I felt them before the ward line did.
That was the thing that stopped me mid-stride on the way back from the morning training session — a sensation I had no name for yet, something that lived below the earth sense and below the heat sense and below every developing frequency I had been cataloguing over the last week. Something older. Something that bypassed all the new machinery of my awakening power and spoke directly to the part of me that existed before training and before Kael and before the prophecy.
The part that was simply animal.
And the animal said: wrong.
I stopped walking.
Kael stopped half a step later.
He didn't ask what was wrong. He had learned — we had both learned, in the week since the northern ward line, in the days since the kiss that had rearranged the world — th
