The body was discovered at 0347 hours in the Descartes family's private meditation chamber within the Academy's guest wing—a space that should have been impossible to access without triggering multiple security wards, that should have been protected by layers of magical and physical defenses designed specifically to prevent exactly this kind of intrusion.
Livia Descartes stood over the corpse of Marcus Descartes, her distant uncle, a man she'd seen at family dinners throughout her childhood, and felt something cold and terrible settle into her chest that transcended mere grief.
The body showed the now-familiar signs of Blood Echo assassination: accelerated aging that had turned a forty-seven-year-old man into withered corpse that looked ancient, life force drained so completely that only biological structure remained, features frozen in expression of absolute terror. But what made this murder qualitatively different from the previous three was the location and the timing.
