The water changed before the Hydra arrived.
Vistra felt it through the dock planks — a displacement wave, not from the surface but from below, a slow, massive shift in the lake's hydrostatic pressure that traveled through the wooden boards and up through the soles of her boots and into her legs like a second heartbeat. She'd been writing in the new Manual — the blank pages filling slowly, each entry checked against Morthan's hidden journal, each observation cross-referenced with her own two decades of watching from this dock — and the pen stopped in her hand the way a compass needle stops when it finds north.
Something was rising.
She set the Manual down. Stood. Her hands were at her sides, open, empty — the posture Morthan had taught her for creature proximity events. No weapons. No sudden movement. No expression that could be read as challenge. A Warden's first language was stillness, and stillness said: I am here. I see you. I am not prey. I am not threat.
