The political pressure came, as she had told the woman from the Northern Ridge Pack it would.
It came quietly, the way the most effective pressure always did, not in dramatic confrontation but in the slow accumulation of small resistances. A council member who had voted for the reforms began raising procedural questions about the implementation timeline. A senior advisor submitted a report suggesting that the bond accountability framework might be better administered through existing pack structures rather than the new independent subcommittee. Two affiliated pack representatives who had initially expressed interest in adopting equivalent reforms went silent on the matter.
Elowen watched all of this with the clear-eyed attention of a woman who had lived inside institutional systems long
