Leo walked back toward the villa through the mid-morning quiet. The paths were mostly empty, the students who weren't in classes scattered to the training yards or the library or the hundred other corners of the academy that swallowed people between bells. The sun had burned off the last of the morning chill, and the stone paths held the faint warmth of a day that was deciding whether to be cold or not.
His cognitive sense was still in its passive register, the low hum of awareness that had become as natural as breathing. He felt the ambient mana in the walls, the distant signatures of students in the academic wing, the faint pulse of the barrier wards around the training yards. All of it familiar. All of it exactly where it should be.
Then, at the edge of his perception, something else.
