The Academy's forensic laboratory was a sterile contrast to the horror of the meditation garden. White walls, clinical lighting, magical analysis equipment that hummed with contained power—all designed to transform visceral tragedy into quantifiable data.
Raven stood before the examination table where Marcus Aero's corpse lay preserved in stasis field, her golden eyes tracking the magical residue patterns that her Thunder affinity made visible. The body looked no better under laboratory conditions—if anything, the clinical lighting made the aged horror more pronounced, emphasizing every skeletal detail, every sunken feature, every indication of life force stripped so completely that only biological structure remained.
