Nobody spoke.
The older Sarya stood across the newly opened Road, one hand still raised in warning, and behind her something moved through the darkness that Sarya couldn't fully process — fragments only, pieces her mind refused to assemble into a whole. Something shifting above the Road's surface, too large to belong naturally to the space it occupied. Distant points of light that might have been eyes, or might have been something else entirely. The sound of something dragging itself slowly across ancient stone, patient and unhurried.
"Why?" Sarya finally asked.
"Because if I reach you," the older woman said, "you become me."
The words did nothing to steady the uncertainty churning through Sarya's chest.
"Become you how?"
The older Sarya's eyes dropped to the light pulsing beneath Sarya's skin.
"You already know," she said.
Then the Road began to change.
---
