Aliyah Winters saw the Gate of Thessara from thirty miles away.
She was flying at eight thousand feet, the altitude chosen for maximum visibility and minimum exposure to whatever was happening at the surface. The Baron of Frost flanked her on Stormclaw, his scepter already channeling a low-level detection spell that fed information about the magical landscape directly into his enhanced perception. Behind them, the two Academy mages rode their own griffons with the white-knuckled intensity of scholars who were far more comfortable in libraries than on the backs of airborne predators.
The Gate was impossible to miss.
