Elvira (Warden-Heir of Dún Rí)

The household sage did not believe in comfort dressed up as ceremony, which was the only reason Elvira trusted him with this. He arrived on bare feet, in robes the colour of flour, and inclined his head at the arrangement she'd already laid out: a circle of river stones, a tray of unlit candles, a hand mirror set precisely at true north.

"You are certain?" he asked. Not a greeting.

"I am."

He did not explain the mechanism to her that night, and she did not ask him to. She understood only the outline: that a working like this did not summon anything, did not see across any real distance — it took a pattern that already existed, faint and diffuse, and gave it enough structure in the stones and the glass to register as something rather than nothing. He called it reading the print left in a thing's absence. She would spend years learning to call it something more precise, and would not fully manage it even then.

He struck the stones with a short rod. They rang, a note that seemed to fold inward instead of out. He lit the candles clockwise, murmuring something she didn't try to follow, and the room thickened with the smell of rain on hot stone.

She closed her eyes and did what he'd told her to do: hold the shape of the thing she wanted to find, not as a wish, but as a fact she was trying to confirm. She thought of Aldera not as memory but as she had last been — soiled, wild-eyed, favouring a torn paw, and entirely unbroken. She held that shape and did not let it soften into something more comforting.

A bell sounded, low and slightly flat. "Let that which is lost find passage," the sage said. "Let the barrier thin."

Nothing, for what felt like a long time.

Then something — not a vision, nothing so generous as an image — a texture, wet and raw, like a tongue over old bone. A flash of white against dark rock. A larger shape behind it, amber-eyed, patient.

She reached for it. The stones vibrated once under her hands. The bell rang twice more.

Cold moved through her, real as a draught through a cracked window, and she opened her eyes to the low-burned candles and the mirror. For one instant there was a mark on the glass — a single paw print, pressed as if from the other side, gone before she could be sure she'd truly seen it. When she touched the spot it was simply cold, and then it wasn't, and the mirror held only her own reflection: eyes reddened, jaw set with an anger she recognised as directed entirely at herself.

"You found her?" the sage asked.

"She's alive." Elvira's voice did not shake. "That's all this tells me. Alive, and somewhere I can't yet name."

He inclined his head — the working was complete, as far as it could be. "Then the next move is yours."

She rose. The bench toppled behind her and she left it there, an unimportant thing next to what she now intended to do. She would not wait at the gate for the cat to find her way back, and she would not treat a single confirmed fact as if it were the whole answer. She would search — the household, the harbour records, every ship's manifest the harbourmaster would show her — starting at first light, and she would not stop simply because the first attempt had told her only that there was, somewhere, still something left to find.