Page 29 of Match Made In Growl

"I appreciate the history lesson," Criss said.

"I hope you do." Rydan inclined his head with the same polite, non-deferential gesture Criss had a feeling he gave to everyone. "Enjoy your visit, Criss. And give my regards to Kieran."

He turned and continued up the path toward the northern ridge, unhurried, book tucked under his arm, disappearing into the shadows of the tree line.

Criss’s tiger was coiled tight. He had just been dismissed as if he was a young cub asking nonsense questions.

His entire life, people had looked at him and decided he was easy to handle. His mother managed him with guilt. Kieran managed him with patience. Women managed him by playing along. And now a man who had erased history and rewritten his family's legacy had looked him in the face and decided he wasn't worth worrying about.

He started walking back toward town. The afternoon sun was warm on his shoulders and the birds were loud in the canopy and Hollow Oak hummed with its usual quiet magic around him. Everything looked the same as it had an hour ago.

But something had shifted. Not in the town or the woods or the path under his boots, but somewhere behind his ribs where the jokes usually lived and the deflections stayed loaded and ready.

Rydan Ashkar was hiding something and it involved Criss’s family. And Kieran wouldn’t talk about it when he had asked initially.

If it hadn’t peaked his curiosity then, it did now. And as much as Criss didn’t care to think about it, it involved Stephanie, and that may have been the main source of his determination.

17

STEPHANIE

Rydan Ashkar had kept his word.

The permits had arrived by Thursday morning, stamped and signed, waiting for her at Tom Brewster's desk as if the delay had never happened. Edgar had called her at the inn that same evening to let her know her supplies had come in, apologizing again for the mix-up with a sincerity that told her he genuinely didn't know what had caused it. Everything restored, everything smoothed over, not a single thread left visible to suggest the last four days had been anything other than bureaucratic inconvenience. And that bothered her.

Steph hiked the eastern trail with her loaded pack and the morning sun warm on her back, turning the conversation at the Griddle & Grind over in her head the way she turned artifacts in her hands, looking for fracture lines. Ashkar had been polite. He'd spoken about the site with the careful respect of someone who understood its significance and had framed his concerns as philosophical rather than personal. A reasonable man offering a reasonable perspective.

Except reasonable men don't shut down your permits for four days and then hand them back like a gift. Reasonable men don't materialize in a town they haven't visited in years the moment you start uncovering something they'd prefer stayed underground. And reasonable men don't end conversations by announcing they'll be staying to "make sure all things go smoothly" while looking at you with eyes that have already decided you're a problem.

He'd warned her. That's what it was, stripped of the courtesy and the tea and the leather-bound book. A warning dressed in concern, delivered with the precision of someone who'd had decades to perfect the art of saying threatening things in unthreatening ways.

She reached the basin and stopped at the tree line, scanning the site the way she'd started doing since the overnight symbols had appeared. The fourteen tiger pride wards were still there, carved into the stone around the seal, but today they felt different. Dormant. The low hum of responsive energy she'd detected on her last visit was absent, the symbols sitting cold and inert in the morning light like carvings in a museum rather than active magic.

Someone had turned them off. Or pulled back, stepping away from the monitoring network for reasons she could only guess at. Maybe Rydan's conversation with her had achieved what he'd wanted, a signal that his message had been delivered and surveillance was no longer necessary. Maybe he assumed the permit delay and the face-to-face warning had been enough to make her cautious.

She wasn't going to waste time wondering why. The wards were down. Her access was restored. And she had lost nearly a week of fieldwork that she intended to make up starting now, before anything else could be delayed, rerouted, or conveniently misplaced.

The cavity exposed by the ridge collapse was her priority. She'd been unable to investigate it before the permits were pulled, and the opening in stone face had been sitting there for days, open and unexamined. She set up portable lighting around the opening and angled her camera for documentation, then crouched at the entrance and let her sensitivity read the space before she reached inside.

Old. Incredibly old. The magic layered in the stone around this opening predated everything else on the site, a foundation layer beneath the foundations she'd already documented. It felt compressed, heavy with the weight of time, but stable. No reactive surges, no pushback. Whatever lay inside had been sealed so long ago that the magic had fossilized into the rock itself.

She eased through the gap with her headlamp on and her magnetometer clipped to her belt. The cavity was narrow at the entrance but widened quickly into a chamber roughly ten feet across, the ceiling low enough that she had to duck. The air was cool and dry and carried that metallic, ancient smell she'd noticed after the ward collapse, like breathing inside a time capsule.

Her headlamp swept the walls and she stopped breathing.

Carvings. Hundreds of them. The chamber walls were covered floor to ceiling in symbols, text, and images cut into the limestone with the same precision she'd documented on the surface. But these weren't ward markers or boundary signs. These were records. Pictographic narratives interspersed with text in at least three different scripts, depicting events, figures, gatherings. A visual history carved into stone by people who wanted it preserved in a medium that couldn't be burned or lost or conveniently misplaced.

She photographed everything, working around the chamber, her camera clicking in the silence. The narratives read left to right, top to bottom, in a chronological sequence she could follow even without full translation. Early settlement. Alliance formation. Multiple species working together to establish wards, build structures, create the foundation of what would eventually become Hollow Oak.

Then, about two-thirds of the way around the chamber, the tone of the carvings changed.

The images seemed to grow sharper in angles and the lines themselves. Figures that had been depicted in cooperative poses were now separated, facing each other across carved lines that looked like boundaries or barriers. She recognized tiger forms among them, stylized but distinct, and the text surrounding these later images was denser, more urgent, as if whoever carved it had been trying to get everything down before they ran out of time or permission. It was at the far wall that she found the treaty stone.

It was larger than the seal she'd uncovered on the surface, roughly two feet across, set into the wall at chest height. The stone was darker than the surrounding limestone, a dense volcanic rock that had been imported from somewhere else, chosen specifically for its durability. And across its face, an inscription that made her hands go cold.

The original text had been shaved down. She could see the ghost of it beneath the current engraving, the faintest shadow of deeper cuts that had been magically ground smooth and then carved over with new words. Whoever had done it was skilled, volcanic rock is hard to engrave in over an original. Part of the reason she had assumed it had been used. And, to an untrained eye, the inscription looked original and unbothered. But Steph's fingers could feel what her eyes could barely see: two layers of text occupying the same space, the older one forcibly silenced to make room for the revision.

She flattened her palm against the stone and let her sensitivity read both layers simultaneously. The newer text was formal, bureaucratic, the language of treaties and agreements. Words like "unity" and "sacrifice" and "voluntary restructuring." The kind of language that made violence and orders sound like a choice.