Dawn in a noble house meant getting up before you wanted to and standing in a courtyard while servants loaded bags onto a carriage that was noticeably less impressive than the ones parked next to it.
The Ashford main estate had four carriages. His was the smallest one, the one with a crack running along the left side panel that someone had patched with wood filler and painted over badly. Two guards stood beside it, both C-Rank by the faint glow of their Crests, both wearing the expression of men who had drawn the short straw on escort duty and knew it. One of them was eating something wrapped in cloth. It smelled like actual eggs.
He looked at that for a second.
"The carriage is prepared, young master," Gren said, appearing at his elbow with a travel bag and the focused energy of someone who had accepted his situation and intended to manage it competently regardless.
He got in.
The road east ran through farmland for the first two hours, flat and boring and lit by the kind of grey morning that couldn't decide if it wanted to be overcast or not. He sat across from Gren, who had produced a small ledger from somewhere and was going through it with a pen, occasionally making sounds that suggested the contents were not encouraging.
He spent the first hour trying to figure out the mark.
The carriage seat was leather, old and cracked. He pressed his palm flat against it and waited. Nothing. He tried the wooden wall panel. Nothing. He picked up his travel bag and held it. Nothing happened to the bag. He was pretty sure the bag wasn't going to evolve into a better bag no matter how long he held it, but he'd wanted to check.
So not objects. Or at least not those objects.
He looked out the window at the farmland going past. A crow was sitting on a fence post watching the carriage with the flat assessment that crows always seemed to have about everything. He thought about whether he could reach out the window and grab a crow mid-travel and immediately decided that was a bad idea for several reasons, the first being that crows were fast and the second being that he didn't know what a marked crow would do and the third being that Gren was right there with his ledger.
He'd figure out the activation conditions eventually. He had time. The estate was apparently several hours away and there was nothing else to do in a cracked leather carriage except think, which he was already doing, and sleep, which he couldn't quite manage, and look at Gren's ledger over Gren's shoulder, which Gren had angled away from him after the first ten minutes.
"Bad numbers?" he asked.
"The estate has been unoccupied for six years, young master. The numbers are what they are."
"Which is."
"Manageable," Gren said, in the tone of someone for whom manageable had stopped meaning what the dictionary said it meant.
He looked back out the window. The farmland had given way to scrubland, and the scrubland was starting to give way to actual trees, and the trees were getting denser and darker the further east they went. The road narrowed. The guards outside shifted from riding casually to sitting a little straighter in their saddles, which was the first indication that the area outside the window had gone from boring to something else.
He'd read enough of the body's memories to know what the Wildlands were. Monster territory. No kingdom authority, no adventurer guild posts, no patrols. The borderland estates sat right up against the edge of it because nobody with options chose to live there, which was exactly why the Ashford family had one sitting empty and exactly why it had been the obvious destination for a NULL son they didn't want to think about anymore.
The trees outside were old. The road through them was the kind of road that existed because people had driven on it enough times to flatten the grass, not because anyone had actually built it. Roots crossed the wheel ruts. The carriage rocked.
Gren closed his ledger.
--------
The wolves came out of the trees fast, which was the thing about wolves that people who hadn't seen them move always got wrong. Six of them, F-Rank by size, grey-coated and coordinated in the loose way that meant they'd done this before. They hit the road from both sides and the horses screamed and both guards were already drawing, one of them shouting something back toward the carriage.
The carriage lurched and stopped.
He grabbed the door handle to stay upright. Gren made a sound somewhere between a prayer and a profanity. Through the window he could see one of the guards trading blows with two wolves at once, C-Rank Crest lit on his forearm, earth-colored, doing fine but not great. The other guard had his horse halfway controlled and one wolf already down but a second coming at his flank.
Six wolves. Two C-Rank guards. The math wasn't immediately catastrophic but it wasn't good either.
The carriage door blew open.
The wolf that had hit it was large, grey, and now directly in front of him with its front paws on the carriage step and its teeth at a height he found uncomfortable. It wasn't looking at Gren. It was looking at him specifically, which said something about how threat assessment worked in the animal kingdom and none of it was flattering.
He grabbed it by the scruff.
Not a plan. Not a decision, exactly. More like the wolf was there and his hand was there and the outcome was contact, and then the wolf went very still in the way things went still when something was happening to them that they didn't have a framework for.
The golden sigil burned into the fur at the back of its neck, bright and immediate and physically real, not a sensation he felt so much as something he watched happen. The wolf's frame expanded, fast enough to be visible, shoulders broadening and legs lengthening while the grey coat shifted color from the root outward, going dark grey and then charcoal and then black. The fangs were longer when the mouth opened again. Shadow came off the fur the way steam came off something hot, thin wisps of it that curled and disappeared.
The wolf looked at him.
He looked at the wolf.
Text appeared behind his eyes.
[Sovereign Mark placed on: Gray Wolf (F-Rank)]
[Evolution triggered]
[Gray Wolf (F-Rank) → Shadow Fang Wolf (D-Rank)]
[Loyalty: Absolute]
[Host power absorbed: STR +12, SPD +8, VIT +5]
D-Rank. Two full ranks above where it had started. He read the stats once, moved on.
The Shadow Fang Wolf dropped off the carriage step, turned, and hit the nearest grey wolf with the kind of force that made a sound. Not a growl. An impact. The grey wolf went sideways into the tree line and didn't come back out.
The fight changed pretty quickly after that.
He climbed out of the carriage while it was still going on. Two more grey wolves were circling the horses and he walked up to the nearer one while it was mid-circle and put his hand on its back. Same thing. The sigil, the expansion, the color shift, the shadow wisps. A second notification he didn't bother reading past the rank. D-Rank again. It turned and went for the remaining wolves immediately.
The third mark he had to move for. A wolf had broken from the main group and was running, which he understood, and he jogged after it for about twenty seconds before it stopped and turned and looked at him with the confused expression of an animal that had expected to be chasing something and was now being chased. He touched its nose. The sigil appeared between its eyes. It grew. It turned black.
Three Shadow Fang Wolves now stood in a loose group at the edge of the road, watching him. The remaining grey wolves were gone, back into the trees, wanting nothing more to do with any of this. Both guards were still on their horses and staring at him. One of them had a small cut on his forearm. The other one's horse was refusing to calm down.
"What," the first guard said. Not a question. More like a word he'd needed to say out loud.
He looked at his hand. Regular hand. Same kid's hand from yesterday. He turned it over.
Okay so he touched things and they got bigger and turned into better versions of themselves. That was the mechanic. Living things, apparently. Or at least animals. He'd tried the carriage seat for an hour and nothing, but three wolves in two minutes and now he had a small pack of shadow dogs that had apparently decided he was their permanent address.
The largest one, the first one he'd marked, had put itself between him and the tree line and was watching the forest with the focused attention of something that had upgraded its whole operating system and was now running threat assessments that would've been beyond it twenty minutes ago.
Behind him, from inside the carriage, came a soft thump.
He looked back. Through the open door, Gren had slid sideways on the bench and was no longer holding his ledger.
He walked back and checked. Gren was breathing fine, just out cold, pen still in his hand, ledger on the floor open to a page of numbers that were probably still not great regardless of what had just happened outside.
Fair enough.
He sat on the carriage step and the three Shadow Fang Wolves arranged themselves in a loose semicircle around him. The first one sat. The second one sat. The third one looked at the other two sitting and then sat too, a little delayed, like it was still calibrating.
He needed to call them something. He wasn't going to give them dramatic names. He didn't have the energy for dramatic names and honestly the gap between what these things looked like and what he was going to call them was funnier if he kept it simple.
"Uno," he said, pointing at the first one.
Uno looked at him.
"Dos." The second one.
Dos looked at him.
"Tres." The third one, still a little late on everything.
Tres sneezed. No shadow came out. Just a regular sneeze. He decided that was fine.
--------
Gren came around about fifteen minutes later, sat up, looked at the three large black wolves sitting outside the carriage door, looked at him, looked back at the wolves, and then picked his ledger up off the floor and found his page again without saying anything. The pen had left a mark on his cheek from where he'd landed on it.
The guards had agreed, through a silent exchange of looks, to ride further ahead than strictly necessary for the rest of the trip.
The road climbed through the trees for another hour before cresting a long hill, and the estate came into view at the bottom.
Crumbling was accurate. One full wing was missing most of its roof, which meant the eastern wing being intact was doing a lot of work as the positive selling point. The garden was dead, brown and overgrown in equal parts, running right up to a low stone wall that marked the border between the estate grounds and the Wildlands proper. Past the wall, the trees were older and denser and darker than anything they'd driven through, the kind of forest where the light didn't make it all the way to the ground.
He looked at it for a second. Then looked at Uno, who was looking at the forest with his ears up and his attention locked on something specific.
Something in there moved. Not fast, not panicked. The slow, deliberate movement of something large enough that it didn't feel the need to move any other way. A shape between the trees, gone before he got a clear look at it, leaving behind the impression of size and the sound of something heavy settling back into stillness.
The guards had stopped their horses on the hill and were not going further down.
He looked at the estate, then at the forest, then at Uno still watching the tree line with that focused attention.
Whatever was in there was bigger than wolves. Considerably bigger.
He looked at his hand.
Then he started down the hill.