Niv - Arcane defenses

          Even with the outer wards breached, Niv-Mizzet was far from helpless. The floor of his sanctum was layered in arcane traps, visible to the intruder's enhanced sight as lines of blue-white energy crisscrossing the floor, flanked by twisting columns of runes. An ordinary thief or assassin might have found these an impenetrable barrier, but the presence in the intruder's mind knew that no defense was truly impregnable. It calculated for a moment, then moved its host forward, stepping confidently through the barriers.

          The intruder stepped, waited a heartbeat, turned, sidestepped, sprinted forward, paused again. Magic pulsed and shimmered through the web of wards, searching for heat, for movement, for the spark of life. The young woman held her breath for so long her vision went gray at the edges as she shuffled backward in front of a bookcase, then spent a moment recovering before turning an easy cartwheel and walking on her hands through a section of densely interleaved runes.

***

          When it was satisfied, it nudged her forward another step. Her foot came down squarely in the middle of a stasis trap, and blue-white energy snapped into a taut sphere all around her, freezing her in place as firmly as if she'd been encased in ice. At the same time, magic pulsed a warning, both to Niv-Mizzet and the unfortunate guards down in the control room.

***

The Gathering Storm, Chapter 1