Elder Coran's contact had a name that appeared in no official pack record anywhere in the northern territories.
He was known simply as Aldric — a wolf of indeterminate age somewhere between sixty and ancient, who had spent the better part of four decades operating in the spaces between formal pack structures as a mediator, an arbitrator, and occasionally something that had no polite name but was universally understood to be necessary. He had facilitated seventeen territorial disputes, prevented four inter-pack wars, and was reportedly the only living wolf that both the eastern and western Coalition factions would accept as a neutral party.
Coran reached him through a channel so old and so carefully maintained that it predated the Coalition itself by twenty years.
Aldric agreed to meet w
