8. I Am My Own Dog

Kinch awakens inhabiting a dog in Norrigal’s tower as she urgently explains Galva’s lung fever and looming winter. She warns the Guild is closing in with a tracker, an adept, and another hard foe, and offers a clandestine alternative through a temple inside the three-headed mountain, Three-Head, whose aid demands an unnamed, awful price that cannot be known beforehand.

Norrigal promises medicine and survival instructions—pellets, small game, frost onion, winterberry, and constant fire—then forcibly sends Kinch back, smuggling a letter and pellets in a tube. He wakes in the cave, eye smarting from Galva’s reflexive poke, retrieves the letter, and begins nursing her.

Over days, Kinch forages and feeds Galva while dosing her. Her fever ebbs slightly, but she remains weak. With time and yak oil for lamps, Kinch studies the sentient Guild Book. A shifting image of a wolf birthing a woman stirs the wind and seemingly affects Galva, who sleepwalks, believing a wolf threatens her brother. She attacks Kinch with her spadín.

Kinch defends himself with shield and shovel, realizing the Book is the conduit; he strikes the tome with iron, disrupting the magic and breaking Galva’s trance. He then weighs the Book down with iron, resolving to keep it near metal whenever he reads. Galva, confused and exhausted, returns to sleep.

Reading safer sections, Kinch finds operational scraps: payouts, infiltrations, failed attempts on Queen Mireya, and the Guild’s fragile state post-Hrava—but little to truly endanger them. Tempted to burn the hateful volume, he hesitates when a page depicting a wrestler on stacked books challenges him and a girleen’s pleas appear within the illustration. Despite warning himself against manipulation, Kinch sweeps the iron from the pages, effectively ‘freeing’ the image and inviting whatever trial follows.