Seraphine felt it first, the way she always felt things first, which was without warning or announcement, just a stop in the middle of walking and a change in the quality of her attention.
She stopped walking.
The group stopped around her the way they had learned to stop when she stopped, which was without asking why yet, because the why would come.
She stood in the middle of the road with the flat grey-green of the borderlands around them and she turned slightly south and she held herself still and read the currents that were invisible to everyone except her and the twins and whatever part of Aelara had been waking up over the past weeks.
"Something ahead," she said. "In the land. Not recent. Old. Has been there a long time, possibly longer than the ruins." She opened her eyes. "The founders did not put it there. They built around it."
— — —
Lyra turned without being asked.
