Every one of the defenses in place beneath the university had been made for a very specific purpose.
Each one was designed to stop a different kind of threat, from the kinds everyone talked about—arcane breaches, divine interference, psychic attacks, or physical intrusion—to the stranger kinds that most people would laugh at if they heard them spoken aloud.
Old superstition, they would call it, the kind of thing that belonged in half-forgotten stories, not in the middle of a modern campus.
But here, in this place, those old protections were not only real, they had been kept alive and ready for a very long time.
None of them were meant to be seen, not even by trained magical eyes that knew how to look for distortions in the air or ripples in the ground.
To any casual scan, the whole area would seem harmless—just stone, soil, and the faint, steady hum of the foundations themselves.
