Ashcroft doesn’t make a mistake.
He makes a statement.
It comes at dawn.
The sky is pale gold, birds just beginning their morning calls, when the tremor hits—not from outside the compound, not from the forest, not from a ritual circle.
From below.
Deep.
Under the earth.
Morgan is already awake when the first seismic reading spikes across the ward grid.
“That’s not a node,” she says, eyes narrowing at the monitors.
“Then what?” Kade demands.
Morgan zooms out the ley-line projection.
The pattern appears slowly, like ink spreading through water.
It’s not triangular.
Not circular.
It’s linear.
A line drawn straight through the western ridge.
Straight through the abandoned Moonwright lands.
Straight through—
Blackthorn territory.
“He’s not trying to converge fields,” Thorne m
