Page 53 of Mating Her Dragon

Sydney read all of it, slowly and carefully. Then left the concealment itself standing.

"You may hide from the world," she said quietly. Then a second later added, "But you can’t hide from me."

The camouflage held, exactly as it had been. To any outside eye, there was still nothing there worth noticing… But Sydney could see straight through it now.

Garrett looked at her. "You just left the camouflage standing."

"Yep."

"So, she may not know we're here?"

Sydney smiled.

"There's that face again," Garrett muttered.

Once the concealment stopped hiding itself from her, the rest of it simply appeared. I didn’t materialize, not exactly. It just settled into her awareness the way a word came back after slipping your mind.

An abandoned logging structure sat on the surface, half-collapsed, roots grown through what remained of its foundation. Underneath it, there was an old Elven stone. A stairwell, worn smooth by feet that had stopped walking it centuries ago. A sealed subterranean waystation, ancient enough that full-grown trees had rooted directly over sections of it.

Garrett shifted immediately into something Sydney had started to think of as his native language… Hand signals, positions, entry points mapped out in the space of a few silent seconds, the small containment team falling into formation around him without needing to be told twice.

He checked with her before anything moved forward. "Ready?"

"Yeah." She gave him a single nod, and they moved forward.

Inside, the dust told its own story. It had been recently disturbed. Fresh footprints cut through soil and debris, telling her that someone had been there sooner rather than later. The dust hadn't yet begun to settle.

To her right, there was a modern light source, tucked into an alcove that had clearly never been built to hold one. To her left, she saw a coffee cup, half-full, abandoned on an ancient stone ledge.

"Keevandrie drinks coffee?" Sydney whispered.

"Focus," Garrett murmured back.

"I'm just saying evil apparently has standards."

But more urgent than the coffee cup was what Sydney could see stretching deeper into the structure. There were threads of active Magic disappearing one by one, unraveling in real time as they walked.

Someone was destroying evidence. Keevandrie had realized Sydney hadn't followed the obvious trap after all. The Elven Sorceress knew the Special One had come here to erase the one place she was never supposed to find.

They moved together after that, the two of them reading two entirely different battlefields laid over the same physical space.

Garrett noticed footprints, exits, lines of retreat, the places a person would choose if they intended to stage an ambush. Sydney noticed Elven triggers, collapsed Wards, containment Spellwork threading deeper into the structure, all of it converging toward a single point.

"She's down there," Sydney whispered.

"You’re certain?"

"Almost."

"I'll take almost."

They'd both learned, by now, not to pretend a certainty neither of them actually had. The chamber they finally reached had clearly once been something important.

Sydney understood why the marker above had stayed silent the instant she saw what the room actually was. It was not simply another waystation, another node in some larger network…

This was the original control architecture. The place Keevandrie had built the Living Threshold project itself, before she'd ever turned it loose on Garrett.

Diagrams hung suspended in the space. They weren’t paper, nothing so mundane. They were Magical constructions caught in old crystal and stone, glowing faintly in patterns Sydney's sight parsed almost instantly. Realm seams. Threshold coordinates. Elven lattice structures, dozens of variations, refined and refined again across what must have been centuries of patient, careful work.