Elvira (Warden-Heir of Dún Rí)

Elvira noticed the cat was gone before anyone told her, in the specific way she noticed most things — a held-breath in the household's rhythm, a chore not reported as done. She did not call for a search immediately. She had learned, from the Fellowship at the old river abbey, that overreacting to a small absence taught the household nothing except that she could be provoked.

She had gone to that abbey twice this year already, drawn by a restlessness she'd stopped pretending was ordinary. Brother Daire kept a forge there that produced no metalwork anyone could sell, and a locked wing of the library where the shelving ran to vellum instead of paper. Your sensitivity runs in your mother's line, he had told her, tapping a diagram that seemed to hold its shape wrong when she looked at it directly. The boundaries are thin here, and thinning further. You are not mad. You are reading something real. He had a household name for it — the Fellowship called it the Overfold — and Elvira had taken the word without asking what stood behind it, because a name, even an imprecise one, was better than the alternative: standing in a garden at dusk feeling watched by nothing she could point to.

She did not yet know the word was a folk label for something the Survey Corps would eventually classify with instruments instead of intuition. She only knew the metallic taste in the autumn air was not imagination, and that the cat had always reacted to the same moments she did — the sundial, the east wall, the well — a half-second before she did.

By full dark, the cat had not come back for her evening feeding, which had never once failed to summon her. Elvira stood at the garden gate holding the untouched dish and understood, with a coldness that had nothing to do with the season, that this was not the cat sulking somewhere warm. Something had actually changed.

She set the dish down anyway. Then she went inside to find the household sage, because if the animals really did know first, she intended to find out what this one now knew that she did not.