Sael reached toward the Cerberus's shoulder, fingers searching through the thick fur. The creature watched him with the right head, curious but relaxed now that the empathic bridge was established. The left head had discovered its new leg was shiny and was attempting to lick it.

  His fingers found what he was looking for, the blood was crusty and frozen solid. He pinched a clump of fur between thumb and forefinger and pulled.

  The Cerberus yelped.

  All three heads whipped around to stare at him, ears flat, lips pulling back to show teeth.

  "Sorry," Sael said immediately. "I needed—sorry."

  The creature made an affronted sound that came from all three throats at once, a kind of synchronized grumble that would've been impressive if it weren't so accusatory.

  Sael held up the clump of fur. "I needed this. The blood. On your fur. From when you bit him."

  The Cerberus's middle head tilted, skeptical.

  "It's important," Sael said.

  The creature huffed. The prosthetic leg clicked softly as it shifted its weight, still clearly annoyed but willing to let this transgression slide.

  Sael turned the clump over in his fingers. Blood had crystallized in the strands, frozen and preserved by Hel's cold. Perfect.

  Behind him, Koleen cleared his throat.

  Sael glanced back.

  Both men were standing at what could generously be called a safe distance. Not far enough to be rude, but far enough that if the Cerberus decided to resume its earlier enthusiasm for dismemberment, they'd have time to react.

  Koleen's eyes were on the creature. Richter's were on Sael's ruined robes.

  "Lord Archmage," Koleen said carefully. "Why are you taking a blood sample from the Cerberus?"

  Sael blinked. "What?"

  "The blood," Koleen said, nodding at the clump. "I understand the principle—sympathetic magic, tracking through biological matter—but the Cerberus is already here. We were looking for a trace of Aldric."

  "This is a trace of Aldric," Sael said.

  Both men went still.

  Koleen's frown deepened. "That's the Cerberus's blood."

  "No," Sael said. "It's Aldric's."

  Richter's eyes moved from Sael's face to the clump of fur, then back. "How?"

  "It bit him," Sael said. "Yesterday. Before Aldric opened the portal. The Cerberus got his arm." He held up the fur so they could see the darker crystalline blood clinging to the strands. "He cleaned himself. Cleaned the ground. Cleaned his robes. But he wasn't thorough enough to clean the Cerberus."

  "Because he was running from you," Richter said.

  "Yes."

  Richter was still watching the blood with that same analytical expression. "How does it work exactly?"

  Sael knelt and set the fur on the snow in front of him. The blood caught the pale light, dark red turned almost black by freezing.

  "Well, blood carries identity," he said. "Hair works too. Nails. Anything living that's been part of someone's body. It maintains a connection to its source."

  "A magical connection," Koleen supplied.

  "Yes. The principle is that things which were once connected remain connected. A severed finger still belongs to the person it came from, metaphysically speaking. The law of nature recognizes the relationship." Sael extended his hand over the blood and began to pull mana from his core.

  It came easily here. Hel was saturated with ambient magical energy—residue from the constant flux of elementals and the realm's own volatile nature—and his core had been absorbing it steadily since they'd arrived. The mana rose through his channels and pooled in his palm, formless and waiting.

  He shaped it with intent, the spell was simple in concept: Blood to source. Part to whole. Show me where this came from.

  But simple didn't mean easy.

  The challenge with [Locate] wasn't the spellwork itself. Any competent mage could manage the basic structure. The challenge was range. A few meters? Trivial. A few kilometers? Difficult. Across realms? That required power and precision.

  The connection existed. That was the foundation of sympathetic magic. The blood knew where Aldric was, encoded in its essence the same way it knew its own type, its age, what species it belonged to. That information was there, written into the fundamental nature of what blood was: part of a whole, seeking to return.

  But information wasn't awareness. The blood didn't consciously know anything. It simply existed in relationship to its source, the way a shadow existed in relationship to the object casting it.

  [Locate] translated that relationship into something a mind could process.

  Sael fed more mana into the spell. The energy began to spiral, winding around itself in patterns that mirrored the sympathetic connection he was trying to trace. The structure was elegant in its simplicity: anchor the spell to the blood, let it reach outward along the connection, then translate what it found into something his mind could understand as direction and distance.

  The threads extended —Not physically, since they didn't exist in normal space— they moved through the conceptual relationship between part and whole, following the path carved by metaphysical law.

  The blood on the fur began to glow.

  Faint at first, it was a dull red luminescence that barely registered against the twilight. Then it got brighter. The glow intensified, spreading from the frozen droplets into the fur itself, crawling along each strand like fire.

  Behind him, Richter made a soft sound of surprise.

  The mana threads stretched further. Distance was strange when you weren't measuring physical space. The connection existed outside normal dimensions. A severed hand in Albyon belonged to a body in Darransh regardless of the distance between them. Geography was irrelevant to the relationship.

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  But translating that relationship back into physical awareness, that was where the power cost came in.

  Sael poured more mana into the spell. The threads moved faster, pulling information back along the connection. Direction. Distance. The shape of the space between here and there.

  The blood glowed brighter and soon, the mana threads found something. Sael felt a tug. Distant but distinct. The spell had locked onto its target.

  Information flooded back along the connection. Not images—[Locate] didn't work that way—but awareness. A sense of direction and distance that settled into Sael's mind like an instinct. He knew where Aldric was the same way he knew which way was up.

  That direction. That far.

  The sensation was supposed to be precise, settling into his awareness with that familiar directional pull. He could feel Aldric's location tugging at his consciousness—north-northwest, elevated and distant. The connection was clear enough that he could navigate to within a few meters of the man if he wanted to.

  But something felt off about the strength of it. The pull was there, reliable and steady, but fainter than he'd expected. With a sample this fresh, this much power behind the spell, the connection should have felt stronger. Not weak, exactly, but...muted. Like sensing something through a layer of cloth when it should have been direct contact.

  The glow faded and the blood returned to its frozen state.

  Sael frowned.

  "Hmm."

  Behind him, Richter spoke immediately. "What sort of hmm was that?"

  Sael turned and found Richter watching him with the same attention he'd given the Cerberus earlier.

  "What?" Sael said.

  "Your hmm," Richter said. "What did it mean?"

  Sael stared at him.

  "Apologies," Richter added, though he didn't look particularly apologetic. "But I've noticed you make that sound frequently. Different hmms seem to indicate different things. This one seemed...uncertain. Or concerned. I wanted to know if it was a good hmm or a bad hmm."

  Koleen was looking at Richter like he'd grown a second head.

  Sael continued staring. Someone had noticed his hmms, catalogued them, then assigned meaning to the different variations and cared enough to ask what they meant.

  That was...

  Well, Sael wasn't sure what that was.

  Touching, maybe? Strange, definitely. He'd never really thought about the hmms. They just happened. Verbal punctuation for thoughts he didn't feel like fully articulating.

  But Richter had been paying attention.

  "It's a concerned hmm," Sael said finally.

  Richter nodded, as if this confirmed something. "What are you concerned about?"

  Sael turned back to the blood. The glow was completely gone now, but the spell's effect lingered in his awareness. That sense of direction and distance.

  "The spell worked," he said. "I can feel where Aldric is."

  "That's good, isn't it?" Koleen said.

  "Yes."

  "But?"

  "The connection is weaker than it should be." Sael turned the fur over in his fingers, studying the frozen blood as if it might offer answers. "With a sample this fresh, this much power behind the spell, I should be able to track him across continents. The pull should be strong enough that I could feel his heartbeat if I concentrated."

  "But you can still locate him?" Richter asked.

  Sael glanced at him. "Yes. The spell worked. I know where he is."

  "Then what's the problem?"

  "The problem," Sael said slowly, "is that the connection shouldn't be this faint."

  Koleen had gone very still. His eyes were fixed on the blood-stained fur with the kind of focus that suggested he was working through something.

  "I've never encountered this personally," Koleen said after a moment. "But there were some rare texts in the Grand Archive. Accounts from the Age of Ash. They mentioned certain...eventualities with sympathetic magic and Corrupted individuals."

  His gaze lifted to meet Sael's.

  "You would know more about this than I would, Lord Archmage," Koleen continued carefully. "In your time, did you ever encounter situations where [Locate] failed to properly track someone who was Corrupted?"

  Sael looked down at the fur again.

  "Yes," he said.

  The single word seemed to carry weight.

  "It happened more than once," Sael continued. "Usually with people who'd been Corrupted for extended periods. We'd try to track them through blood samples, hair, anything we could find. The spell would work initially. Then, over time, the connection would weaken."

  "Why?" Richter asked.

  Sael was quiet for a moment, organizing his thoughts.

  "Corruption doesn't just affect the mind," he said. "It changes the body fundamentally. At the cellular level."

  Koleen nodded slowly, as if this confirmed the thing he'd read.

  "The stages of Corruption aren't just about mental degradation," Sael continued. "They're about transformation, it replaces what was there with something else. Stage one, stage two, it's mostly psychological. Changes in thought patterns, erosion of empathy, that sort of thing. The body remains largely the same."

  He held up the fur.

  "But by stage six, the physical transformation becomes significant. The person's cellular structure begins to change. Their blood composition shifts. The fundamental building blocks of what they are start to become something different."

  "So the blood stops recognizing its source," Koleen said quietly.

  "Yes. The sympathetic connection relies on the principle that the part belongs to the whole. But if the whole has changed enough, the part no longer recognizes it as the same entity. It's like..." Sael paused, searching for the right comparison. "It's like trying to use a key from your childhood home to unlock the door after someone's completely rebuilt the house. The door might be in the same location, but the lock has been replaced."

  Richter's expression had shifted from curiosity to something more serious. "How long does that take? From stage one to stage six?"

  "It varies," Sael said. "Depends on the individual, the intensity of exposure, whether they're fighting it or embracing it. Some people reached stage six in less than ten years. Others took more."

  "And Aldric?" Richter asked.

  Sael considered the weakened connection, that muted pull in his awareness.

  "He's not at stage six yet," Sael said. "If he were, I wouldn't be able to track him at all using this sample. The connection would be completely severed. But he's close. Stage five at minimum. Maybe approaching six."

  "How long does he have?" Koleen asked. "Before he crosses that threshold?"

  "Months," Sael said. "Maybe a year if we're lucky. Once he reaches stage six fully, this blood will be useless. I won't be able to find him through conventional tracking."

  The implications settled over all three of them.

  Richter broke the silence first. "Then we need to move quickly."

  "Yes."

  "Shall we go then?" Koleen asked, already turning toward the direction of the portal.

  Sael didn't move.

  He stood there, aware of the directional pull in his mind, but also aware of something else. A consideration that had been growing since the moment he'd arrived here. He was in Hel. Not by choice, not by plan, but he was here nonetheless. And Hel was where he'd grown up and learned magic under his mother and master's strict tutelages. Where his parents and master were buried.

  He hadn't been back in centuries.

  Sael looked toward the horizon. The perpetual twilight made distances hard to judge, but he could see the dark silhouettes of mountains in the far distance. Jagged peaks that scraped against the grey sky. Somewhere beyond those mountains, in a valley he could still picture with perfect clarity, there were four graves marked with simple stone.

  And there was something else. An artifact he'd left behind when he'd departed for the outside world all those years ago. His mother's staff, placed at the foot of her grave as was tradition. He'd thought about it occasionally over the centuries, but there had never been a reason to return for it.

  Until now.

  Young Orion would need every advantage he could get. A properly attuned focus could make the difference between a spell that worked and one that killed its caster. His mother's staff had been crafted specifically for wielders with unusual magical constitution.

  "I'd like to make a detour," he said.

  Both men turned to look at him.

  "A detour?" Richter repeated.

  "Yes." Sael gestured vaguely toward the portal's direction. "You two should head back. I'll meet you shortly."

  There was a pause.

  Then both Koleen and Richter spoke at the same time.

  "We'll come with you."

  They said it quickly, almost reflexively, as if the words had left their mouths before their brains had fully processed the decision. Then they seemed to realize what they'd done and both straightened, suddenly looking like men who'd just remembered they were supposedly dignified adults.

  Koleen cleared his throat and Richter adjusted his coat.

  Neither of them retracted the statement.

  Sael stared at them, they looked like children who'd blurted out a request to stay up past bedtime and were now trying to pretend it had been a perfectly reasonable adult suggestion all along. How odd to see them as such.

  A sound escaped him before he could stop it. A short, soft laugh that surprised him almost as much as it seemed to surprise them.

  "Very well," Sael said, still fighting the smile that wanted to form. "Come along then."

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