(Rhea POV)

The cabin was smaller than I'd expected.

Scrap wood and salvaged stone, built into the lee of a granite shelf where the mountain bent east. A single window. A chimney made from stacked river rock, mortar crumbling at the joints. The porch was three planks wide, warped from weather, with a wooden chair sitting in the center like someone had placed it there for the specific purpose of watching the trail.

Vera was in the chair.

She saw us coming from two hundred yards — no cover on the final approach, just open scrubland and loose stone. She watched our group move across the clearing without standing, without calling out, without reaching for anything. Her hands stayed in her lap. Her shoulders stayed flat against the chair back.

She looked old. Older than fifty-six should look. The woman I remembered from Silverpine — the one who'd managed a pack with the precision of someone arranging chess pieces — was thinner now, her face sharper at the angles, her hair more gray than brown. The silver shackles were gone. The scars on her wrists were still visible — pale rings of tissue damage, healed but permanent.

"I wondered when you'd come," she said.

* * *

I told Torren to hold the perimeter. Four scouts, positioned at the compass points, watching the trails for Aldric's search teams. Nobody in or out without my knowledge.

Torren looked at Vera. Then at me. The question on his face was simple: Are you sure?

I nodded. He took his people and disappeared into the tree line.

I climbed the porch steps. Three warped planks. The wood groaned under my weight. Vera didn't move from the chair.

"You look like you've been walking," she said.

"Four days."

"In a hurry."

"Aldric's people are behind me."

That changed something in her face. Not fear — Vera didn't do fear the way other people did. Assessment. The rapid, internal calculation of a woman who'd spent her life reading angles and deciding which ones to stand behind.

"How far behind?"

"Close enough that this conversation has a deadline."

She stood. Slowly. The way someone stands when their body has learned to expect effort from things that used to be automatic. She opened the cabin door and held it.

"Then come inside."

* * *

The cabin was one room. A cot against the far wall. A table. A fireplace that had been used recently — ash still warm. And against the wall opposite the cot, a shelf made from two boards balanced on stone brackets.

The shelf was full of papers.

Not a few documents. Not a folder. Stacks. Bound with twine. Some loose, some folded into leather covers that had cracked at the spines. The paper ranged from fresh to ancient — some pages white and clean, others yellowed to the color of old bone, edges soft from centuries of handling.

The Ashford Archives.

Vera sat at the table. I sat across from her. The position was familiar — two women on opposite sides of a flat surface, the way we'd never actually sat at Silverpine because I'd been Luna and she'd been the mother-in-law who stood behind the authority rather than across from it.

"You want the archives," she said.

"Yes."

"You want to know about Firstborn."

"Yes."

She looked at me. The same eyes I remembered — dark, attentive, the eyes of a woman who catalogued everything and discarded nothing. But the thing behind them was different. In Silverpine, Vera's eyes had held the sharp focus of someone managing an operation. Now they held something flatter. Wider. The look of a person who'd spent a year alone with information that was too heavy for one body.

"Then sit down. Because you're not going to like what I tell you."

"I'm already sitting."

"Then hold on to the chair."

* * *

She didn't start with Lily. She started with her mother.

"The Ashford women pass it down," Vera said. "Mother to daughter. One generation at a time. My mother told me when I was sixteen. Her mother told her. Her mother before that." She laid her hands flat on the table — palms down, fingers spread, the posture of someone grounding themselves before saying something that required weight. "Fifteen generations."

"Told you what?"

"What to watch for." She counted on her fingers. "Early wolf awakening — before two years old. Cross-pack bonding in childhood — the pup responding to wolves outside the family line. Alpha-level wolf presence in a non-Alpha child. And the eyes. Silver threading in the iris, visible from birth or appearing before maturity."

She looked at me.

"My mother called them markers. She said they were signs of something that Council had tried to eliminate a long time ago. Something in the blood. Something that appeared at random, across generations, in families that had no idea they were carrying it."

"Firstborn," I said.

"My mother never used that word. She called it 'the old line.' The bloodline that existed before Council. Before the pack system. Before any of the structures that the wolf world runs on." Vera's voice was level. Measured. The voice of a woman reciting something she'd memorized a long time ago and had been refining in solitude ever since. "The Ashford family was designated as Watchers. Our job — our only job, for fifteen generations — was to monitor wolf bloodlines in our region for signs of the old line resurfacing."