Four days before the ceremony, the scope of what we were facing had grown larger than anything either of us had planned for.
Crane had been manageable. Crane was a known entity, a single man with thirty years of fog over his instincts, a problem with edges we could see. This was different. A hundred-year-old network of governance bonds running through pack governments across the entire region was not a problem with edges. It was the water we had been swimming in without knowing it was water.
Caden wanted to delay the ceremony.
Not permanently. Two more weeks, he said, to understand the full scope of what we were walking into, to identify the players, to build some kind of counter before the binding activated a fifth level ability that would make whatever target already existed on my bac
