(Rhea POV)

The pass was narrow and cold and hadn't been used in a long time.

Kieran led. He'd studied the Ashford archives' reference to the First Hall overnight — the description was sparse but specific. An eastern pass, above the tree line, marked by a split boulder at the entrance. The Ashford records called it "the repository of the founding record" and noted that three generations of Watchers had attempted to reach it. Two had failed. One had reached the entrance but found it sealed by a rockslide.

That was eighty years ago. The rockslide might have cleared. Or it might not have.

We left at dawn. Two of us. No scouts — Torren was staying with Lily, and we couldn't spare the wolves. Sera had agreed to manage the compound for two days. She hadn't been happy about it.

"You're both leaving," she'd said. Not a question. A statement of the thing she found objectionable.

"We'll be back in two days."

"You said that last time. It took five."

"This is closer. Two days east. One day inside. Two days back."

"And if the containment team moves while you're gone?"

"Then you hold the walls and keep Lily inside. Torren knows the protocol."

Sera had looked at me the way she looked at tactical decisions she disagreed with but couldn't argue against — the look of a woman who understood the math even when she didn't like the answer.

"Two days," she said. "If you're not back by the third morning, I'm sending Torren."

* * *

We found the split boulder at midday on the second day. The pass opened onto a shelf of exposed granite — treeless, windswept, the kind of terrain that looked like it had been scraped clean by something geological and hadn't recovered. The boulder was exactly as the archives described: a single massive stone, cracked down the center, the two halves leaning away from each other like the pages of an open book.

Behind the boulder, the rockslide. Or what was left of it. Time and weather had done their work — most of the debris had shifted, slumped down the slope, leaving a gap at the top. Not large. Wide enough for one person to squeeze through if they didn't mind stone pressing against their shoulders.

Kieran went first. I followed.

* * *

The First Hall was not what I expected.

Not a hall. A cave. Natural formation, expanded by hands that had worked the stone a very long time ago — chisel marks visible on the walls, regular and deliberate, the kind of marks made by people who intended to use this space for something specific.

Shelves. Carved into the rock. Running along both walls, from floor to ceiling, set at regular intervals. Dozens of them. Each one wide enough to hold a stack of papers or a row of books or a collection of whatever records had once lived here.

Most of them were empty.

Not just empty — cleaned out. The surfaces were smooth, dust-free in the way that things are dust-free when they've been emptied deliberately rather than left to decay. Someone had come here and taken everything.

And what they hadn't taken, they'd burned.

The burn marks covered the back wall. Black scoring that climbed from floor level to above my head, the kind of marks left by a fire that was fed deliberately and maintained long enough to consume everything placed in front of it. The stone behind the burns was cracked from heat — the deep, structural cracking that happens when fire is sustained for hours.

I stood in front of the burned wall. Kieran stood beside me. Neither of us spoke for a long time.

Someone had come to this cave centuries ago. They'd taken what they wanted from the shelves. And then they'd burned the rest. Everything that remained — the soot, the cracked stone, the empty shelves — was evidence of an erasure so thorough that the cave itself had been damaged by it.

"The founding purge," Kieran said. His voice was quiet. Not from discretion — from weight. "This is where they did it. One of the locations, at least. They came here and they destroyed everything."