Book 2: Chapter 3: The Taking

Chapter 3: The Taking

He smelled it before he saw it.

His horn had been screaming for the entire run, a sustained note of wrongness that had emptied the forest ahead of him like a siren clearing traffic. Every living thing in his path had pressed itself flat or scattered: starlings mid-flight veering away from the sound, a fox den going silent, a hare bolting from its form with the blind speed of prey that had correctly identified a catastrophe in progress, the undergrowth parting as if the vegetation itself understood that a Tier 6 mythic creature running in a state of escalating panic was not something you stood in front of.

His Life magic, usually a warm ambient broadcast, had compressed during the gallop into something denser. Hotter. The passive glow that grew flowers and encouraged ferns had tightened into a focused pulse that matched his heartbeat, and his heartbeat was doing things that would have concerned a cardiologist. If cardiologists existed in Edaphia. If any medical professional in this world had ever examined a unicorn’s cardiovascular system and lived to publish the results.

But underneath the horn’s alarm, underneath the hoofbeats and the wind and the pulse in his horn, his truth sense was picking up something else. A chemical signature in the air. Scorched earth. Burned vegetation. The acrid, manufactured tang of binding magic discharged in large quantities. His Life magic recoiled from the binding residue like a tongue touching something rotten, and the horn translated the recoil into sound: a grinding, discordant harmonic that sat underneath the screaming and made the inside of his skull feel like it was being rubbed with sandpaper.

And underneath that: the faint, fading trace of Veronica. Her warm coconut scent, the one his horn recognized as instinctively as a compass recognized north. Present. Diminishing. Moving away.

He crested the ridge at the northern boundary and the trail opened below him.

Fighting had happened here.

Andy pulled up hard, hooves tearing furrows in the soil, and the scene registered in pieces because his brain was doing the thing it did when the information was too big to process at once: it cataloged, itemized, and broke the unbearable into inventory to compartmentalize away.

Item 1: scorched earth in a twelve-meter radius, the burn pattern consistent with binding arrays deployed in a surrounding formation. This was a precise and deliberate set up. Three overlapping circles. Andy’s gamer brain flagged the formation automatically, parsing it the way he’d once parsed raid encounter mechanics: three overlapping circles meant three coordinated casters. The way they had when they had tried to capture Andy

Item 2: broken equipment. A ranger’s belt pouch, torn open. Veronica’s. He recognized the stitching because he had watched her repair it two days ago with a needle and thread, her fingers precise, while he failed at buttons six feet away. She had been sitting on the boulder by the stream, the afternoon light on her hands, and he had thought: I could watch her sew forever. That thought was twenty-seven hours old. Twenty-seven hours ago, the world had been a place where Veronica sewed and Andy watched and the worst thing that could happen was another burned egg.

Item 3: Three bodies, one dead , one unconscious, sprawled at the edges of the burn pattern in the positions of people who had been thrown. A third was conscious, barely, dragging himself toward the tree line with one functioning arm. Binder’s people. Had to be. Uniform matched: dark, practical, the nondescript clothing of people who did terrible things efficiently and did not want to be remembered doing them. Andy’s truth sense probed the conscious one automatically, and what came back was: pain, fear, professional assessment. Even now, bleeding and broken, the operative was evaluating the unicorn’s horn output, cataloguing Andy. Whoever trained these people had trained them well. They collected intelligence even while crawling away from the consequences of it.

Item 4: Veronica’s satchel. On the ground. Open. Her book inside, the one she’d been reading on the boulder yesterday, had fallen out and was lying face-down in the dirt with its pages bent. He did not know the title. He could not read the language yet. She had been halfway through it.

Item 5: Veronica was not here.

His horn stopped screaming. What replaced it was the forest gone still, every living thing within range flattened against the ground, waiting. The forest itself seemed to be holding its breath.

Andy stood on the ridge. Four hooves planted. Horn blazing discordant gold-white. Every detail of the scene arrived through his senses, through truth sense, through the life magic that permeated his territory. Damaged soil, burned vegetation and residual corruption left behind by binding arrays. In the dead center of the three overlapping circles: a binding array remnant.

Item 6: It was still active and pulsing. A crystalline construct no bigger than his hoof, embedded in the scorched ground, emitted a low-frequency hum that his horn registered as wrongness and unnatural.

He approached it.

His horn did not want to approach it. That was the only way to describe the sensation: resistance, internal, the crystal itself pushing back against his forward motion like a compass needle fighting a magnet. It was wrong in a way that his horn found personally offensive, the magical equivalent of nails on a chalkboard, and the closer he got, the louder the protest. His Life magic flared around his hooves, the golden glow reacting to the construct’s proximity by brightening defensively, a biological immune response rendered in light. Even the grass around the construct was dead. Not wilted. Dead. A perfect circle of brown, dried nothing, as if the construct had sucked the life out of the soil in a one-meter radius just by existing.

Andy approached it anyway.

It pulsed brighter as he drew near, responding to his horn’s proximity like a sensor detecting exactly what it was built for. And then it spoke. A voice, calm, professional, delivered with the flat affect of a person leaving a voicemail about an accounts receivable matter.

“The Conduit has been acquired. Yield assessment: significant. The Director sends her regards to the unicorn. Pursuit is anticipated and accounted for.”

Conduit. Andy didn’t know the word but it didn’t matter. “Acquired” mattered. “Yield assessment” mattered. Presumably they were speaking of Veronica and they had given her a classification.

Yield assessment: significant. Pursuit is anticipated and accounted for.

They had planned this. Waited for her to leave the territory. Three extraction teams in a pincer formation (Teeth had been right, Teeth was always right, how did a fox know about pincer formations, later, file everything, there was no room in his skull for anything except the next five seconds). They had waited for Voss to send the summons. Maybe they had planted the summons. Maybe the routine patrol was never routine.

His horn detonated.

He did not consciously choose this. He did not aim it, direct it, or control it. Grief hit a frequency that his life magic interpreted as a command, and the command was: everything in range, react. Golden light erupted from the horn in a concentric ring, not a beam, not a blast, a WAVE, expanding outward at the speed of sound. Every tree within twenty meters of Andy Snodgrass snapped at the base. They fell outward like dominoes arranged in a circle around a unicorn who had just lost the only person he had ever held with hands he had spent six tiers earning.

The ground cracked. Binding construct shattered. All three operatives were thrown an additional five meters, two now unconscious, one not surprisingly– still dead. This would have been concerning if Andy had been in a state to feel concern, which he was not.

[HORN RESPONSE: ANGUISH. UNCONTROLLED MAGICAL DISCHARGE. DAMAGE RADIUS: 20M. SEVERITY: SIGNIFICANT. SELF-DAMAGE: MODERATE.]

[RECOMMENDATION: PROCESS EMOTIONS BEFORE ENGAGING IN–]

“Finish that sentence,” Andy projected, “and I will find a way to headbutt a notification.”

The System did not finish the sentence.

He tried to feel her.

Their bond. That connection that had formed in the clearing when she first touched his horn and the System had classified it as UNPRECEDENTED. That thread of awareness that let him sense her heartbeat at close range, that told him her emotional state through her warm amber frequency. He reached for it now, poured his awareness into the bond, stretched the horn’s perceptive range to its absolute maximum.

Nothing.

Not “nothing” as in she was dead. He would know if she was dead. Their bond would have severed, and he would have felt it the way you feel a limb removed. This was “nothing” as in blocked. Interference. A wall between him and the signal, artificial, deliberate, constructed by someone who understood how bonds worked and had built technology specifically designed to prevent them from working.

They had blocked the bond. They had technology that blocked bonds.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

[BONDED PARTNER: STATUS UNKNOWN. BOND: BLOCKED BY EXTERNAL INTERFERENCE.]

[THE SYSTEM DOES NOT APPROVE OF BOND DISRUPTION. THIS IS A VIOLATION.]

[CONDUIT HARVESTING IS A VIOLATION OF SYSTEM PARAMETERS.]

Angry. Andy had never felt the System angry before. Its notifications arrived with a weight he hadn’t encountered, a density to the brackets that pressed against his awareness like a hand gripping a desk edge hard enough to leave marks. It was a bureaucratic entity that expressed itself through formatted text and editorial asides.

“How long has this been happening?” Andy projected at the System.

[THE SYSTEM DOES NOT COMMENT ON ACTIVE THREAT INTELLIGENCE.]

“You don’t comment on a lot of things. You didn’t comment on the warning last night. You flagged it as ‘monitoring’ while they were setting up a kidnapping operation right outside my territory.

[THE SYSTEM MONITORS. THE SYSTEM DOES NOT INTERVENE. THIS IS BY DESIGN.]

Andy had processed a lot of grief. Two lifetimes worth. He had cataloged the death of his first life (truck, red light, the specific absurdity of dying in traffic), the loss of his friends and family, cataloged every predator in the second life that had nearly killed him and every form he had outgrown, and every life he’d had to take to grow. He was, by this point, professionally acquainted with loss.

This did not fit in his filing system which was designed for things that were over. Veronica was not over. She was taken, which was a different category entirely, and did not have a drawer. The grief without a compartment piling up in his awareness like papers on a desk that was already too small.

Voss arrived with a ranger squad twenty minutes later.