“Sorry, what?” asked Nick.

Elise had grown adept enough with {Sense Emotions} to tell that he was mostly confused, but there was just a hint of anger underneath.

“H-he’s a member of Ostra,” said Elise, shrinking back. “I- I should have said something sooner.”

Nick’s anger rose, and Elise looked down in shame. The rest weren’t happy either.

“So you’re saying that if we organized an attack on him using Jelorian knights, it would cause a diplomatic incident?” asked Penelope. She was getting angry as well.

“Y-yes,” said Elise.

“He’s a member of Ostra, and they haven’t punished him?” asked Nick.

Oh, thought Elise as she realized that she wasn’t the sole target of his anger.

That made her feel a little bit better, and also made her a little bit angry herself. She had allowed Jag to placate her last time, but the fact still remained that the warg was an unrepentant murderer, and that Ostra had done nothing about it. In fact, they basically rewarded him by bringing him into the fold and having Freddy mentor him. Elise wasn’t completely against the idea that criminals could be redeemed and rehabilitated, but the warg had thus far not been going down that path.

“Why didn’t you tell us sooner?” asked Penelope sternly.

Elise knew there was no point in making excuses, so she just told the truth.

“I wasn’t thinking clearly,” she said. “I wanted the warg to face justice, and… I just wasn’t thinking clearly.”

Penelope’s anger rose for a moment, then faded.

“Well, at least we know now, instead of after the fact,” she said with a sigh. “I can bring up the matter with the Knight Commander. He is one of the people in charge of working with Ostra, so if the matter gets brought up officially, we might see some kind of resolution.”

“Is Ostra protecting the warg?” asked Nick.

“K-kind of?” said Elise. “One of the most powerful members took it in.”

“How powerful?”

Is he thinking of going to kill the warg anyway? wondered Elise.

“Very,” she said. “You’ve met him. It’s Freddy.”

“Ah,” he said.

Elise felt his anger rise until it reached its peak as he pounded the table, his fist punching clean through.

“Hey, it’s alright,” said Bianca, leaning in and holding his arm. “We’ll figure something out.”

“I can’t believe they’re protecting that thing,” said Nick.

“I know,” said Bianca in a soothing tone. “But killing the table won’t make it any less true.”

The group was silent for a few seconds as Nick’s anger decreased until finally he took a deep breath and spoke again.

“So what do we do now?” he asked.

“I’ll talk to the Knight Commander,” said Penelope. “He might be able to work something out.”

“I doubt it,” said Nick. “We don’t have much influence. Not compared to Freddy. It would be easier to sweep it all under the rug.”

“Not necessarily,” said Elise, her mind racing. “Ostra wants the monsters to be able to integrate peacefully with the humanoids. If an incident like this was made public, it would turn public opinion against them, and public opinion is what matters most to them.”

“That’s… a good point,” said Nick, stroking his chin. “Then all we need to do is threaten to go public with the incident, and they might relent? But Freddy is powerful. If he retaliates…”

“He’s not more powerful than Iris,” said Sophie. “And Iris said she’d protect us.”

“Right…” said Nick. “Alright, then we’ll do that. Penelope?”

“Got it,” she said. “I’ll pass it along. And what will we do in the next few days then?”

“We’ll still head back home,” said Nick. “For the funeral, at least. Then, I guess we’ll see what happens.”

“I can talk to Oberon too,” said Elise. “And maybe Freddy.”

Nick’s mood worsened at the mention of Freddy’s name, but he nodded.

“I’ll talk to Iris too!” said Sophie.

“Then, I believe that’s all settled,” said Nick. “For now. Unless anyone else has something?”

No one did, so they wrapped up their little meeting and went to see Penelope off. Once Penelope was gone, they split up, and Elise went to talk to Oberon while Sophie went to talk to Iris. Both conversations had the same result. Their respective mentors would pass the message along. Freddy was apparently incommunicado for whatever reason, but they both promised to talk to him when they found him again. Well, Irylax’s response sounded more like she would be threatening Freddy than talking to him, but that worked fine for them.

The rest of the day was tense, but without incident, and Elise went to bed restless. Her dreams that night were strange.

She saw many scenes that she didn’t recognize. A forest with trees taller than the ones in the Jungle with a snake coiled around one of them. A cathedral the size of a skyscraper where a group of holy-looking people prayed. A lone swordswoman fighting what looked like an army. A dark dungeon where an emaciated prisoner hummed a tune from his cell. A mountain top where a man so old she would have assumed he was dead if not for his chest rising and falling meditated facing the sunrise.

She woke up confused, but not as confused as she might have been. After her talk with Maggie, she knew that such dreams likely weren’t random. They were aetheric connections that she was tapping into. How she was connected to the people she saw in the dream, she had no clue, but she knew they were important. She spent a few minutes trying to commit each vision to memory before rising to face the day.

The group ate a quick, silent breakfast before packing up and heading to Oberon’s private teleportation pad. Unlike most teleportation pads which used pre-established connections, his functioned on coordinates, meaning he could send them directly to the cabin, which is exactly what he did. They would have to return through Greenwood’s official teleporter, but this saved them a fair amount of time and hassle on the away journey, at least.

The cabin was just as Elise remembered it, though dustier. If the dwarves had found it, they had left it alone. The mood was somber, and the only sounds were the wind and the birds as the Grays looked upon what was left of their home. Then, they got to digging the graves.

No one spoke until the bodies were in the ground, and the dirt had been packed back on top of them. Elise and Bianca used {Nature Mana Manipulation} to grow some grass and flowers on the small mound, and Nick grabbed a stone and used a mana-infused knife to carve words onto the headstone. He gave a speech about his parents, then turned it over to Sophie who started crying ten words into her own speech. Bianca talked about how she had only known them for a day, but wished it was longer, and when it was Elise’s turn, she could only manage two words.

“Thank you.”

In her earliest days as a rabbit, she was terrified and confused and fighting for her life, and then the Grays had provided her comfort and peace. She hadn’t known them much longer than Bianca, but the time she did know them was the best two weeks since she had died.

After the simple funeral, the Grays wanted a bit of time to go through their house alone, so Elise took her leave and flew up into the air, making for the mountain where the warg lived. She didn’t plan to do anything to it, but she at least wanted to see it, if only from afar. However, when she reached the part of the forest that was previously covered in snow, everything looked ordinary. The snow was gone, the woods were green, and there was no sign of the warg.

She flew in for a closer look, and still couldn’t find anything, so she took a quick air tour around the forest. She encountered a few carnivorous birds that tried to eat her, but after her experience in the Jungle, they weren’t a problem at all. Between {Suggest}, {Forced Feeling}, and {Magic Missile}, they died very quickly after they tried to attack her. She didn’t gain any levels from them.

While she saw some more direwolves, there was no sign of the warg anywhere in the forest at all. She returned to the place where she had seen it originally, and flew all the way down to the cave where it slept, and still, she saw nothing. After a few seconds of hesitation, she entered the cave itself, and noticed a few oddities.

There was a clear patch of dirt that was packed down and slightly dug in where the warg had likely slept. Then on the edge of the shallow cave, there was a relatively deep hole filled with sticky orange-ish black substance that Elise recognized as the interior of an evolution pod.

Did it die while evolving? she wondered.

That didn’t make sense though. The hole with the goop wasn’t big enough for the warg to fit in. There was no way it had entered there. That meant that something else had been in that hole evolving, and it had been killed mid-evolution. Did something move in after the warg left then? Why did the warg leave in the first place? Where had it gone?

As she pondered, she caught a slight glint out of the corner of her eye in the back of the cave. She approached it and found a small golden coin, and upon closer inspection, it was laced with impossibly intricate mana. She approached it cautiously, and when she got about five feet away, something sprang out of it. She used {Move} to back out of the cave as quickly as she could, but then stopped when she saw that the thing that sprung out of the coin was Freddy. A miniaturized, floating Freddy.

“Hello, Elise!” he said with a smile. “This is a pre-recorded message, so if you try to ask me anything, I won’t be able to respond.

“If you’re listening to this, that means that you’ve come back to check on Walter. Well, maybe not ‘check on’ but you know what I mean. Well, I’m glad to say that Walter has faced justice. Perhaps not the justice you envisioned, but justice all the same.

“Yes, he is alive, but he is far, far away, and he won’t be returning any time soon. No, that’s not the justice. That was merely a safety precaution. He will return eventually, and he will hopefully return a better person. If not… Well, I’ll take care of him. And by ‘take care of,’ I mean kill. I’m giving him some leeway as he is new to sentience, but if he chooses to remain uncontrollable, I’m afraid he’s no better than an ordinary monster.

“Now, I know you’re likely burning with questions, such as the specifics of the ‘justice’ that I meted out, but the details are sensitive, so I’d rather not leave them within an artifact that could potentially be taken and viewed by an unintended party. I’ll be quite busy in the near future, but next time we meet, I can tell you more about it.

“That’s all from me! If you want to show this recording to anyone else, just start using {Mana Circulation} while within a few feet of it. It’s set to respond to your mana signature, and your mana signature alone. I hope you have a wonderful day!”

The floating mini-Freddy disappeared and after a few seconds, Elise cautiously approached it again. It did not trigger this time, but she did test out his final words by using {Mana Circulation}, which caused the message to replay in its entirety. Satisfied she understood how it worked, she put it into Astrid’s Star and flew back to the cabin.

She wasn’t sure what to make of the message. She was indeed burning with questions, and none of the answers she could come up with were satisfying. What kind of justice could Freddy have enacted on Walter? Her best guess was that he had forced the warg to sign some kind of highly restrictive contract, but as to what the contents of such a contract might be, she had no idea. She would definitely have to talk to him to get the details.

When she returned to the cabin, the Grays were about done and just waiting for her. She was going to show them the coin immediately, but they started talking about having a nice dinner and reminiscing, so she decided to save it. Unlike the fact that the warg was in Ostra, she had no plans to hide this in the long term; she just felt like this wasn’t the time.

Unlike the funeral, the meal afterward was a relatively joyous event. They talked and told stories and laughed and ate until their stomachs were full and Nick and Bianca were quite drunk. There were some tears shed, but the overall mood was much brighter than Elise was worried it would be. It almost reminded her of the dwarven funeral.

They returned to Everspring late that night, and Nick and Bianca almost immediately passed out when they got back. Elise and Sophie read in the library for a bit before they too went to bed.

The next morning, Elise showed them Freddy’s message, and as far as she could tell, they felt roughly the same as her. Hearing that justice had been meted out filled them with questions, and unfortunately, they had no way of answering those questions. Whatever Freddy was doing, he was completely out of contact with both Oberon and Irylax, meaning that they would just have to wait for him to get back from whatever he was doing.

And wait they did. Even after two weeks, they had heard nothing from him, and it was time for the Grays to head back to Jelor. Sophie cried a bit when they said goodbye, and Elise shed a tear or two as well.

With the Grays gone, Elise had no further distractions from her training. She dove in wholeheartedly, and a month later, she finally had all her skills capped. The social ones had actually been fairly easy, since her massive aether reserves made grinding them a non-issue. It was the mana-based skills like {Magic Missile}, {Telekinesis}, and {Nature Mana Manipulation} that took most of her time. Still, progress was steady with those, and Oberon even had a meditation circle that drew in nearby mana to make her recovery quicker. It would be a lie to say it was fun, but when Elise looked at her status window and saw all her skills at level 70, she couldn’t deny how satisfied she felt.

During this time, Oberon had also given her a lot of mini-missions to get her used to all kinds of changeling shenanigans. Elise bailed on a few she felt uncomfortable about, but overall, it was excellent experience. Nothing quite as eventful or impactful as the auction or the Euphoria vault happened during these outings, but it did a lot to help Elise build up her knowledge about what was and wasn’t possible for her, and what she wanted to be able to do when she evolved.

On the day she got her last skill, {Nature Mana Manipulation} to level 70, she decided to take the rest of the day off before visiting Oberon. She was eager to evolve, but after working basically nonstop for two months, she wanted a little break. She switched to her bird form and took a little flight around the city, then went a bit outside the city. It was weirdly enjoyable to fly in and out of the city limits and feel the stark contrast in temperature.

She slept for twelve hours that night, waking up close to noon, and after a hearty breakfast, she finally went to Oberon’s office. One thing she had come to find convenient about Oberon is that he was always easy to find. With his ability to create clones, there were a few places in the castle where there was always at least one Oberon, and the office was one of them.

“You look like you’re in a good mood,” he said when she entered. “I assume you finally finished with {Nature Mana Manipulation}?”

“Yep!” said Elise happily. “You said you had a few places I could go hunting to get my last couple levels?”

“I do!” he said. “But first, there’s something very important I need to show you.”

“What is it?”

“It’s something that could change the course of your evolution path,” he said in a dramatic tone, holding up a piece of paper. “This piece of paper is something that others can only dream of having. Something that, just by having it, unlocks countless paths only available to a select few in the entire world. It is-”

“Just tell me what it is already,” said Elise, rolling her eyes.

“It’s your new identity!” he said, flipping the paper around so she could see it.

Elise read the first few words on the paper, then couldn’t help but gasp.