The Tulin family was already waiting for them with two fresh horses when the would-be rescue party rode up to the gate.

“Lady Corvina. Prince Agis.” Marquess Ormen nodded to each of them in greeting. “We had some provisions packed for you, since there’s no way of telling how far this Eva woman may have traveled using her magic.” He looked up at the assassin, a bemused expression on his face. “But I suppose I’ll have to call for a third horse.”

“No need,” said Agis, patting his horse’s neck. “I will not be changing horses. My noble steed, Iramus, could run a thousand miles without tiring.”

“Alright,” said the Marquess. “Far be it from me to question the stamina of an elven prince’s horse. I’ll just go up to the house and arrange to have more provisions brought, then. I assume your noble steed will be able to handle carrying a bit of extra weight?”

“Of course,” said Agis, smugly.

“Thank you, Marquess,” said Corvina, dismounting from her own horse. She was out of breath from riding so hard, but at the same time she was desperate for a cigarette. She half considered asking Marquess Ormen to have a servant fetch a pack from her room, but she knew that would be a bad idea. She would have plenty of time to smoke once Anne was safe.

Agis and the Unseen Rain had also dismounted. Agis was leading his ‘noble steed’ over to the water trough, and the Unseen Rain was busy transferring a few leather bags over to one of the fresh horses. Corvina wasn’t sure she wanted to know what was inside of those…

Justine and Liza hadn’t moved from their spot by the gates since the riders had arrived. Liza looked like she was about to run up to them, but Justine put out a hand to stop her. Corvina was briefly confused by this until she noticed that Justine was glaring at the assassin.

“Oh, don’t worry,” said Corvina. “She’s helping us at the moment.”

“I’m not a woman,” said the assassin, looking over at her.

“Really?” said Corvina, mildly surprised. “Okay, he’s helping us—“

“I’m not a man, either,” said the assassin. “Not today, anyway.”

“Is that right?” said Corvina. She wasn’t currently in the mindset to make sense of that, so she just said, “The Unseen Rain is helping us right now. That is what people call you, isn’t it?”

The Unseen Rain nodded, satisfied.

“Fine,” said Justine. “But if you cause any trouble in my home ever again I will personally help to make sure your name is more accurate than ever.

Rain shrugged. “A clumsy threat, but I take your meaning.”

Liza, who was practically vibrating with excitement, finally lost her patience with this conversation and pushed past her mother’s arm to run up to Corvina and shove a small object into her hands.

“I found out I couldn’t track Eva’s magic directly after all,” she said. “I guess cause the fact that I can’t use magic at all means I can’t really sense it either, and I was super sad about that, but then I thought that, even if I can’t feel magic, maybe the pin can still ‘feel’ magic, in a way. Or at least Eva’s magic, since Eva was the one who made the pin using magic. Like, matching types of magic are drawn to each other. I read something about that once, I think. Anyway, that’s how I got the idea for this.”

Corvina looked at the object. It looked like a worn-out compass, but the needle had been replaced with Anne’s lapel pin.

“What is it?” asked Corvina.

“It’s a compass,” said Liza, beaming. “Just like how it looks, only instead of pointing to magnetic north it points at Eva!”

“What? That thing points at Eva?” Agis had finished tying his horse up by the water trough and was walking back over to the group. He strained his neck to try to get a look at the compass. “How does that work?”

“It’s super complicated, but like I said, basically the pin is just attracted to the magic that created it,” said Liza. “You can ignore the directions written on it, they don’t matter, but I don’t know how to make a compass from scratch so I just used an old one.”

Corvina held the compass in her hand, staring at its face while she slowly spun in a circle. Sure enough, the pin kept pointing the same way while the compass shifted underneath it.

“Which end is pointing towards Eva?” asked Corvina.

“This one,” said Liza, pointing it out.

Corvina followed the direction of the needle with her eyes, looking out across the landscape and towards the heart of the city of Longren.

“How certain are you that this is accurate?” Corvina asked.

“Well…” Liza clasped her hands behind her back and rocked back and forth on her feet, staring off into the distance. “When you’re doing research nothing is ever really certain, I guess.” She shrugged. “But I tested the principle with several other alchemical objects and they all pointed back towards their main power source. Eva’s magic was almost definitely the main source of power anchoring the spell on that pin, so it should work.”

Justine put a hand on Liza’s shoulder. “I may not know as much as my daughter, but I helped her with her experiments. The results were consistent. I can assure you, the compass works the way she’s told you.”

“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” said Corvina. “It’s just… it doesn’t make any sense.”

“What doesn’t make sense about it?” asked Agis, taking the compass from Corvina. He squinted at it, turning it over in his hands. He turned it upside down and shook it a little. “I don’t understand how any of this stuff works, but ‘the needle points at Eva’ seems pretty simple to me.”

Corvina snatched the compass back from him. “Yes, I understand the concept,” she snapped. “But this compass… it’s pointing in the direction of the church. Surely Eva wouldn’t be stupid enough to take Anne back to the one place we’d me most likely to look for them, right?”

“You’re thinking too much like a chess player,” said Rain, cantering up to them on the back of their new horse. “Not everyone is thinking about what their opponent is thinking about what they might be thinking. Even smart people, in moments of high emotion or desperation, will often make the most obvious choice available to them.”

“Fine,” said Corvina, glaring up at them. “But even then, a big church like that is always crowded and busy, isn’t it? It would be next to impossible for someone to truly hide there.”

“Hmm, that might be true of the cathedral in the capital,” said Agis, uncertainly. “But the church here actually doesn’t have a ton of people working there anymore and there’s lots of good places to hide. There’s a whole abandoned wing where almost no one ever goes, too. Actually, I saw Eva walking towards the abandoned wing the other day when I was looking for Anne…”

Corvina stared at Agis.

“Alright,” said Marquess Ormen, returning from the house. “A few of the kitchen boys will be up here with more provisions in a few—”

“Not necessary, Marquess, thank you!” said Corvina. “Agis, Get on your damn horse, we’re heading for the church right now.”

Anne was starting to lose her sense of time, lying there tied up in the dark. There were no windows in this room, no clocks, not even an hourglass. Nothing to help estimate how long she’d been sitting there, watching Eva do inscrutable things while muttering to herself.

Uncounted time always seemed to stretch on forever, and now, in addition to being scared, and stressed, and feeling really sorry for Eva, and also for the Saintess for that matter, but also kind of angry at both of them because maybe if either of them had talked to the other about their feelings and their assumptions at any point then maybe things wouldn’t have gotten this far, Anne was also feeling… kind of bored.

Was that supposed to be possible? Was it normal to be bored while waiting for someone to murder you as part of a mysterious ritual to summon their crush back from another world?

It would probably help if Anne felt like there was something she could do to try to save herself, but being tied up and gagged meant she was truly out of options.

Except, well…

Anne had never been super religious back in her past life. It was hard to be, when you were raised in a religion that told you it was a sin for you to fall in love. That sort of thing tended to put you off the whole concept altogether.

But… this was a different world. With a different god. And yeah, people had told Anne that the goddess might not approve of homosexuality, but also Anne hadn’t read any of the sacred texts really so who knew if that was part of actual doctrine or not? Also, who knew if the goddess actually existed or not, but… this was a fantasy world, so it wouldn’t feel out of place for the genre…

Ugh, fuck it. It couldn’t hurt, right?

How were you supposed to pray again?

Dear Goddess, thought Anne. I don’t really know any of the proper rituals for your religion, so sorry if I’m messing this up somehow. But you know this is a pretty messed up situation down here and I could really use some help if you felt up to it.

Anne paused for a moment but she really couldn’t think of anything else to add.

Thanks in advance for your help. Amen.

Anne hadn’t prayed a lot in her life but she had written a lot of business emails.

Anne waited.

There didn’t appear to be any immediate signs of divine intervention, but perhaps Coris worked in subtle, mysterious ways?

“There,” said Eva, a note of satisfaction in her voice.

Anne looked over to see Eva stepping away from the elaborate magic circle she’d been creating, brushing the remaining chalk off of her hands.

“You know, once Bishop Geist gave me a direction for my research, I was actually able to find the specific books that Anne must have used. They were hidden in another corner of this pointless maze, along with the remains of her version of this magic circle. Once I’d seen that, it was easy to recreate the spell. Of course, I had to make some modifications.”

Eva walked up to Anne and crouched down next to her, looking her in the eye. “Tell me, impostor, do you know what mana is? Just nod or shake your head.”

Anne shook her head.

“Of course you don’t,” said Eva, standing back up. “The Church of Coris put a lot of time and effort into erasing every single mention of what it is or how to use it from the historical record. But there were some clerics at the time who had certain reservations about destroying books entirely, which is why many of them ended up down here, where everyone slowly forgot about them… Well. Almost everyone. But luckily the Bishop thought I could be useful, which is why she didn’t have me killed when she first found me down here, poring over the texts.”

Eva was staring off into the distance, wistfully.

Anne, of course, was gagged, and couldn’t respond even if she wanted to.

Eva sighed and then reached down to grab the lapel of Anne’s coat, dragging her towards the magic circle in the center of the room.

“Everyone has mana, even if not everyone can use it,” said Eva. “Mana is life force. Mana is the essence of the soul held by all sentient beings. When I was a kid I accessed my mana instinctively. That happens sometimes, as a reflex. Usually your soul has an instinct to protect itself, but if you feel like you’re about to die anyway…” Eva shrugged.

Eva dropped Anne in the middle of the circle and took a few steps out, still talking.

“But there are ways to learn how to access your mana. And in some extreme cases, there are even ways to utilize other people’s mana.”

Eva used her chalk to make a few small corrections to the circle, and then she turned to an open book on a table nearby, consulting something.

“That’s what Anne did…” said Eva. She smiled. “Honestly, it’s such a brilliantly clever solution she found. I’m so proud of her for it. You see, at the moment of a person’s death, all of their remaining mana is released all at once, in this incredible burst of power. Usually that power just… goes wherever it goes, uselessly. But my Anne…”

Eva crouched down to look Anne in the eye again.

“She found a way to reach through all the way to your dimension and use the power generated by your own death over there in order to summon you here. Isn’t that brilliant?”

Anne felt sick to her stomach.

It was clever, in a way. It was also extremely messed up. What kind of light-hearted fantasy romance setting was this, where the characters were pushed to such extremes? What the hell were you thinking, original author?

Eva sighed and cocked her head to one side. “Unfortunately, we don’t really have time to be that clever about it. So I’m just gonna kill you, capture the power of your mana in this—“ Eva tapped on something that looked vaguely like a tesla ball. “—heal your body back up real quick, and then spend the rest of that mana to pluck Anne’s soul back out of the intermediary dimensions and put it back where it belongs. Does that sound good to you?”

Eva patted Anne on the shoulder before standing back up and getting back to work. She started lighting several candles around the room.

Dear Goddess, thought Anne, Just following up on that earlier conversation. I could really use that miracle about now. Please. She’s picking up a knife now. Oh god. I mean goddess. Wishing you all the best. Amen.

As soon as Anne said amen, she heard a woman’s voice speak gently in her ear, so quietly that she could barely make out what it was saying. It said:

“Just give me two seconds, dear. You really can’t rush these things, you know? And I’m not, like, actually all powerful, but I am doing my best, so just, like, hold your horses for a minute while I try to find the right opening here, k? TTYL. ;)”