Leopold felt like he was dying, but he urged himself on nonetheless. Every step sent excruciating bolts of pain through his hips and up his spine, but he endured it. Willow had endured so much worse over the years, he could hold out until they found her.

The forest was so dense that the canopy nearly blotted out the sun overhead. Huge towering oaks crowded around the artifacts of civilizations past. Poured stone, metal rods, even shards of glass had been sucked up into the trees to be consumed over slow centuries. If you felled one of these beasts, there was no telling what you’d find within.

He stumbled over a root and an arm shot out to catch him before he toppled all the way over. Leopold regained his footing and looked at Bryan who’d been fast enough to halt his fall.

“Thanks,” Leopold said. Bryan smiled in reply and kept on walking. The company wasn’t waiting around for them, and they’d been told specifically that if they fell behind they’d be picked up on the return journey. Leopold wondered how much of this was bluster and how much was the truth, but he didn’t want to test the hardened mission commander.

The man was named Rolf, and Bryan had managed a few words to Leopold about him whlie they were digging a latrine away from the main company. He was the highest ranked soldier in the city, but he never appeared on the wall for duty. Rumor had it he was reserved for special missions that required secrecy and stealth. Without the threat of open war between the city-states, there wasn’t much higher a soldier could climb. Bryan was satisfied with his position, but Rolf hadn’t been.

After the attack on the city, Leopold hadn’t been conscious at the Sisters of Mercy for more than an hour before Dean Weatherby himself made an appearance by his bedside. He’d asked about Leopold’s condition, performed his own cursory exam with a glowing ball of essence which gave him the ability to see through cloth and flesh, and pronounced the surgeons’ task satisfactory. Leopold would walk again, with practice.

But there was another matter, and the dean requested a curtain be drawn around the bed before he warded the cloth itself with a sealing spell. He asked about Willow, if Leopold had really seen her at the gate. Leopold said that he had, that he came to right before she cast the lance of flame which had apparently obliterated the advancing warbeast.

And then the dean had asked him the hardest question of all. Willow was missing. Did he know anything about that? Could he explain why she’d been able to do what she’d done? It wasn’t until he told Leopold that there had been another woman, a nurse, with Willow right before the Monstruacans’ lens blanked out that Leopold even considered saying what he knew. Willow was missing, again, but it appeared this time as if she’d been kidnapped.

On their march the dean was up toward the front of the column of twenty men, wrapped in a traveling cloak and walking with a staff. He looked like one of those traveling mages from the storybooks Leopold’s father had brought back home in the short periods when he’d visited their backwater town before scurrying off to the cities once again. Those plates with the mages in their pointy hats commanding lightning and fire had always inspired him. They’d eventually inspired him to attend the Arcanum, where he might have destroyed any hope for Willow’s future.

Because he’d told the dean everything; from Willow’s essential attributes to her special training sessions with Professor Brandeweiss, to her unintentional murder of said professor. The dean had listened stoically to all of this, even the impossible parts. At the end he rose, thanked Leopold, and made to leave their small curtained enclosure. But before he swept the curtain aside, almost as an afterthought, he said he was putting together a company of men to track Willow down wherever she’d gone, and offered Leopold a place in that company.

As if he could say no. It took two days for them to gear up and set out, and in that time Leopold had pushed himself past what he previously considered his upper bounds on pain. The surgeons had had to reconstruct much of the bone and flesh around his upper thighs, as they had been crushed by a tumbling block from the initial bombardment of the city, and they warned that it would take a while before his nervous system fully reintegrated. They really wanted him to stay for a week if possible, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He had two days, and two days was all it took for him to start walking again.

Bryan was picked for the company, which at first surprised Leopold. He was a wall-guard when he wasn’t guarding caravans, and the man had little experience with this sort of mission. But Leopold caught on rather quickly that the dean had surreptitiously assembled nearly everyone Willow knew into this company, and they were heading straight for her. It was Bryan who had housed Willow with his family for months after she single-handedly saved their caravan from a freak deathworm attack. What the dean would use this concentration of her allies for was anybody’s guess.

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The forest was getting darker, and soon enough Rolf called the company to a halt. He ordered them to set camp and dig latrines, and Bryan and Leopold went off to pitch their tents a little further away from the rest of the guards.

They worked in silence, Bryan finishing much faster than Leopold who wasn’t used to the ropes and staves and canvas envelopes, but the guard helped him execute the correct knots to ensure the tent wouldn’t fall over on him again like it had their first night.

“Let’s see if you’ve got the weatherproofing down right, shall we,” Bryan said, and crawled into Leopold’s tent. Leopold look on in confusion, as he was holding the weatherproofing canvas under his arm at the moment, but he followed Bryan inside anyway.

Inside, Bryan slung the roll which contained his sword off his back and laid it down on the dirt floor.

“Bryan—,” Leopold began, but Bryan held his finger to his lips and gestured Leopold forward. As he unfurled the wrapping, it became clear that there was more than just a sword in the bundle.

An iron rod topped with a screw-on wooden handle fell out beside the sheathed sword. The last time he’d seen this metal cane he’d been at the mercy of an approaching deathworm and Willow was hauling back to smack it, probably to distract it from eating him. What happened instead was that the cane sliced entirely through the deathworm and sailed off into the night. Willow had looked at her hands in horror afterwards, thrown up, and passed out. That one attack had nearly stripped both of her hands of all their skin and muscle.

Leopold moved in closer until his mouth was right beside Bryan’s ear. He could still hear the commotion of raising camp off in the distance, but he didn’t want anyone else hearing what he was about to say.

“I thought it was lost,” Leopold whispered.

“I saved it,” Bryan said. “I thought it was inscribed. I… took it to a dealer. I thought I would get myself a new weapon.”

Leopold knew in an out-of-body way that he should be furious with the man for stealing Willow’s cane, but he just couldn’t summon up the anger. Not toward Bryan who’d housed Willow for so long in repayment for their lives, who’d paid for her surgery upon entering Durum without a second thought. If he felt like he needed a new weapon to keep himself safe for his wife and son, then who was Leopold to cast blame.

“But it wasn’t enchanted,” Leopold said, and Bryan nodded. That terrible night with the deathworm had been, in retrospect, the first hint that there was more going on with Willow than met the eye. It had been the first tell that her body wasn’t controlled by muscles and tendons, but by an impossible confluence of psychokinetic spells. Her bones had simply heeded the call of her will, regardless of the damage to the surrounding tissue.

Leopold put his hand on Bryan’s shoulder. “Thank you,” he said. Bryan didn’t need to mention the work he’d had done on the cane—after passing through a deathworm, it was a miracle it was still in one piece. He’d restored it for Willow, perhaps even meant to give it to her before she’d disappeared from their lives after killing Professor Brandeweiss, but had never had the chance.

“She might need it, when we find her,” Leopold said. “I don’t know if she’s got a… a…”

Tears came hot and fast down Leopold’s face and he covered his eyes with his hand. Gods, he couldn’t even think about what Willow must be going through. She was both the most powerful being any of them had ever known, and the weakest person alive at the same time. Was she going along with the nurse Annabelle willingly, or was she being coerced? Their brief reunion at the western gate before the attack hadn’t been enough for him to know if she was still running from the guilt of what she’d done.

And always, there was that other voice, a whisper in the back of his mind. A feeling about the dean, about this Rolf, and the company of men they’d sent out with to rescue Willow.

It didn’t seem like a rescue party.

Leopold wiped his eyes and took a shuddering breath. Bryan nodded, rewrapped his bundle and backed out of the tent. Leopold still had the weatherproof canvas tarp to unroll, but he felt exhausted. His hips were killing him, his legs were shooting phantom pain, and all he wanted was to lay down on the hard ground and go to sleep.

No, he had to keep moving. Willow was moving, Willow was always moving. Always pushing past her limits, always breaking through the boundaries of the possible, even if she didn’t know them as such. She’d worked through an impossible essential resistance as a result of her psychokinetic body, building up a city’s worth of essence volume and a regeneration rate that would make a wall-mounted essence cannon blush. And she’d done it all hoping beyond hope that someday she’d be able to have a normal life.

He could give her that, he wanted to. The month he’d spent searching for her in the city had shown him that. He loved her, and he thought she loved him too. He would give her everything he could, everything he had to give. If he could only find her again.

She was so strong, had she already moved beyond him?