Stonehold City – Thorne Manor – Moments After the Pulse
The floor cracked with a thunderous rumble. A pulse of jade-green light surged upward from beneath the manor, blasting through the courtyard tiles and forming a glowing sigil in the shape of a mist-wreathed phoenix. Wind howled. Spirit energy erupted like a storm. For the first time in centuries, the Mistshroud Sect's ancestral seal awakened.
The assassins froze.
Too late.
The protective formation surged to life, glyphs burning through the manor walls. The lead assassin snarled and slashed a black talisman across the air, trying to destabilize the newly formed barrier—
—but his blade bounced off an unseen wall, shattering from the recoil.
"Impossible," he whispered.
The formation was alive.
A mistlike aura surged from every wall, window, and stone in the house. For a heartbeat, the assassins saw what the manor had once been—a shrine, old and hidden, cloaked in the city's ruins. Then the present snapped back into focus.
