"…just an ordinary couple's ring?" Logical Heart finished with a startled expression. He gazed upward after Kit.

"What just happened?" MatchlessMinion asked after a moment.

His question jolted Danika out of her own shock, but she didn't answer, she followed Kit into the sky instead.

--

Kit rose higher and higher, in a circle that grew wider the higher she got.

Danika struggled to keep up, even though with her fairy dragon wings she could rise nearly vertically and didn't have to flap around in a circle after the shapeshifted druid. Even though her own rise slowed with the increasing height, she finally caught up to Kit in elevation when the hawk's circle had widened and flattened to the point where she was barely rising with each revolution.

Danika moved over to the edge of Kit's circle and shouted as she approached, "What are you trying to do?"

"Go up!" Kit answered with a wheeze that reminded Danika that she was playing on a full motion console.

As Kit made another pass, Danika got closer and reached out to cast her featherweight spell on the druid. The hawk immediately began climbing again, and her circle tightened. After a moment Danika cast the spell on herself as well and zipped upward again.

The weight reduction increased Kit's range, but even though Danika closed in and renewed the spell when she thought it was near timing out, eventually Kit's rising circle flattened out again.

"I can't get high enough!" Kit cried out. She didn't stop trying though, she kept flapping as hard as she could.

Danika didn't know what else to do for her. She hovered worriedly.

"Can you still go up!?" Kit demanded as she circled close enough to be heard again.

Danika flew upward slowly. Above her she could see only high thin clouds, although she thought that maybe the faint shapes of enormous dragons swam through them like they were foamy waves. Below her 'Living Jade Empire' sprawled out into a fading distance, so far away that it almost resembled the view from the celestial work spaces at the top of the game's atmosphere. She was only a few stories higher than Kit though, when her featherweight spell wore off. She almost renewed it, before she realized that the hawk below her was falling.

Danika dove after Kit, who seemed to be falling in an inelegant flutter of feathers rather than gliding or diving downward. Her butterfly wings just weren't very aerodynamic though, and Danika was really afraid that she wasn't going to catch up in time.

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"Kit!" she screamed.

Hikaru popped out of the pebble that held her garden in the harness on her back, and quickly fell behind as the little beetle hovered in the air. A moment later the firefly flashed into existence beside her again, as it was teleported back into her vicinity. Danika wanted to thank her pet, as she realized that she still had more options to try.

Her first random teleport flung her a bit upward and sideways from Kit's path downward, but the next one dropped her downward almost the skill's full range. She was close enough now to see that Kit was still trying to right herself, she was just catching the air wrong somehow and flipping over instead of gliding.

Danika thought frantically, and then tried attaching her featherweight spell to her light spell and shooting it downward at the hawk, the way she could with her spark cantrip. For a moment she thought it hadn't worked, and then Kit suddenly flipped once more and caught the air like a kite.

A sharp curse word floated up to meet Danika who was still diving as fast as she could. She laughed with relief.

"Zip, can you heal me?" Kit asked a bit anxiously as Danika got closer.

Danika blinked and checked the party screen on her way to the menu to trigger her restore prayer, and she saw with shock that Kit's health was extremely low. When she finally got close enough to touch her, she could tell that Kit was shaking even as she kept her wings stretched as wide as she could.

Kit's level had risen a lot lately and the drop in ZipZing's Karma as she used the prayer was sharp, but Danika was merely relieved that it was successful and Kit's health and energy were completely restored in an instant.

Danika's own energy was nearly completely empty, and she hovered for a moment to pull out candies to stuff into her mouth. She was startled to realize that she was still descending slowly even though she thought that she was hovering. Hikaru circled her, and Danika wondered if the firefly was worried.

Below her Kit called out faintly, "ZipZing?"

Danika dove again, until she caught up with the hawk's slow spiraling descent. "I'm here," she called out.

"Could you see anything above us? I can't really see much above myself," Kit called back.

"Just clouds and dragons," Danika replied. She decided that the dragons were probably quite real, given the celestial dragons who lived at the top of the sky.

Kit was silent as she descended the rest of the way to the ground. Danika didn't know if she should be trying to talk or not, so she didn't call out again either. It was tiring to shout at each other, and there were lots of things she wanted to verify.

Kit landed a bit heavily, but as neatly as usual, and shifted back into her human shape. She still didn't speak though, even as Danika dropped back to her usual eye level hover.

MatchlessMinion's large round ears twitched, but he didn't ask anything yet.

Shrubbery simply walked forward and hugged Kit, and then asked, "You know where he is now?"

"Up," Kit said simply. She tilted her head back and stared into the sky.

"May I examine your ring Kit Tay?" Logical Heart asked politely.

Kit clenched her hand protectively, as though she worried that the ring would suddenly slide off on its own, and stepped out of Shrubbery's embrace. She turned and looked down at the little gnome, before asking a little sharply, "Why?"

"Um, because it looks like an ordinary couple's ring?" Logical Heart replied uncertainly.

Danika hovered worriedly, and asked, "Would an ordinary couple's ring stop working just because their marriage was dissolved?"

Kit touched her ring gently with the fingers of her other hand and glanced between them. "What do you mean?" she asked finally.

Logical Heart rubbed his nose and said, "Well, it ought to simply link to its mate? Each ring should only resonate with the one that matches it, but it won't respond if it isn't worn by the person it was given to."

"Kit has kept wearing it the whole time," Danika protested before Kit could speak. "It's the person who gave it to her whose ring disappeared."

"It used to link to every nearby instance of the traveling merchant," Kit said faintly.

"I wish I'd examined it before. I wonder if Lin Hao did?" Logical Heart replied uncertainly. "I can only make guesses without examining it to see if it even is what it appears to be now?"

"I'm afraid," Kit admitted without lifting her eyes from the ring. "I'm afraid that it will stop working again." She looked upward suddenly and asked, "But I'm also not sure… how can he really be above us in the empty sky like the thread shows? And there's only one thread now…"

"He could be a dragon?" Danika suggested uncertainly.

Kit blinked and then stared at her.