Lira had been walking on the pain for two days before she understood it wasn't going to stop on its own.
It lived somewhere behind her ribs, a pull with no shape beyond distance, dragging her steadily north long before she had a name to give the direction.
'Something is hurting,' she thought, legs unsteady on the last stretch of broken road, 'and my body decided that mattered more than my own safety.'
She had not known where the pull would end, only that it grew sharper every time she tried to walk away from it instead of toward it.
The formation opened in front of her without warning, broken anchors and bound bodies scattered across ground that had clearly stopped being ordinary hours ago.
Black threads crossed a woman's chest near the center, and a man held rigid by restraints turned his head toward her the instant she crossed the outer line.
