The attack came four nights after the note, not against the garrison's gate as everyone had braced for, but against the supply road two miles east, where a routine patrol led by Corporal Osric found itself ambushed by six armed figures wearing no insignia at all.
Word reached the garrison at a dead run, and Vane was mounted and riding before Marek had fully finished relaying the message, Eric's alarm sharp and immediate through the bond as the two of them covered the distance in considerably less time than caution alone would have advised.
They arrived to find the patrol scattered but largely intact, two soldiers wounded, one seriously, and Osric himself pressing a torn strip of cloth against a gash along his forearm with the particular grim steadiness of a man assessing damage rather than dwelling on pain.
"They weren't after us," Osric reported, breathless, still catching his wind as Vane dismounted. "They knew our patrol schedule too precisely for that, Marshal. They came for the wagon. The medical stores we were escorting back from the eastern depot."
*That's odd,* Eric said, cold calculation cutting through the fresh adrenaline. *Voss threatened to even an accounting. Stealing medical supplies doesn't read like revenge. It reads like preparation for something that requires exactly that kind of stock.*
Vane relayed it, and Osric's expression tightened. "There's more, Marshal. One of them said something, before they broke off — not to me, to each other, like they didn't expect anyone close enough to hear it clearly. 'Enough for the second site, tell her.'"
The words landed like a physical blow.
"The second site," Vane repeated, flat. "She's not just retaliating. She's resupplying something."
*Talwyn's fear,* Eric said, grim. *A facility we never found, still operating, and now apparently in need of resources badly enough to risk an armed raid on a garrison patrol to get them.*
Vane crouched beside the more seriously wounded soldier, a young private named Corwin who'd taken a blade across the ribs attempting to defend the wagon, and Eric's attention sharpened immediately into the familiar, clinical focus of triage. *Deep, but the blade missed anything vital,* Eric assessed, quick and precise. *He needs pressure and a careful ride back, not a hasty one. Tell Marek to have the healers ready the moment we arrive, and have someone walk the horse rather than trot it.*
Vane relayed the instructions in clipped, urgent phrases, and the small patrol began the careful work of stabilizing their wounded for the journey back, the ambush site itself left, for now, to two soldiers assigned to guard whatever evidence remained until Marek's own investigators could examine it properly by daylight.
"Whoever led that attack knew exactly what they wanted and exactly how to get it," Osric said, wincing as a fellow soldier tightened the bandage on his arm, exhaustion and adrenaline both plain in his voice. "In and out before we could properly organize a defense. That's not banditry, Marshal. That's trained discipline."
"I believe you," Vane said, grim. "Rest once we're back. You did well tonight, holding them off long enough to save the wounded, and I won't forget it."
"Didn't feel like well," Osric muttered, though something in his exhausted posture eased slightly at the acknowledgment regardless, and he let himself finally be led toward the healers waiting a short distance away.
---
They brought the wounded back for treatment, Eric guiding the garrison's own physicians through the worst of it with the same quick, precise focus he'd offered a hundred times before, and it was well past midnight before the immediate crisis eased enough for the council to properly convene.
"Six armed attackers, no insignia, targeting medical stores specifically," Marek summarized, grim, arms crossed as he studied the small assembled group. "That's not opportunistic banditry. That's a coordinated strike with a specific purpose."
"And confirmation there's a second facility," Talwyn added, visibly shaken despite his best efforts at composure, the fear he'd voiced weeks earlier finally, grimly, made concrete. "One apparently still operational, still requiring resupply, which means whatever's happening there hasn't stopped simply because we found and emptied the first depot."
*More captives,* Eric said, quiet and furious. *That's the only explanation for needing medical stores at that scale. She's keeping people alive somewhere else, Vane. Possibly right now, while we're sitting here discussing it, waiting for someone to come the way we came for Corin and Bren and the others.*
Vane relayed it, and the tent went grim and silent, the weight of the implication settling over each of them in turn.
"We don't know where," Marek said. "We don't have Dessin's schedule to work from this time, no informant walking among us feeding her information. We're working blind."
Dessin himself, present at the council for the first time since his marriage, spoke up with visible hesitation. "I might still be able to help, Marshal. I don't have current access to her correspondence anymore, but I know the requisitions patterns she relied on, the kind of supplies a facility like the first depot required and in what quantities. If tonight's raid targeted specific medical stores, I might be able to estimate what she's actually running low on, and work backward toward what that implies about scale."
"Do it," Vane said. "Anything that narrows the search helps, however small it seems."
Mira, seated beside her husband with her hand resting protectively over his, added her own steady contribution. "I remember things too, from inside. Guards mentioned transfers sometimes, careless the way captors get when they stop seeing you as anything but furniture. I never thought the details mattered until now. I'll try to remember more clearly, if it helps find whoever's still in there."
*Tell them both that courage like that is exactly what this garrison runs on,* Eric said, warm despite the grimness of the hour. *And tell Mira specifically — I know reliving those memories costs her something real. I don't think anyone here takes that sacrifice lightly.*
Vane relayed it, and something steadied in both their expressions at the sentiment, resolve replacing some of the evening's raw fear, Mira's hand tightening briefly around Dessin's before she nodded, resolute despite the visible cost of the offer.
"Then we stop working blind," Vane said, low and resolute. "Talwyn, every record we recovered from the first depot — go through it again, every page, looking specifically for any reference to location, supply routes, anything that might point us toward a second site. Marek, I want every soldier who survived tonight's attack debriefed thoroughly, every detail of what they saw and heard. Someone in that raiding party said something they weren't supposed to. I want to know if there's anything else we missed."
---
It was Freya, arriving late to the gathered council with Kael's shimmer bright and alarmed at her collarbone, who brought the night's true horror into full, unbearable focus.
"Kael felt it," she said, breathless, having clearly run the distance from wherever she'd been when the alarm first spread. "During the attack. Not the fighting itself — something else, underneath it. He says it felt like the collapse. Like the moment his bond with me first formed, except wrong somehow. Distorted."
*That's not possible,* Eric said, quiet dread threading through the words. *Unless—*
"Unless what," Vane said, urgent.
*Unless whoever attacked tonight was carrying something designed to interfere with bonded resonance,* Eric said, grim understanding arriving all at once. *A weapon, or a device, built from thirty years of studying exactly how bonds like ours actually work. If Voss has spent this long researching the phenomenon, she may have developed more than just observation. She may have developed a way to actively disrupt it.*
Vane relayed it, and the tent went colder still.
"Disrupt it how," Freya asked, fear plain and unguarded in her voice for the first time since her arrival at the garrison.
*I don't know,* Eric admitted. *I don't know if it's meant to sever a bond entirely, or simply weaken it, or something else altogether that none of us have any framework to anticipate. I only know that if such a thing exists, and was present at tonight's attack, we need to understand it before she has the chance to use it directly against either of our bonds rather than merely near them.*
Freya's hand pressed hard against her own collarbone, Kael's shimmer flickering with visible distress at the memory. "He says it only lasted a moment. A heartbeat, maybe two. But he says it felt like standing at the edge of the collapse again, except this time something was actively trying to pull him back into it."
"That's considerably more specific than 'distorted,'" Marek said, grim. "Someone at that ambush was carrying something capable of reaching across at least two miles and touching a bond directly. That's not a rumor or a theory anymore. That's a demonstrated capability, and we have no idea yet how to defend against it."
"Then finding out becomes the garrison's first priority tomorrow," Vane said, flat. "Above everything else. If she can reach any of our bonds from a distance, at will, nothing else we're planning matters until we understand exactly how, and exactly how to stop it." He looked to Freya, something protective and resolute in his expression. "And I want you and Kael under closer watch until we understand this better. Not confined. Just not alone, if we can help it."
Freya nodded, some of her old wariness returning but tempered now by trust rather than suspicion. "Agreed. I'd rather have company than pride, given what we just heard."
Talwyn nodded, grim and resolute despite his obvious exhaustion. "I'll begin immediately, Marshal. Tonight, if my eyes will allow it."
"Sleep first," Vane said, though he suspected, even as he said it, that none of them would manage much rest before dawn regardless.
---
The garrison spent the following two days in grim, exhaustive investigation, Talwyn poring over every recovered page for any hint of the phrase "second site," Marek's soldiers combing the ambush location for any trace evidence the attackers might have left behind, and Vane and Eric growing steadily more watchful of the bond itself, alert for any sign of the distortion Kael had described.
Freya and Kael submitted to a careful, deliberate series of tests during those two days as well, Eric guiding the process with the same methodical caution he brought to any unfamiliar diagnosis, comparing notes on exactly what Kael had felt against Vane's own account of the ambush, searching for any pattern that might help them recognize the threat before it struck again rather than after.
"It felt directional," Kael offered, through Freya, on the second day. "Like something reaching specifically for me, rather than simply radiating outward and happening to catch me in its range. If that's accurate, whatever device she's using may require a target rather than merely a general area."
*That's useful,* Eric said, quiet. *If it needs a specific target, that means proximity and awareness both matter to however it functions. We're not simply vulnerable to it existing somewhere nearby. We're vulnerable to being specifically found and aimed at.*
"Which means better awareness of who's watching the garrison might matter as much as the device itself," Marek said, grim satisfaction at finally having something actionable to work with. "I'll adjust the patrols accordingly, and double the watch specifically around Freya and the Marshal both, given what we now know she's willing to attempt."
It was on the third night, during a routine patrol of the garrison's own perimeter, that Vane felt it — a sudden, sickening lurch through the bond, as though the ground beneath a familiar path had abruptly given way, Eric's presence flickering, for one horrifying instant, faint and distant in a way it had never once been since the day they'd first bonded on that battlefield.
*Eric?*
Silence answered him, cold and absolute, for three full heartbeats that felt, to Vane, like the entire span of his life compressed into unbearable, breathless dread.
Then, faint but unmistakable, Eric's voice returned, shaken and confused. *Vane. Something just — something pulled. Hard. I don't know what that was.*
Vane's knees nearly buckled with relief, one hand flying to his own chest as though he could physically hold the bond in place by sheer force of will. "Don't do that again," he said, hoarse, to no one and everyone at once, and staggered toward the nearest lit tent, shouting for Marek before the fear could fully catch up with him.
Marek arrived within minutes, alarmed by the shouting, and found Vane sitting on an overturned crate outside the tent, one hand still pressed flat over his own sternum, breathing hard as though he'd run considerably further than the few steps that had actually carried him there.
"Marshal?"
"Something reached the bond," Vane managed, voice unsteady. "From a distance. It felt like—" He stopped, unable to properly articulate the specific horror of it. "It felt like losing him, for three seconds. Longer than any moment since the day we first bonded."
Marek's expression went carefully controlled, the particular stillness of a man suppressing his own alarm in favor of practical action. "Where were you standing? Exactly. I need it precise, Marshal, not approximate."
Vane pointed, and Marek immediately dispatched two soldiers to search the perimeter in that direction, though all of them privately suspected, correctly, that whoever had caused it would be long gone before any search could locate them.
*I'm here,* Eric said again, quiet but steadying now, the earlier flicker fully resolved into his familiar, constant presence. *I'm here, Vane. Whatever that was, it didn't take me. I'm still here.*
"I know," Vane said, aloud, for Marek's benefit as much as his own reassurance. "I know. I just need a minute."
Marek crouched beside him, uncharacteristically gentle. "Take your minute, Marshal. I've got the perimeter covered."
---
Talwyn arrived not long after, summoned by a runner, and listened to the account with visibly mounting horror. "A device capable of reaching a bond from a distance," he said, slow. "That's precisely the kind of application thirty years of research toward 'confirmation and control' might eventually produce. I'd hoped, given how theoretical most of her early records read, that we had more time before she developed something this advanced."
*Apparently not,* Eric said, grim, once Vane had recovered enough to relay it. *Which means whatever safety we thought this garrison offered just became considerably less certain than we believed even an hour ago.*
"I'll begin cross-referencing everything we recovered against tonight's incident immediately," Talwyn said. "If there's any description of such a device in her records, however oblique, I intend to find it before she has the chance to refine it further."
"Get some sleep first," Vane said, echoing advice he'd received often enough himself to have finally internalized it properly. "You'll read more clearly in the morning than you will exhausted tonight."
Talwyn managed a tired, grateful nod, though the set of his shoulders suggested sleep would not come easily to him either, not with a threat this immediate now confirmed.
---
Vane didn't return to his own tent until well past the deepest hour of the night, and once he had, he sat a long while simply feeling the steady, unbroken rhythm of Eric's presence, reassuring himself, again and again, that the connection had truly held.
*You're still shaking,* Eric observed, gentle rather than alarmed.
"I nearly lost you," Vane said, low. "For three seconds, I genuinely believed I'd lost you, and I don't think I've ever been more afraid of anything in my entire life. Not the battlefield. Not my mother's death. Nothing has ever frightened me the way those three seconds did."
*I know,* Eric said, quiet. *I felt an echo of it too — not the same distance, but something pulling, hard, like a hand trying to drag me somewhere I didn't choose to go. It frightened me as well, more than I've let myself admit since it happened.*
"We need to find out what that was," Vane said. "Properly. Before she tries it again with more than three seconds behind it."
*We will,* Eric said, certain despite the lingering fear. *But not tonight. Tonight, I need you to simply breathe, and let yourself believe, fully, that I'm still here. Whatever comes tomorrow, we face it rested rather than run entirely ragged by fear.*
Vane's breath came slower, gradually, Eric's steady presence doing more to calm him than any amount of reasoning alone could have managed. "Stay close," he said, quiet. "Just — stay close tonight."
*Always,* Eric said, and meant it more fiercely than he had in weeks, the bond settling, slowly, back into its familiar, unbroken rhythm as the night wore on toward an uneasy dawn.
He stayed with Vane through the remaining dark hours, offering warmth rather than words, letting the steady, wordless presence of the bond do the work no reassurance alone could quite manage, and it was near dawn before Vane's breathing finally evened into something like actual rest, exhaustion at last outpacing fear.
*Sleep now,* Eric murmured, gentle. *I'll be here when you wake. I promise you that, whatever else remains uncertain tonight.*
"You always are," Vane mumbled, already half-gone into sleep, and Eric held the quiet vigil a while longer, watching over the fragile, hard-won rest of the man he loved, and turning over, with cold and patient fury, exactly how much he intended Voss to pay for the three seconds of terror she'd inflicted on both of them tonight.
---
Somewhere beyond the garrison's perimeter, in the dark where no sentry's torch reached, a figure withdrew into the tree line, satisfied, for tonight, with having confirmed exactly what she'd come to learn — that the device worked, that the bond could be reached even from a distance, and that whatever safety the garrison believed it had won two months ago had just, in a single instant, revealed itself to be nothing more than a comforting illusion.
You've reached the end of this chapter
The attack came four nights after the note, not against the garrison's gate as everyone had braced for, but against the supply road two miles east, where a routine patrol led by Corporal Osric found itself ambushed by six armed figures wearing no insignia at all.
Word reached the garrison at a dead run, and Vane was mounted and riding before Marek had fully finished relaying the message, Eric's alarm sharp and immediate through the bond as the two of them covered the distance in considerably less time than caution alone would have advised.
They arrived to find the patrol scattered but largely intact, two soldiers wounded, one seriously, and Osric himself pressing a torn strip of cloth against a gash along his forearm with the particular grim steadiness of a man assessing damage rather than dwelling on pain.
"They weren't after us," Osric reported, breathless, still catching his wind as Vane dismounted. "They knew our patrol schedule too precisely for that, Marshal. They came for the wagon. The medical stores we were escorting back from the eastern depot."
*That's odd,* Eric said, cold calculation cutting through the fresh adrenaline. *Voss threatened to even an accounting. Stealing medical supplies doesn't read like revenge. It reads like preparation for something that requires exactly that kind of stock.*
Vane relayed it, and Osric's expression tightened. "There's more, Marshal. One of them said something, before they broke off — not to me, to each other, like they didn't expect anyone close enough to hear it clearly. 'Enough for the second site, tell her.'"
The words landed like a physical blow.
"The second site," Vane repeated, flat. "She's not just retaliating. She's resupplying something."
*Talwyn's fear,* Eric said, grim. *A facility we never found, still operating, and now apparently in need of resources badly enough to risk an armed raid on a garrison patrol to get them.*
Vane crouched beside the more seriously wounded soldier, a young private named Corwin who'd taken a blade across the ribs attempting to defend the wagon, and Eric's attention sharpened immediately into the familiar, clinical focus of triage. *Deep, but the blade missed anything vital,* Eric assessed, quick and precise. *He needs pressure and a careful ride back, not a hasty one. Tell Marek to have the healers ready the moment we arrive, and have someone walk the horse rather than trot it.*
Vane relayed the instructions in clipped, urgent phrases, and the small patrol began the careful work of stabilizing their wounded for the journey back, the ambush site itself left, for now, to two soldiers assigned to guard whatever evidence remained until Marek's own investigators could examine it properly by daylight.
"Whoever led that attack knew exactly what they wanted and exactly how to get it," Osric said, wincing as a fellow soldier tightened the bandage on his arm, exhaustion and adrenaline both plain in his voice. "In and out before we could properly organize a defense. That's not banditry, Marshal. That's trained discipline."
"I believe you," Vane said, grim. "Rest once we're back. You did well tonight, holding them off long enough to save the wounded, and I won't forget it."
"Didn't feel like well," Osric muttered, though something in his exhausted posture eased slightly at the acknowledgment regardless, and he let himself finally be led toward the healers waiting a short distance away.
---
They brought the wounded back for treatment, Eric guiding the garrison's own physicians through the worst of it with the same quick, precise focus he'd offered a hundred times before, and it was well past midnight before the immediate crisis eased enough for the council to properly convene.
"Six armed attackers, no insignia, targeting medical stores specifically," Marek summarized, grim, arms crossed as he studied the small assembled group. "That's not opportunistic banditry. That's a coordinated strike with a specific purpose."
"And confirmation there's a second facility," Talwyn added, visibly shaken despite his best efforts at composure, the fear he'd voiced weeks earlier finally, grimly, made concrete. "One apparently still operational, still requiring resupply, which means whatever's happening there hasn't stopped simply because we found and emptied the first depot."
*More captives,* Eric said, quiet and furious. *That's the only explanation for needing medical stores at that scale. She's keeping people alive somewhere else, Vane. Possibly right now, while we're sitting here discussing it, waiting for someone to come the way we came for Corin and Bren and the others.*
Vane relayed it, and the tent went grim and silent, the weight of the implication settling over each of them in turn.
"We don't know where," Marek said. "We don't have Dessin's schedule to work from this time, no informant walking among us feeding her information. We're working blind."
Dessin himself, present at the council for the first time since his marriage, spoke up with visible hesitation. "I might still be able to help, Marshal. I don't have current access to her correspondence anymore, but I know the requisitions patterns she relied on, the kind of supplies a facility like the first depot required and in what quantities. If tonight's raid targeted specific medical stores, I might be able to estimate what she's actually running low on, and work backward toward what that implies about scale."
"Do it," Vane said. "Anything that narrows the search helps, however small it seems."
Mira, seated beside her husband with her hand resting protectively over his, added her own steady contribution. "I remember things too, from inside. Guards mentioned transfers sometimes, careless the way captors get when they stop seeing you as anything but furniture. I never thought the details mattered until now. I'll try to remember more clearly, if it helps find whoever's still in there."
*Tell them both that courage like that is exactly what this garrison runs on,* Eric said, warm despite the grimness of the hour. *And tell Mira specifically — I know reliving those memories costs her something real. I don't think anyone here takes that sacrifice lightly.*
Vane relayed it, and something steadied in both their expressions at the sentiment, resolve replacing some of the evening's raw fear, Mira's hand tightening briefly around Dessin's before she nodded, resolute despite the visible cost of the offer.
"Then we stop working blind," Vane said, low and resolute. "Talwyn, every record we recovered from the first depot — go through it again, every page, looking specifically for any reference to location, supply routes, anything that might point us toward a second site. Marek, I want every soldier who survived tonight's attack debriefed thoroughly, every detail of what they saw and heard. Someone in that raiding party said something they weren't supposed to. I want to know if there's anything else we missed."
---
It was Freya, arriving late to the gathered council with Kael's shimmer bright and alarmed at her collarbone, who brought the night's true horror into full, unbearable focus.
"Kael felt it," she said, breathless, having clearly run the distance from wherever she'd been when the alarm first spread. "During the attack. Not the fighting itself — something else, underneath it. He says it felt like the collapse. Like the moment his bond with me first formed, except wrong somehow. Distorted."
*That's not possible,* Eric said, quiet dread threading through the words. *Unless—*
"Unless what," Vane said, urgent.
*Unless whoever attacked tonight was carrying something designed to interfere with bonded resonance,* Eric said, grim understanding arriving all at once. *A weapon, or a device, built from thirty years of studying exactly how bonds like ours actually work. If Voss has spent this long researching the phenomenon, she may have developed more than just observation. She may have developed a way to actively disrupt it.*
Vane relayed it, and the tent went colder still.
"Disrupt it how," Freya asked, fear plain and unguarded in her voice for the first time since her arrival at the garrison.
*I don't know,* Eric admitted. *I don't know if it's meant to sever a bond entirely, or simply weaken it, or something else altogether that none of us have any framework to anticipate. I only know that if such a thing exists, and was present at tonight's attack, we need to understand it before she has the chance to use it directly against either of our bonds rather than merely near them.*
Freya's hand pressed hard against her own collarbone, Kael's shimmer flickering with visible distress at the memory. "He says it only lasted a moment. A heartbeat, maybe two. But he says it felt like standing at the edge of the collapse again, except this time something was actively trying to pull him back into it."
"That's considerably more specific than 'distorted,'" Marek said, grim. "Someone at that ambush was carrying something capable of reaching across at least two miles and touching a bond directly. That's not a rumor or a theory anymore. That's a demonstrated capability, and we have no idea yet how to defend against it."
"Then finding out becomes the garrison's first priority tomorrow," Vane said, flat. "Above everything else. If she can reach any of our bonds from a distance, at will, nothing else we're planning matters until we understand exactly how, and exactly how to stop it." He looked to Freya, something protective and resolute in his expression. "And I want you and Kael under closer watch until we understand this better. Not confined. Just not alone, if we can help it."
Freya nodded, some of her old wariness returning but tempered now by trust rather than suspicion. "Agreed. I'd rather have company than pride, given what we just heard."
Talwyn nodded, grim and resolute despite his obvious exhaustion. "I'll begin immediately, Marshal. Tonight, if my eyes will allow it."
"Sleep first," Vane said, though he suspected, even as he said it, that none of them would manage much rest before dawn regardless.
---
The garrison spent the following two days in grim, exhaustive investigation, Talwyn poring over every recovered page for any hint of the phrase "second site," Marek's soldiers combing the ambush location for any trace evidence the attackers might have left behind, and Vane and Eric growing steadily more watchful of the bond itself, alert for any sign of the distortion Kael had described.
Freya and Kael submitted to a careful, deliberate series of tests during those two days as well, Eric guiding the process with the same methodical caution he brought to any unfamiliar diagnosis, comparing notes on exactly what Kael had felt against Vane's own account of the ambush, searching for any pattern that might help them recognize the threat before it struck again rather than after.
"It felt directional," Kael offered, through Freya, on the second day. "Like something reaching specifically for me, rather than simply radiating outward and happening to catch me in its range. If that's accurate, whatever device she's using may require a target rather than merely a general area."
*That's useful,* Eric said, quiet. *If it needs a specific target, that means proximity and awareness both matter to however it functions. We're not simply vulnerable to it existing somewhere nearby. We're vulnerable to being specifically found and aimed at.*
"Which means better awareness of who's watching the garrison might matter as much as the device itself," Marek said, grim satisfaction at finally having something actionable to work with. "I'll adjust the patrols accordingly, and double the watch specifically around Freya and the Marshal both, given what we now know she's willing to attempt."
It was on the third night, during a routine patrol of the garrison's own perimeter, that Vane felt it — a sudden, sickening lurch through the bond, as though the ground beneath a familiar path had abruptly given way, Eric's presence flickering, for one horrifying instant, faint and distant in a way it had never once been since the day they'd first bonded on that battlefield.
*Eric?*
Silence answered him, cold and absolute, for three full heartbeats that felt, to Vane, like the entire span of his life compressed into unbearable, breathless dread.
Then, faint but unmistakable, Eric's voice returned, shaken and confused. *Vane. Something just — something pulled. Hard. I don't know what that was.*
Vane's knees nearly buckled with relief, one hand flying to his own chest as though he could physically hold the bond in place by sheer force of will. "Don't do that again," he said, hoarse, to no one and everyone at once, and staggered toward the nearest lit tent, shouting for Marek before the fear could fully catch up with him.
Marek arrived within minutes, alarmed by the shouting, and found Vane sitting on an overturned crate outside the tent, one hand still pressed flat over his own sternum, breathing hard as though he'd run considerably further than the few steps that had actually carried him there.
"Marshal?"
"Something reached the bond," Vane managed, voice unsteady. "From a distance. It felt like—" He stopped, unable to properly articulate the specific horror of it. "It felt like losing him, for three seconds. Longer than any moment since the day we first bonded."
Marek's expression went carefully controlled, the particular stillness of a man suppressing his own alarm in favor of practical action. "Where were you standing? Exactly. I need it precise, Marshal, not approximate."
Vane pointed, and Marek immediately dispatched two soldiers to search the perimeter in that direction, though all of them privately suspected, correctly, that whoever had caused it would be long gone before any search could locate them.
*I'm here,* Eric said again, quiet but steadying now, the earlier flicker fully resolved into his familiar, constant presence. *I'm here, Vane. Whatever that was, it didn't take me. I'm still here.*
"I know," Vane said, aloud, for Marek's benefit as much as his own reassurance. "I know. I just need a minute."
Marek crouched beside him, uncharacteristically gentle. "Take your minute, Marshal. I've got the perimeter covered."
---
Talwyn arrived not long after, summoned by a runner, and listened to the account with visibly mounting horror. "A device capable of reaching a bond from a distance," he said, slow. "That's precisely the kind of application thirty years of research toward 'confirmation and control' might eventually produce. I'd hoped, given how theoretical most of her early records read, that we had more time before she developed something this advanced."
*Apparently not,* Eric said, grim, once Vane had recovered enough to relay it. *Which means whatever safety we thought this garrison offered just became considerably less certain than we believed even an hour ago.*
"I'll begin cross-referencing everything we recovered against tonight's incident immediately," Talwyn said. "If there's any description of such a device in her records, however oblique, I intend to find it before she has the chance to refine it further."
"Get some sleep first," Vane said, echoing advice he'd received often enough himself to have finally internalized it properly. "You'll read more clearly in the morning than you will exhausted tonight."
Talwyn managed a tired, grateful nod, though the set of his shoulders suggested sleep would not come easily to him either, not with a threat this immediate now confirmed.
---
Vane didn't return to his own tent until well past the deepest hour of the night, and once he had, he sat a long while simply feeling the steady, unbroken rhythm of Eric's presence, reassuring himself, again and again, that the connection had truly held.
*You're still shaking,* Eric observed, gentle rather than alarmed.
"I nearly lost you," Vane said, low. "For three seconds, I genuinely believed I'd lost you, and I don't think I've ever been more afraid of anything in my entire life. Not the battlefield. Not my mother's death. Nothing has ever frightened me the way those three seconds did."
*I know,* Eric said, quiet. *I felt an echo of it too — not the same distance, but something pulling, hard, like a hand trying to drag me somewhere I didn't choose to go. It frightened me as well, more than I've let myself admit since it happened.*
"We need to find out what that was," Vane said. "Properly. Before she tries it again with more than three seconds behind it."
*We will,* Eric said, certain despite the lingering fear. *But not tonight. Tonight, I need you to simply breathe, and let yourself believe, fully, that I'm still here. Whatever comes tomorrow, we face it rested rather than run entirely ragged by fear.*
Vane's breath came slower, gradually, Eric's steady presence doing more to calm him than any amount of reasoning alone could have managed. "Stay close," he said, quiet. "Just — stay close tonight."
*Always,* Eric said, and meant it more fiercely than he had in weeks, the bond settling, slowly, back into its familiar, unbroken rhythm as the night wore on toward an uneasy dawn.
He stayed with Vane through the remaining dark hours, offering warmth rather than words, letting the steady, wordless presence of the bond do the work no reassurance alone could quite manage, and it was near dawn before Vane's breathing finally evened into something like actual rest, exhaustion at last outpacing fear.
*Sleep now,* Eric murmured, gentle. *I'll be here when you wake. I promise you that, whatever else remains uncertain tonight.*
"You always are," Vane mumbled, already half-gone into sleep, and Eric held the quiet vigil a while longer, watching over the fragile, hard-won rest of the man he loved, and turning over, with cold and patient fury, exactly how much he intended Voss to pay for the three seconds of terror she'd inflicted on both of them tonight.
---
Somewhere beyond the garrison's perimeter, in the dark where no sentry's torch reached, a figure withdrew into the tree line, satisfied, for tonight, with having confirmed exactly what she'd come to learn — that the device worked, that the bond could be reached even from a distance, and that whatever safety the garrison believed it had won two months ago had just, in a single instant, revealed itself to be nothing more than a comforting illusion.
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