The tether between us glowed steady and bright.
"Eighty-nine minutes," Azryth said.
I wiped my face, took a breath.
"How much further?"
He checked the compass, the needle was pointing straight ahead, but something about the pull felt different now. Final.
"Very close," he said.
We started walking, the gray ahead was changing, not lighter or darker, but sharper and more defined, like we were approaching something that imposed structure on the formless void.
After what felt like hours but was probably minutes, I saw it.
A barrier.
A veil of shimmer and light, stretching infinitely in both directions, impossible to go around. It looked like aurora borealis frozen in place, colors that shifted between visible and not.
"The arbiter boundary," Azryth said quietly.
As we got closer, I could see symbols moving through the veil, not carved or written, it's just existing within the shimmer. Ancient, powerful, and older than anything I'd encountered.
We stopped a few feet away.
