Mira doesn't stop. She steps left, arcing around the figure's reach, eyes fixed on where the thread disappears past its shoulder. The sand_figure doesn't speak — but it turns. The whole pillar of it pivots on no visible joint, that spiral groove tracking her movement. Sand hisses from its edges, grains catching the light and falling. She is past it before she can think better. The thread resumes at shoulder height, unchanged, and she follows it up the ridge's packed slope. A dozen strides and the other side opens beneath her: a road. Old, stone-flagged, half-buried by drift, running east to west through the basin below. Near it, something that might once have been a gate — two posts leaning into each other like exhausted travelers, a lintel still balanced between them. Behind her, the hiss of sand is moving.