The villa was quiet after midnight. Twelve suites, most of them dark, the mana lanterns along the third floor corridor dimmed to their pale night output. Through the shared wall, Garrett's breathing had the slow, even weight of someone genuinely asleep.
Leo was at his desk, going through his thoughts and mapping the events that has happened especially the senior Purist's words.
The attacks on Aria won't stop.
A statement of fact delivered with calm, no threat in his intonation which was almost worse, as if this was just something that had been ordained to happen this way.
Leo set the pen down.
His cognitive sense moved through the villa passively: Garrett's pulse, the structural mana in the stone, the faint signatures behind closed doors. All of it familiar. All of it exactly where it should be.
