The Gate

Sophia's POV

Alaric arrived at midnight.

I felt him before I saw him — a shift in the quality of the dark beyond the southern gate, a change in the air that my hybrid senses registered before my eyes had the information to confirm it. The power in my chest stirred with the specific, ancient alertness it had developed for genuine threat, different from the strategic threat of Vane and Gravis and more personal, more final.

Then the torches at the outer perimeter caught the shape of ...