Previously on Reclaiming Orathos

It's 10 PM and the long day isn't done. Detective Malcolm Locke — narrating his own genius like a back-alley Columbo — walks you into the South Wall shadows, straight to the body-handoff you've been chasing since the Tannery. The bigoted butcher is here to buy a fresh corpse from the Anthropocentrists, a gang of human-supremacist kids who've just murdered a young catfolk on his way home. Locke deputizes you. It's legal now. It gets brutal.

Silithane charms the butcher out of the fight. The gang's ancient leader, Rickard, reveals himself a homebrew anti-everything paladin, smiting in pillars of light. Then he crits Ashlyn for 87 radiant — cleaving her clean in two. But she'd Soulbound him: his killing blow drags him to the grave too. Both halves, same instant.

You win. The gang falls, the butcher's webbed to a wall alive, and a guard-cart rushes Ashlyn to the arena Bloodworks — raised from the dead by dawn.

Tomorrow: Locke's pot roast, and your leaving-papers. What's the butcher going to tell you?

SUMMARY: Energetic 150–200-word present-tense recap of Session 16 — the South Wall ambush, Ashlyn's mutual-kill death and resurrection, and the captured butcher hook — saved to Recaps\Session 16 recap.md.