"There," she said at last, pointing into the white with absolute certainty. "Everything in this forest follows one array. One pattern. Every tree, every stone, every curve of the fog, all of it part of the same weave. Except one thing." Her eyes narrowed. "There's a rock, that way, that doesn't fit. It's the only anomaly in the whole forest. This rock holds the secret."
She led them to it, a squat grey boulder sitting unremarkably among the trees, indistinguishable to any normal eye, but wrong in every way that mattered to Lyra's.
Aelira stepped up, leveled her hand, and called her elements. A spear of condensed flame and screaming wind formed at her fingertips, an Inferno Spear of fused Phoenix Flame and Heavenfall Wind, and she flung it at the boulder.
