The days after Wenrik’s withdrawal moved in a strange rhythm.

The leaderboard prisoners who had scattered for the hunt began to filter back into the central hunting grounds within seventy-two hours of the Cantor’s departure. Some of them had stories. Some of them had wounds. Many of them had losses — Wenrik had killed at least eleven prisoners during his approach and engagement window, a higher-than-average count for a single Ordained hunter. The leaderboard updated several times in those three days as positions shifted around the dead.

Owen rose to rank seven, then to rank six on Day 65 when the prisoner who had held that slot turned up missing. He passed seven and a half million credits. Then eight. Then he stopped tracking the daily climb because the climb itself was no longer the urgent part. The credits would accumulate. Survival was the urgent part.

The cave they had been using as their secondary position got quietly upgraded to a primary one. Yalira mapped the surrounding two kilometers in detail. Jorik used his stonecraft to widen the lower-level entrance and add a second narrow passage that could function as an emergency exit. Vren brought the rest of his supplies down from the original camp on Day 64 and stayed.

There was no formal vote on whether the four of them were now a single unit. There did not need to be. Tessa’s death had welded them together in a way that would not have happened otherwise.

---

Owen returned to the river chamber on Day 67.

He took the trip alone. Yalira had offered to come, but he had asked her to stay with Jorik and Vren — the cave needed two people on watch at all times, and Owen wanted the time on the road by himself. Yalira had not pressed. She had only nodded and pressed a small wrapped package of dried meat into his hand and said, "Bring it to him."

The walk took almost four days. He moved at a steady pace, suppressed his CE just enough to read as a Tier 5 two-star scout to any drone overhead, and ate the dried meat slowly. He thought, while he walked, about a number of things. About Wenrik’s filing. About Tessa’s last expression. About the canyon’s silver threads. About the desolate channeling that had cracked something in his core that had not yet healed back to where it had been.

About what was coming next.

He reached the ruins on the morning of Day 71. The descent through the collapsed temple felt familiar this time. The bioluminescent moss. The shift in air. The sound of the river coming up from below.

Gorvax was sitting on a flat stone by the riverbank when Owen emerged into the chamber.

The Sower was reading. Owen did not know what, some kind of sheet of cured beast hide with markings on it, propped against his knees. He looked up as Owen ducked through the entrance. His abyss-black eyes registered Owen’s arrival, and something in his face eased.

"Dragon."

"Gorvax."

The Sower set down the hide. Stood. Walked across the chamber. Stopped a meter away.

"You look thin," Gorvax said.

"You look better."

"I am better. Eighty-five percent. Possibly more. The river chamber is a gift I do not yet fully understand."

"Good."

Gorvax studied him for a long moment. His face was sharper than it had been a month ago. The hollow under his cheekbones was gone. The deep lines around his mouth had not vanished, but they no longer dominated the rest of his expression.

"Tessa," Gorvax said quietly.

"Yeah."

"Speak."

Owen told him. The whole thing, in detail, the way he had told the others. The cave. The escape route. The staff strike. Jorik’s stonework. The name carved into the slab. The blade still in her hand.

Gorvax listened without interrupting. When Owen finished, the Sower stood quietly for a long time.

Then he said, "I would like to come up to the surface and pay respects."

"It’s four days each way."

"I know."

"Your healing..."

"My healing has reached the point where four days of careful travel will not undo it. I can move at my own pace and rest as needed. Yalira knows the route. I will need a guide for parts of it." Gorvax paused. "I would like to do this, Dragon. If she gave her life adjacent to mine, I should at least visit the place where she rests."

Owen thought about it.

The risks were real. Wenrik’s filing protected Gorvax from procedural pursuit, but it did not protect him from random patrols, drone sweeps, or other prisoners who might recognize a Vexari face. Surface travel was not zero-risk for him.

But Tessa had bandaged Gorvax’s ribs in the dawn of the camp where she had still been alive.

"Okay," Owen said. "Not now. After my next hunt. I’ll come back for you. We’ll do it then."

"That is acceptable."

---

He stayed at the river chamber for two days.

Gorvax used the time to share what he had been working on. The Sower had not spent the past three weeks merely healing — he had spent it teaching himself, again, in careful stages, things he had forgotten or set aside during his long centuries of cosmic gardening. Old fighting forms. Old CE channeling structures that predated the Tribunal’s standardized methods. Old ways of reading other beings’ patterns that the Cantors had not thought to develop.

He showed some of these to Owen.

Most of them, Owen could not yet do. Some of them required Tier 4 channeling capacity, which Owen did not have. Some of them required the kind of ancient cosmic-energy intuition that Gorvax had built over a span of time Owen could not imagine. But there were a few — small ones, foundational ones — that Owen could begin learning now.

One of them in particular caught Owen’s attention.

It was a method Gorvax called the listening. It was not an attack. It was a way of holding one’s own CE perfectly still and reading the cosmic energy of beings around you not by their visible signatures but by the small ripples their presence made in ambient particles. Drones could not detect the listening. Cantors had never developed it. It was older than either system.

"You will not master this in days," Gorvax said. "It takes years. But beginning now means that in a year, you have begun. In two years, you have a foundation. In five, you have something useful."

"I might not have five years."

"Then in the time you do have, you will have made the start."

Owen drilled the breathing pattern under Gorvax’s eye. It was harder than it looked. Holding CE still while remaining receptive to the smallest external ripples was a kind of meditation that fought every combat instinct Owen had built over the past year. He failed it for four straight hours on the first day. On the second day, he managed it for almost ninety seconds before his concentration broke.

Gorvax nodded slowly when he came out of it. "Good. That is the seed."

---

Owen left the river chamber on Day 73. He did not say goodbye in any formal way. Gorvax simply walked him to the descent shaft and watched him climb. There would be other visits. There would be the trip up to Tessa’s grave. There was no need for ceremony.

The walk back to the cave took less time than the walk out. Owen’s pace had quickened. Whatever the visit had given him — meditation seed, healing method, something he could not yet name — it had restored a small measure of what Tessa’s death had taken from him.

He arrived at the cave on Day 76.

Yalira was on watch above. She came down the moment she registered him approaching. Her amber eyes flicked over him with quick, expert assessment.

"He’s better?"

"He’s better."

"Good."

She did not say anything else. She did not need to.

---

Days 76 to 80 passed in a steadier rhythm.

They hunted. Smaller targets — solo prisoners, the remnants of the Lifer cell Brask had left behind, a single Tier 4 fugitive named Helva who had been moving south after the Cantor hunt. Each kill was clean. Each one added credits. Owen’s total passed nine million on Day 78. He held rank six.

Yalira sparred with him in the mornings. He drilled the listening exercise in the evenings. Jorik and Vren kept the cave functional, took the longer scouting routes, and gradually worked out their own way of being near each other without Tessa as a center point. It was not seamless. It was not painless. But it worked.

On the evening of Day 80, Yalira sat down beside Owen at the cave entrance and handed him a small piece of dried Crimson Hide jerky.

"What does the leaderboard look like ahead of you?" she asked.

"Six is me. Five is Vrynn. Four is Kael’thos. Three is Sylkra of the Wraith Collective. Two is Malthor of the Crucible Kings. One is still Torvann."

She chewed slowly on her own piece of jerky. "Day eighty-one is tomorrow."

"I know." 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶

"Architects, by the original rotation. But with Wenrik’s withdrawal filed under declined pursuit, the schedule may shift. The Tribunal sometimes substitutes a different Race when an earlier hunter ends a cycle without a kill. It depends on which Race has a Cantor-equivalent ready to deploy."

"You think it could be different."

"I think it could be anyone." Yalira’s amber eyes held his. "Wenrik did something unusual. The first hunter too, The next hunter may also be unusual."

Owen nodded slowly.

"I’ll be ready," he said.

"You will be more ready than last time."

"I will be."

She bumped her shoulder against his. Then she stood up and walked back to her perch.

Owen sat alone with the dried meat in his hand. He looked at the dunes. The two moons of Prison World rose slowly above the horizon. The night was cold.

Tomorrow, the third month began.