I stood over the burn mark until the torches Zereth had ordered brought out finally caught its full shape clean enough to be certain, and certainty was worse than the guessing had been. The same branching pattern from the sky. The same pattern scorched fresh into ground that shouldn't have been able to hold heat at all, given how cold the night had turned since the thing came apart into smoke. Grall stood over it with his blade still drawn, turning it slowly as though the steel might tell him something his eyes hadn't, and Krez wouldn't come within six feet of the mark itself, nostrils working at air that had gone, by his own account, worse rather than better once the shape was actually gone.
"I want it covered before first light," Zereth said. "Salt, iron filings, whatever Algor recommends. I don't care if it does anything. I want it out of sight before the kitchen staff start their morning rounds and half the castle decides the wards have already failed."
