Chapter 33 | Part 2 | The Realization

She reached for the vision the way she always did, and this time she found him waiting.

Not waiting. Moving. Walking east through a landscape she’d seen in fragments since the spruce forest, volcanic and wrong and shot through with dark crystal formations. He was walking with three other figures, two of them his companions from the earlier visions, the third someone new. Taller. Armored. The three moved in a loose formation that suggested protection, not capture. He was being escorted.

Maris sat on the ground at the edge of camp with her eyes closed and her hands pressed flat against the cold earth and the Beacon’s frequency running through her like current. She could feel him. Not the drowning man anymore. The man who’d stopped drowning and was now walking with purpose through a landscape that should have killed him and didn’t.

She could feel the other artifact.

It sat in his pack the way the Beacon sat in Dulint’s, and the two frequencies resonated across whatever impossible distance separated them, tuned to each other, calling to each other, two parts of something that wanted to be whole. The Beacon in Dulint’s pack was the homing signal. The thing in the dark elf’s pack was the destination. And the Beacon wasn’t pointing at a place because the destination was a person.

She opened her eyes. Blood from both nostrils this time. She didn’t wipe it. Let it drip.

“She sees him,” Maris said.

The group was gathered around the dead fire. Dulint sat with the pack between his knees, protective, instinctive. Balin was beside him, walking stick across his lap. Aldric stood. Xandor was closest to Maris, his good hand still pressed against the spruce trunk, listening with whatever senses his training had given him access to.

“The dark elf?” Xandor said.

“He’s carrying something. The Beacon is following it.” She pressed her fingers against the bridge of her nose. The headache was building behind her eyes with the familiar architecture of a structure being assembled in her skull without her consent. “The thing he carries, it’s the other half. The other piece. The Beacon has been pointing at it since the beginning, and it was near the barrier, so it looked like the Beacon was pointing at the barrier. It wasn’t.”

“It was pointing at him,” Xandor said. Not a question.

“At what he carries. And he’s moved. He’s not at the barrier anymore, or wherever he was before. He’s traveling. East. With people.” She looked at Dulint. The old dwarf’s face was the color of winter stone. “The Beacon tracks the other piece of the system. It always has. We weren’t following a location. We were following a person, and the person was standing still long enough that it looked like a fixed point.”

“And now he’s moving,” Aldric said.

“Now he’s moving.”

Silence in the camp. The kind of silence that happens when a group collectively adjusts a map they’ve been navigating by and discovers that the map was never what they thought it was.

Balin was the first to speak. “So everything we’ve been walking toward. The barrier. The convergence. The thing at the end of the northeast pull.” He tapped his walking stick against his boot. “It’s a person.”

“It’s a person carrying an artifact,” Maris said. “The Beacon doesn’t track him. It tracks what he carries. But since he carries it, the effect is the same.”

“Does he know?” Dulint’s voice was quiet. The rambling was gone, the tangents stripped away. When the artifact was involved, Dulint became someone else: direct, spare, frightened in a way that removed all ornamentation from his speech.

“She doesn’t think so. She sees his mind sometimes when the visions hit. He knows the artifact is important. He doesn’t know it’s calling to us.”

“Can he feel the Beacon?”

Maris closed her eyes again. Reached. The connection bloomed with pain, a hot spike behind her left eye that made her jaw clench. She pushed through it. Found the frequency. Found him.

He was eating. Sitting near a crystal formation with provisions that someone else had supplied. His body was relaxed in a way it hadn’t been in earlier visions. Comfortable. Adapted. The landscape around him was wrong, hostile, volcanic, and he sat in it like he belonged.

There was a woman near him. Tall. Dark armor. Standing, not sitting. She was watching him the way you watch something you’ve assessed and found satisfactory.

Maris couldn’t read her. The frequency slid off the woman like water off stone. Whatever she was, the Beacon’s system didn’t register her as part of its network. She existed in a space the frequency couldn’t penetrate.

“She doesn’t know if he can feel it,” Maris said. She opened her eyes. The pain receded into its usual residence behind her temples. “But the system is mutual. He’s being pulled too. He just doesn’t know what’s pulling.”

Xandor removed his hand from the tree. “The Nexus system. Two components, separated. One Sense, one Erase. Sense locates. Erase responds. They’re designed to find each other.” He looked at the group. “We’ve been carrying a homing signal. And the thing it homes to is walking through a hostile realm on the other side of the barrier, being escorted by someone Maris can’t read.”

“She can’t read her,” Maris confirmed. “The woman. Whatever she is, the system doesn’t see her.”

“That’s worth noting,” Aldric said. His hand was on his sword pommel again. The automatic gesture of a man whose instinct for threat was faster than his ability to locate it.

“Everything they’ve been following,” Dulint said. He was looking at his pack. At the Beacon inside it. “Every direction. Every pull. Every vision. It was never the barrier.”

“It was never the barrier,” Maris said.

“It was him.”

“It was him.”

Dulint’s hands tightened on the pack straps. His iron-ore eyes were wet with something Maris chose not to name, because naming it would require understanding it, and understanding Dulint’s relationship with the artifact in his pack was a depth she couldn’t afford to dive while the headache was still building behind her eyes.

The Beacon hummed. Steady. Directional. Pointed at a person neither of them had met, walking east through a landscape none of them could reach, carrying the other half of a system that was assembling itself regardless of what any of them wanted.

“What do we do?” Balin asked.

The question sat in the morning air like a stone dropped into a well. They waited for the sound of it hitting bottom.

End of Chapter 33.2 —> 33.3: What the Beacon Lost: The Course Change