The girl's hand was cold—not the cold of death, but the chill of a winter morning just before the sun breakes. As their fingers locked, the fractured shards of the bridge began to dissolve into glowing dust. There was no longer a path to run across.
"The bridge was a lie," the other girl shouted over the defining roar of the silver river."It was a tether! If we stay on it, the Wood will pull us back into the yesterday!"
"Then where do we go?" she cried out, her bracelet humming so violently it felt like it might shatter her bones.
The other girls looked down at the churning, metallic liquid below."Into the flow. We have to become the pulse."
Before she could protest, the girl yanked her forward. They plummeted.
The sensation wasn't like falling into water. It was like falling into a memory. The silver liquid swallowed them, but it didn't drown her. It filled her nose with the scent of pine needles and her ears with the sound of a thousand heartbeats. The lilac glow of her bracelet bled into a swirling vortex of violet and chrome.
They were moving at an impossible speed through the very veins of the Elder Wood. Around them, she saw flickers of the forest's history: the first stone altar being carved, the Weaver being born from a discarded shadows, a door being grown from a single, enchanted speed.
Suddenly, the current jerked. The "yesterday" girl let go of her hand, her from stretching out like silk caught in a breeze.
"Find the root!" the girl screamed, her voice echoing through the silver."The center in hollow!"
With a final, bone-jarring thud, the silver river spat her out. She hit a floor of soft, white sand in a chamber that breathed with a rhythmic, golden light.
She wasn't in the woods anymore. She was inside the Heart.