Sery frowned in instinctive unease as she slowly came back to consciousness, a dull ache throbbing in the back of her head. The air felt heavy and suffocating as she opened her eyes to an unfamiliar, windowless room with plain white walls and sparse furniture on rough wooden flooring, only a small table and chair accompanying the narrow bed she lay on. A single small mana crystal on the wall provided the only source of light.

She sat up, pushing aside the featureless brown blanket that was jarringly different from the intricately patterned quilt she was used to waking up to. The room had two doors. One led to a modern bathroom with running water but no heating spells over the taps.

The second door was locked. She tugged uselessly at the handle, the obstacle causing her to realize why she felt so suffocated: her senses could not detect even a single enna nearby.

Panicking, she threw open the walls of her enna and reached desperately outward with her senses, only to hit a barrier that surrounded the room in all directions, sealing her away from the rest of the world.

Shuddering, she retreated to the bed, hugging her knees to her chest and wrapping the blanket around herself. It could not ward off the chill that ate into her bones. She was alone again. Even her ever-present sense of Veltyen was gone.

Phantom pains ran through her body, electric shocks from a ghostly necklace, an angry voice shouting next to her ear, a bruising grip on her arm before a shallow cut that stung and burned. Her throat locked, old instincts keeping her silent because to cry would only make things worse.

A single presence appeared to her senses, bringing her partially out of her panicked fugue. The enna signature was somewhat familiar, so she was unsurprised when the locked door clicked and opened to reveal a richly dressed man with lightning streaks of silver zigzagging through his hair.

Tristane’s face was twisted in an arrogant sneer as he looked down at her. “Not so quick to run your mouth now that Veltyen and your guildmasters aren’t running over to protect you,” he taunted with a smirk.

She stayed silent, a spark of anger igniting under the fear at the mockery of her beloved guildmates. It battled against the chill inside her, freeing her to think and move.

Her silence seemed to anger Tristane. “What? You think you can just bide your time until your precious Veltyen comes to save you? Well, he won’t. No one will be able to find you. I made sure of it.”

“What do you want?” she made herself say.

His expression turned gloating. “A Source, obviously. If you’d listened to me, you could have been a member of Inheritance, even as a commoner, but we had to do things the hard way. Well, now you’re stuck in this room until we can manufacture an artifact that can seal your magic. This room won’t let mana particles in or out. No one will ever find you. And if Inheritance members can suddenly fulfill more jobs, well, perhaps we made an advancement in meditation techniques.”

The chill inside her bones deepened. She was again trapped, reduced to nothing but a living power source. “I won’t help you,” she said quietly, sealing up the walls of her enna once more.

His grin was ugly. “Maybe not now. That’s fine. We need to lay low until Eterna stops looking for you, anyway.” He turned to leave, tossing a final line over his shoulder. “You do need to eat, though. Think about that before you refuse to help.”

The door closed with a gentle click.

Sery lay down, still curled in on herself, rubbing her arms restlessly against the memories of pain.

Her fingers brushed across the bumpy, raised scar above her elbow, the one Veltyen had given her in the course of saving her life. Reminded of the piece of him that was always with her, her fine trembling stopped.

Veltyen would eventually find her, she knew. He would never stop looking, and Tristane had already shown obvious interest in acquiring her multiple times. The evidence would be there, no matter what magical contraption was cutting off her connection to the outside world.

She needed to do her part to make herself easily found.

She had spent the last few months studying enna resonance. There was nothing, physical or magical, that could separate ennas in resonance because they were in effect one single entity.

She had spent the same period learning the unique signature of Veltyen’s enna, a pure note to her senses that was as familiar as his rich voice or his warm scent.

Instead of listening as she had done all along, she began to try to “hum” with her own enna, the note coming out weak and wobbly. Setting her jaw, she persisted.

***

He found the kidnappers after four hours.

They were not trying for stealth, instead driving their cart along the main road like all the other travellers, as mundane as possible in appearance. Blending in did not help them when he had every detail of their appearance, their vehicle, even the chestnut cart horse, all carved into his memory with painful clarity. The trip back to Oslethia was taken at a vision-blurring mage-gallop that slowed only to check the faces of every traveller they passed.

He recognized the cart and horse before he was close enough to check their faces and Mindseye was ready, forcing them smoothly off the road before they could react.

Veltyen jumped from saddle to driver’s seat and struck one man brutally across the face before throwing him, dazed and bleeding, into the platform-box that he used as a portable prison at times.

“Wha-” said the other man before Veltyen armlocked him and forced his face into the wooden bench seat.

“Where. Is. She?” he asked.

“What are you talking a—” The man’s sentence morphed into a pained scream as Veltyen pulled his dagger and cut off one of the kidnapper’s fingers, magically sharpening it so he barely had to apply any pressure to slice through tendon and bone.

Of the two men, this one had been the one to search Sery’s body for her communication crystal and Guild Association identification, and it had not escaped Veltyen’s attention the way the bastard’s hands had lingered in inappropriate places, sick enjoyment on his face. Veltyen would happily carve him into inch-long pieces while he screamed, but he needed answers first.

“The finger can be reattached as long as you get to a skilled healer within the next four hours,” Veltyen said calmly over the kidnapper’s sobbing. “Now tell me where she is.”

The man in the platform-box spoke up, voice muffled from a broken nose. “We handed her off hours ago! Man kept his hood up but you could tell he was money by the way he talked.”

Veltyen systematically questioned the broken-nosed man for every detail he could remember, which was not much, just a rich man on a good horse who was probably neither young nor old.

He was a few minutes into the questioning when the captive below him thrashed and bucked, trying to take advantage of Veltyen’s distraction to escape. Veltyen contemptuously increased the pressure on the arm he held until the shoulder dislocated.

The scream was louder and longer this time. Veltyen found he could not muster a single shred of pity for the man or regret at his own actions. Veltyen’s rage had turned cold and merciless in the frantic ride to this point, and he knew it would not thaw until he had Sery safe in his arms.

Veltyen threw his second prisoner into the back of the cart, ignoring the kidnapper’s crying and pleading as his dislocated shoulder was roughly jostled. He got the cart turned around and had the man in the platform box direct him to the place where Sery had been handed over. “I will have a time mage examining the site,” he warned the broken-nosed man in a frighteningly gentle voice. “If you lie to me, your friend there will not be the only one missing a finger.”

The prisoner paled. “I’m telling the truth, I swear! Spare my life; I was the one who stopped Erlan there from feeling up the miss too much, wasn’t I?”

It was the truth as Veltyen had seen in Asher’s re-enactment spell, which was why the man still had all the function in his limbs and extremities.

As they travelled back along the road he had just raced along, he called Foria and reported his findings. “I need Asher,” he said into his communication crystal.

Foria’s lips tightened. “We’re coming, but Asher blew his mana stores on the Powerspeed competition and Sery hadn’t gotten around to replenishing much past his natural enna stores. I’m not sure how many more times he can cast it.”

“Put him in a carriage and tell him to pull that storage trick he has,” said Veltyen.

“Veltyen! You know that’s terrible for his health.”

Veltyen just stared impassively into the mirror until Foria looked down. From outside the view of the crystal, he heard Asher speak. “Foria, you know he’s right. I’ve done it for far less important reasons than finding Sery.”

Foria scowled. “That doesn’t change the fact that Veltyen has no right to demand it of you. How would Sery feel about all this?”

Veltyen did not need Foria’s agreement, only Asher’s. “I’ll see you there, Asher,” he said before ending the call.

Reaching the handover site, he made a rudimentary camp and prepared himself food that he ate mechanically, keeping his body fuelled without tasting anything.

The prisoner in the cart stirred. “You have to take me to a healer… My finger…”

Veltyen found his lips curling into a smile at the ludicrousness of this despicable dreg of humanity claiming that Veltyen needed to do anything at all to help him. It felt so odd to make such an expression without a hint of mirth or warmth inside.

The expression must have looked odd as well, as the prisoner shut up and lay back down so the cart’s walls hid him from view.

Veltyen returned to his meal.