book3: character bible updates for ruin backstory revision

- duchess-pamira.md: 20-year Kade Reach survey backstory,
  Holven as named rival, Devod's field note held 20 years,
  Ch07 "I've read about you" reveal
- devod-fields.md: Pamira survey at ~35 as final Pathfinder-
  adjacent contract and real exit from the life
- ledger.md: Scout Deployment Sequence explaining the 4-month
  post-wedding gap; Cairns as institutional memory

Ref: docs/superpowers/specs/2026-04-19-book3-ruin-backstory-revision-design.md

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

characters/devod-fields.md

@@ -72,9 +72,12 @@ During a frontier clearance gone wrong, Devod took charge of a deteriorating sit
 | ~28 | Left the Pathfinders | Did the math: stay and eventually your daughter grows up without a father. Left on his own terms — not broken, not forced out |
 | ~28-30 | Transitional years | Took lighter guild contract work while settling into civilian life. Logistics and supply skills translated immediately |
 | ~30-31 | Mere born | Fully committed to delivery work. Same guild network, same logistics skillset, fraction of the danger |
+| ~35 | **Kade Reach survey (Pamira's territory) — final Pathfinder-adjacent contract.** Multi-month eastern-coast job on a newly surveyed 45-acre section of Thorngate duchy. Devod was a senior asset — the Wolf's terrain eye on a puzzle the senior surveyor couldn't read. Catalogued the walled pre-Compact compound, three cliff-face mines, and the sealed perimeter gate. Wrote the field note that called the gate *a ward, not a door.* Note filed with Pamira's survey report. **The job that actually ended him** — not the 28-year-old formal departure. Came home from the eastern coast and told Charlette never again. | Final contract |
 
 ### Retirement Reasoning
-"Did the math — stay and your daughter grows up without a father." Left on his own terms. Not broken, not forced out. The delivery career is the same brain — navigation, terrain assessment, logistics, improvisation — applied to work that doesn't kill you.
+**Formally left full-time Pathfinder service at 28** — *"Did the math — stay and your daughter grows up without a father."* Not broken, not forced out. But the formal departure was not the real exit: he continued taking occasional Pathfinder-adjacent contract work through his early 30s while building the delivery career, a common transition for the skillset.
+
+**The Kade Reach survey at ~35 is where it actually ended.** Multi-month eastern-coast job on Duchess Pamira's territory. Careful documentation work, not frontier combat. He came home and told Charlette never again. That is the moment he exited the life. The delivery career — navigation, terrain assessment, logistics, improvisation applied to work that doesn't kill you — is what the rest of his 30s onward became.
 
 ---
 
@@ -100,7 +103,7 @@ During a frontier clearance gone wrong, Devod took charge of a deteriorating sit
 - **Pathfinder service (~18-28):** Served roughly a decade in the Pathfinders, an elite guild-contracted frontier clearance unit. Earned the nickname "The Wolf" for pack-leader instinct and relentless problem-solving under pressure. Left voluntarily at ~28 when he did the math on fatherhood vs. casualty rates.
 - **Met Charlette (~25):** She worked guild-adjacent supply logistics for Pathfinder operations. Sharp, organized, ambitious. They bonded over competence. Married ~26-27.
 - **Charlette reframe:** Her controlling nature is grounded in her professional history — years managing logistics for operations where people died regularly. Risk assessment, contingency planning, resource control were assets in that context. When she shifted that energy to family life, "managing risk" became "controlling everything and everyone." The same traits that made her excellent at supply logistics made her suffocating as a partner and parent. This doesn't excuse her behavior with Mere. It grounds it.
-- **Transitional years (~28-30):** Lighter guild contract work while settling into civilian life. Logistics and supply skills translated immediately. Mere born ~30-31. Fully committed to delivery work by then.
+- **Transitional years and contract work (~28-35):** After leaving full-time Pathfinder service at ~28, took occasional contract gigs through his early 30s while building the delivery career — not uncommon for the Pathfinder-to-civilian transition. Mere born ~30-31, Devod ~5 years into the civilian shift. **The Pamira / Kade Reach survey at ~35 was the final contract.** Multi-month eastern-coast job; he was senior asset; his field note on the sealed gate went into Duchess Pamira's survey report and sat there for 20 years. He came home from that job and told Charlette never again. That is the real end of the Pathfinder-adjacent life — Charlette had already started to calcify by then, and the months-long absence was one of the pre-ultimatum friction points. Mere was ~5; light-touch series texture whether she has any memory of "the year Dad was away for a long job on the coast." Drafter's call on whether this surfaces on-page in Book 3.
 - Divorced from Charlette Fields (Mere's mother). Marriage ended mutually ("or close enough"). Charlette hates him.
 - **The Ultimatum (when Mere was 12):** Two years post-divorce, Devod was still seeing Mere on Godsday visits. Every visit, Mere was missing something basic — worn shoes, old coats, clothes that should've been replaced. Devod took her shopping each time. **The trigger:** Winter, Mere at twelve, no gloves, hands red and cracked. Devod bought her three pairs (lined, with spares). Charlette came to Millford Street: framed basic care as "undermining her" — if he kept showing up and making her look like she couldn't provide, she'd take Mere and disappear. No forwarding address, no legal recourse — custody was hers, divorce settlement gave him nothing. He complied. Strategic choice, not cowardice. Calculated that Mere staying in Drenwick (near him) was better than Mere disappearing entirely. Then Charlette found out he was still in Drenwick — demanded 3 silvers/month payment for the privilege of proximity. Paid for four years (ages 12-16). Has lived with the guilt for 12+ years.
 - **Mere learns the truth in Book 2 Ch11.** Payment records trigger the revelation. She reclassifies both parents — Charlette as closed account, Devod as model-inverted (didn't leave, was forced out).
@@ -221,7 +224,12 @@ During a frontier clearance gone wrong, Devod took charge of a deteriorating sit
 | Epilogue | **Wedding party attendance, Mere hug on-page, Pathfinder address handoff.** Day ~17 post-draining. Attends Phelan and Mere's wedding party at Chandler's Row. Fourth attendee in arrival order (after Carter & Jenet, Carson, Leon). **Mere does not wait for him to reach her** — meets him in the middle of the room and puts her arms around him "the way Mere put her arms around almost nobody," and he holds her "as a man holds the daughter who had stood at his bedside and counted his pulse for hours in the dark." First physical affection beat between them on-page in the book. Lasts a breath longer than Phelan expects. They step back at the same moment without coordinating it. **Book 3 Pathfinder seed:** sets a folded slip of paper down on the table next to Leon's cloth twist. An address, written in a hand Phelan does not recognise — not Devod's own handwriting. *"For when you're ready."* Implied source: Brennan Toor or another Cairns/Pathfinder-adjacent contact from the same network that delivered the Ch15 Vethek Pass story. First tangible Book 3 lead Phelan holds that Ledger did not give him — independent of guild channels. **Exchanges a quiet unheard word with Ledger** at the party, Phelan files the exchange without being able to read it. The two of them now explicitly operate on off-channel communication Phelan cannot parse. Uninformed about Phelan/Mere marriage decision's interior weight (the children decision, the father wound from Ch21) per Book 2 lock | Mere hug / Pathfinder address / Ledger off-channel |
 
 ### Book 3
-<!-- Future -->
+
+<!-- Chapter-by-chapter progression fills in during drafting. Pre-set anchor from the ruin backstory revision: -->
+
+**Ch07 anchor:** When the team arrives at Pamira's estate, Pamira's survey file is already on her desk. Devod's handwriting is on the 20-year-old field note about the sealed gate. His reunion-recognition exchange with Pamira lands on *"I've read about you. You were on the Kade Reach survey. You found my sealed gate."* / *"That was your survey?"* He paced this ground at 35. He remembers where the cliff crumbles, where Mine 1's entrance sits, how the palisade reads from the approach. Ledger's "Devod specifically" reasoning in the Ch02 briefing is grounded in this concrete expertise — the team assembly includes him because the site is already partly mapped in his head.
+
+<!-- Full Book 3 chapter rows to be filled in during drafting. -->
 
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