Inside the anchor ring was different.
The ring wasn't visible — no physical markers, no obvious boundary. But crossing it was unmistakable, the way crossing a significant threshold of any kind was unmistakable. The ambient temporal field went from dense to structured. Not random disturbance but organized disturbance — the specific quality of something being maintained rather than something that happened.
Satou felt it as pressure.
Not physical pressure. Temporal pressure — the specific sensation of being in a space where time was being actively managed by an external will, where the normal flow of time that existed as background reality was being shaped into something else, the way a river was shaped by a channel into something more directed than natural water movement.
The directional sense had become entirely redundant. He knew where Chronus was the way he knew where his own hand was.
He looked at Morgana and Seraphina.
