.
"What do you need from me?"
The directness of it caught the room slightly off guard.
William blinked.
Alice glanced at Jericho.
Corvus noticed their surprise and looked faintly uncomfortable with it.
"You came here with information," he said simply. "That means you came here with a purpose. I'd rather skip to it."
Jericho almost smiled.
"Three things," he said. "First — specialized units. Not standard soldiers. Men and women who can be trained to handle evolved creatures specifically.
Conventional military formations won't work against coordinated pack behavior and elemental ability. The strategy has to change."
Corvus nodded once. Already processing.
"Second — supply lines to the border settlements need to be restructured. If hunting has stopped and trade has halted, those towns are surviving on reserves. That won't last indefinitely."
"How long?" Corvus asked.
"Dasos had perhaps another month," Alice said quietly. "Others may have less."
Corvus's expression didn't change. But something behind his eyes did.
"Third," Jericho continued, "this needs to reach the alliance. Not as a local incident — as a continental issue. What's happening in Valdis is happening elsewhere. The three great powers need to coordinate a unified response before this becomes something that can't be managed."
The room was quiet.
Corvus turned back to the map.
He stood there for a long moment, hands clasped behind his back, eyes moving across borders and settlements and forest lines with the focused silence of someone who was already three steps into solving the problem.
Then he turned around.
"The specialized units — I have people who've been surviving on the forest's edge their whole lives. Hunters. Rangers. People who already understand how these creatures move." He paused. "They'll need guidance on the soul energy aspect."
"We can provide that before we leave," Erica said.
Corvus nodded.
"The supply lines I can begin restructuring within the week. I'll need exact numbers from each settlement." He looked at Alice. "Can you provide those?"
Alice nodded. "I documented everything I could while we were there."
Something shifted in Corvus's expression — not quite surprise, but close to it. The quiet acknowledgment of someone who had expected to need to ask for more and hadn't needed to.
"The alliance—" He paused. A brief silence that carried more weight than the others. "That conversation will not be simple. There are members who will see this as an opportunity to push their own agendas rather than address the actual problem."
"I know," Erica said. "I'll handle that."
Corvus looked at her.
"You're not just passing through," he said. It wasn't quite a question.
"No," she said simply. "I wasn't. Not after Dasos."
He held her gaze for a moment.
Then he nodded.
The kind of nod that meant something.
He moved back to the table and sat — the formal weight of the meeting shifting into something slightly less structured now that the essential things had been said.
"You're continuing your journey after this," he said. It wasn't a question either.
"Yes," Jericho said. "There's something we need at the Mist Mountains. It can't wait much longer."
Corvus didn't ask what it was.
Which Jericho appreciated more than he could have said.
"Then go," Corvus said simply. "You've done more for this kingdom in five days than most do in a year." He paused — and for just a moment something in his expression shifted into something quieter and more genuine than anything the meeting had produced. "Dasos would have died without you. Slowly and without understanding why."
He said it without ceremony.
Which made it land harder than ceremony would have.
Jericho said nothing for a moment.
"Make sure it doesn't happen to the others," he said finally.
Corvus met his eyes.
"I intend to."
⸻
They left Thornwall two hours later.
The vehicle Clover had given Jericho sat waiting at the city's eastern gate where they had left it — compact, well built, carrying the particular quality of everything Clover made.
Functional on the surface. Quietly extraordinary underneath.
Jericho ran a hand along its side briefly as he approached.
Something fond in the gesture.
William was already loading the last of their supplies.
"Mist Mountains," he said, not looking up. "Finally."
"We were always going," Alice said.
"Tell that to the four days we spent in a haunted forest."
"It wasn't haunted," Alice said patiently.
"The creatures breathed fire, Alice."
"That doesn't make it haunted."
Drako settled into his seat without comment.
Erica paused at the vehicle's door and looked back at Thornwall's gate briefly.
A guard on the rampart above caught her eye and gave a small nod — the kind soldiers give when they can't say what they mean out loud.
She turned away.
"Everyone ready?" Jericho asked.
A quiet chorus of affirmation moved through the group.
He stepped in.
The vehicle moved forward.
Thornwall fell behind them.
Ahead, somewhere past the roads and the lesser towns and the slow change in landscape that marked the boundary between one kind of world and another —
The Mist Mountains waited.
⸻
The eastern gate had barely closed behind them when the messenger arrived.
He came through the main entrance at a pace that drew immediate attention — not running, but close enough to it that the gate guards stepped aside without being asked.
Dust on his riding cloak. Eyes that carried the particular urgency of someone who had not stopped moving since receiving what they were carrying.
He was brought to Corvus directly.
The meeting chamber was being cleared when the secretary intercepted him outside the doors.
A brief exchange. Then the secretary entered without knocking — which he never did — and approached Corvus with the careful movement of someone managing something fragile.
"Your Majesty. A dispatch from the Holy Kingdom of Righteous. Marked urgent and sealed at the highest level."
Corvus looked up from the map he had already begun annotating.
He took the dispatch without comment.
Broke the seal.
Read it.
The room was quiet.
His expression didn't change — not dramatically. But the quality of his stillness shifted. The kind of shift that happened when something landed that the mind needed a moment to fully absorb before the body caught up.
He read it again.
Then he set it down on the table slowly.
Outside the window, the distant sound of Thornwall's afternoon trade carried on without interruption. Carts. Voices.
The ordinary noise of a city that didn't yet know what was in that document.
Corvus stood.
He moved to the window and looked out at the eastern road — the one that led away from Thornwall, away from Valdis, toward wherever the road eventually became the path to the Mist Mountains.
They had left perhaps twenty minutes ago.
He thought about the woman who had sat across from him less than an hour ago. The composure of her. The certainty.
The way she had said I'll handle that about the alliance as though it were simply a matter of application rather than politics.
A princess who had ridden into a dying town on her way somewhere else and stayed anyway.
Who had spent four days in a forest that had killed trained hunters
Who had come to his table without ceremony and given him exactly what he needed to protect his people.
She had no idea.
Corvus exhaled slowly through his nose.
Her brother.
The prince of the most powerful kingdom in the alliance.
A traitor.
A matricide.
Wanted.
The words sat in his mind with the particular weight of things that couldn't be unsaid or unknown once encountered.
He had met men capable of betrayal in his years — had navigated enough court politics to understand that blood ties were frequently the thinnest of all loyalties.
But this.
A son who had raised his hand against his own mother.
Against Rachel Von Righteous — a woman whose reputation even reached Thornwall. Gentle.
Devoted. The kind of queen that made a kingdom feel like more than a political arrangement.
Dead.
And her daughter didn't know yet.
Corvus turned from the window.
He looked at the dispatch on the table for a long moment.
Then he looked at his secretary.
"Send a rider after them," he said quietly.
The secretary hesitated. "Your Majesty — the dispatch requests that the information be contained until official channels—"
"I know what it requests," Corvus said.
A pause.
"Send the rider anyway."
The secretary read his expression and asked nothing further.
"Yes, Your Majesty."
He left quickly.
Corvus turned back to the window.
The eastern road was empty now. Just open distance and the slow change in landscape toward the mountain regions.
He thought about what that news would do to her.
To a woman who had just spent five days carrying other people's weight without complaint — who had arrested a man for insulting someone she cared about and then immediately composed herself back into a princess because there was work to do.
What it would do to find out that while she was here protecting a town that wasn't even hers—
Her home had been burning.
He pressed two fingers briefly against the window frame.
"I'm sorry," he said quietly.
To no one.
To the empty road.
To a princess who was already too far away to hear it.
Corvus looked at the dispatch one more time.
Then he looked at the empty road through the window.
He thought about the rider he had almost sent.
A foreign king delivering news that should come from a father. From a palace. From people who knew her and loved her and could hold that moment properly when it arrived.
Not from a messenger on a dusty road between Thornwall and the Mist Mountains.
Not like that.
He folded the dispatch carefully.
"Cancel the rider," he said quietly.
The secretary paused at the door.
"Your Majesty?"
"You heard me."
A beat.
"Yes, Your Majesty."
The door closed.
Corvus set the dispatch down.
He sat for a long moment in the empty meeting room — the maps still on the wall, the chairs still arranged exactly as they had been when five people sat in them an hour ago and gave him what he needed to protect his kingdom.
He owed them more than a ruined road.
The news would find her.
It always did.
But it would find her the right way.
On that, at least, he could do something.