Mira presses her palms down. The warmth is not like sun-baked stone — it pulses, rhythmic, almost breathing. Beneath her hands the sand becomes fine as flour, then finer still, until she feels no resistance at all, only heat rising in slow waves against her skin. The glinting thing inside the hollow lifts. Not thrown upward — lifted, as though by a careful hand. It is a key, small and brass, trailing a ribbon of woven blue thread that is somehow dry and unweathered despite having been buried here. The key turns once in the air, and a low sound begins — not music this time but a satisfied click, like a lock releasing somewhere very deep, somewhere she cannot see. The warming spreads up her wrists and into her arms. The sand beneath her knees begins to sink, evenly, deliberately — and for the first time Mira wonders whether she is being received or claimed.