Chapter 122 Not Get Lost
ARYA
The runoff took place ten days later.
I spent those ten days doing two things simultaneously. The ordinary work of running a council that couldn’t stop for an election, and the preparation for what I’d finally, formally decided to attempt.
The void retrieval.
Elara’s research, reviewed by Bardon over two intensive weeks of work that had left him looking both exhausted and illuminated, was solid. More than solid. It was genuinely extraordinary work. The methodology for anchoring a void pocket retrieval was theoretical but coherent. The specific approach she’d developed for the scale of what they’d displaced was built around assumptions about the anchor that were now demonstrably accurate.
The anchor was me.
The question was whether I was enough, and how to make it safer.
“You’re not going in the way you went in before,” Bardon said, at the fourth session reviewing the methodology. “The previous entry points were forced openings, rifts, seams, damaged void containment. What Elara’s framework describes is a controlled entry. A door rather than a wound.”
“Can you build the door?”
“Elara can help build the door. She’s done it before on smaller scales.” He paused. “There’s a significant difference between displacing a research facility and retrieving it. The displacement was a one-way operation with a simple process, push it in and seal it. The retrieval requires going in, locating the pocket, opening it, and coming back out. All while maintaining the anchor.”
“And the anchor is a living connection to real space.”
“Yes. Which means the moment you enter—”
“I become the thing keeping the door open,” I finished. “If I lose the anchor quality — if the void starts dissolving what I am — the door closes.”
“Yes.”
“And if the door closes with me inside.”
He looked at me steadily. “We’d have seven days. Perhaps less.”
I thought about Luca’s face when I’d told him about this. The careful stillness of someone who’d been promised that this conversation had already been had and the decision had already been made and the only constructive thing remaining was to make it as safe as possible.
“Can we use it the way we used it in the void last time? Luca as a secondary anchor?”
“Possibly. The mate bond functions independently of physical proximity in ways that aren’t fully understood. If it survived the void before—”
“It survived the void.” I looked at my hands. The ward resonance humming gently at the edge of my awareness. “What if I extend the ward connection? The way I’ve been doing with the temple wards. If I can stay connected to the land here while I’m in there—”
Bardon was very quiet.
“What?” I said.
“That’s—” He stopped. Started again. “The ward resonance allows you to receive information through the earth connection. If you can extend that two-directionally by sending information back as well as receiving it, you’d essentially have a lifeline that functions independently of both the bond and any ward structure in the void itself.”
“Can I do it two-directionally?”
“I have no idea. I’ve never seen anyone attempt it. I’m not sure the theory supports—” He paused. “But you can try it. Right now. Send something back through the ward connection.”
I focused on the low hum of the ward network. Felt the land under the temple, deep and old, threaded through with the Moonborne magic that had been worked into it over generations. I found the specific frequency of my own awareness in it and pushed.
I felt something, a mix between a presence and a pulse. ‘I’m here.’
Bardon’s eyes went wide.
“What did you feel?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “But the ward monitoring system just registered a Moonborne signature in the northern section of the grounds.” He checked his tablet. “You sent a signal through the ward network.”
“A pulse,” I said. “It feels like a—”
“—a heartbeat.” He finished for me.
He set down his tablet very carefully. “Aeliana. You just described a solution to the problem that has made void retrieval theoretically impossible.”
“The anchor is losing connection.”
“If you can maintain a heartbeat through the ward network a regular signal then even if the void begins to affect your anchor quality, the ward network maintains the connection independently.” He looked at me. “It’s a backup anchor.”
“A backup anchor that runs through the earth itself.” I felt the weight of it. “Which means the void would have to dissolve my land connection as well as my anchor quality simultaneously to lose me.”
“Which would require—”
“A level of void saturation that we’d detect long before it became critical.” I exhaled slowly. “We can do this.”
“We can possibly do this,” he said carefully. “With considerable preparation. And I want Elara working on the void-side mechanics and Luca aware of every parameter before we discuss a timeline.”
“Of course.” I stood. “Set up the session. All four of us.”
⸻
The room didn’t move after that. It should have. There should have been the scrape of chairs, the quiet shuffle of paper, the end of a meeting.
Instead, everything held.
The air felt different, like something fundamental had shifted without making a sound. Bardon was still watching me, not with doubt now, but with the kind of focus reserved for something that had just crossed from theory into reality.
“You felt it clearly?” he asked finally.
“Yes.”
“Not imagined. Not constructed. It responded.”
“It answered,” I said. “Not in words. But it answered.”
That seemed to settle something in him. Not comfort. Not yet. But direction.
“Then we’re not just talking about maintaining an anchor,” he said slowly. “We’re talking about communication. If you can send a pulse out, you might be able to map the void pocket from the inside by how the signal returns. Distortions. Delays. Absence.”
“A way to see without seeing,” I murmured.
“A way to not get lost.”
The weight of that pressed in, quieter than fear, heavier than hope.
Not getting lost meant coming back.
It meant this wasn’t just an attempt.
It was a plan.