The light spread from the stones to Alex's hands, up his arms, across his chest, settling finally in the curve of his belly where the small lives answered with their own glow—faint, golden, pulsing in rhythm with the stones.
Alex gasped. The sensation was overwhelming—not painful, but immense. As though something vast had brushed against the edges of his awareness and was now pressing closer, trying to find a way in.
"Alex." Naga's voice came from somewhere distant, filtered through the light. "Alex, your eyes—"
"They're glowing," Leo finished, and his voice was something Alex had rarely heard from him—genuine awe.
He couldn't see his own eyes, but he could feel them—the strange heat behind them, the way the world had sharpened into impossible clarity. Every blade of grass was distinct. Every grain of soil in the dead circle was visible. And beneath the surface, deep in the earth, something was moving.
"The threshold," Alex breathed. "I can feel it."
