On the other hand, Natalia and the gang crossed the scarred plain at first light, nine people walking toward a pull that had been tugging at every sense sharp enough to feel it since the day they'd first spotted it.
The ground grew warmer with every step, cracked earth healing and splitting in the same slow rhythm, and by the time the source finally came into view, none of them had words ready for what they were actually looking at.
It wasn't a monster. It wasn't a tree, or a maze, or anything built with intent at all.
It was a heart.
Vast beyond anything a body could have ever properly held, half-buried in the scarred ground, red-black and still, impossibly, beating, and from it roots spread out in every direction, threading through soil and stone alike, the same wrong-jointed crimson trees that had haunted every mile of this whole dimension.
