Lira's brow furrowed. "Is that… why I was hunted? Because I crossed the rules?" she whispered. Her voice felt swallowed by the mist, yet the fog seemed to nod in reply, a wave of rainbow light rippling in rhythm with her heartbeat.
As she walked, she noticed objects—floating, half-transparent, glimmering like crystalized memories—hovering near the path. One was a tiny, perfectly shaped fruit-crystal she had touched on this world; another was a fragment of her first stinky-flower fruit from the forest. A delicate vine curled around a shard of rainbow light, moving as if alive.
"These are… pieces of the planet itself," she thought. "They remember. They remember everything."
