The deep-range patrol returned on the twenty-second of Scorchend — four days overdue, three members missing, and carrying intelligence that converted the northern hypothetical into a confirmed operational threat.
Patrol Leader Raegal — the grizzled wolf-beastman whose forty years of frontier service had given him the uncanny threat-reading ability of a predator who survived by understanding what was trying to kill him — delivered the debrief to Marquess Gharrek Fenward in the war room of Fangwall Fortress while the patrol's survivors were being treated for injuries that the Frostmarch's healer priests described as "consistent with sustained divine-domain exposure."
