Nyx stopped walking three days out from the valley.
Mid-stride.
Vane noticed before she said anything.
It was the way she stopped when the frequency gave her something none of the rest of them could hear yet — not startled, not afraid, simply arrested by a signal that had suddenly become more important than whatever her body had been doing a second earlier.
"There."
Everyone slowed.
Nobody asked where.
There was nothing obvious to point at.
The trees still leaned in the same direction they had for days, trunks bending beneath a pressure nobody had managed to identify. The light still came down at angles that made distance unreliable if you stared too long. The ground ahead looked no different from the ground behind them.
But Nyx's voice had changed.
The uncertainty was gone.
Ashe shifted the strap across one shoulder.
"How far?"
Nyx closed her eyes.
For several seconds, she listened.
Vane had no better word for it anymore.
