Ethan opened his eyes, remembered where he was, and then wanted to fall back asleep. But he was in extreme discomfort lying in the back of a small wooden cart, each bump in the road sending pain shooting through his stomach. Sleep would not come naturally. This made him wonder what he had awoken from. Had Sera treated him?

“Please, no, lay still.”

Ethan felt the gentle hand on his chest, pushing him down in the cart as he started to rise. It was a woman, but he didn’t recognize the voice. His eyes adjusted to the darkness quickly, and he could just make out her features. It looked like she had been crying.

“My name is Emoyen,” she said quietly. “I am a friend of Sir Gerhold Wentry, or, at least, I was.” It looked like she might cry again, but she composed herself. “What do you remember?”

That was a good question. What did Ethan remember? Mostly he remembered Natasha. The woman had stood over him during the fight in the street with Yori after the islander had stabbed him. The cart hit another bump, and Ethan felt pain shooting up from his stomach again. He propped up his head to look down, and Emoyen didn’t stop him this time. He was wearing a shirt to help ward off the chill of the late spring night, but it was unbuttoned halfway up from the bottom, revealing a slight scar. He had expected more based on his memory of the injury and the pain he felt.

“Sera did a good job closing the wound and keeping you alive,” Emoyen said, “but you have a lot of internal healing to do. As uncomfortable as the cart might be, lying still is your best path to healing.” Though he hadn’t said anything, Emoyen was good at interpreting body language. A byproduct of mind cultivation was that she had become slightly empathic, so after asking Ethan what he remembered and watching him examine his wound, she was pretty sure what had gone through his mind. “Do you remember anything after your injury?”

Again, Ethan could only bring up one thought from his mind. “Natasha,” he said. “She was . . . everything.”

Emoyen nodded. They weren’t sure how to prepare Ethan for the transfer they had expected, so Natasha and . . . Emoyen looked away and brought her hand to her face. She had mourned Diedre for several hours already. She was in control of her mind, but her heart ached. Natasha and Diedre had worked with Ethan to massage his sense of desire and “loosen” it from his soul. Emoyen didn’t really know what that meant, but since they expected him to be in and out of consciousness during the ceremony, they didn’t want the sudden removal of the Elemental to cause more harm than it should. Sera would have been awake and aware of what was happening, but Ethan would have likely gone into shock if they had ripped his power away. It turned out it wasn’t necessary.

Either way, the paladin could understand how Ethan would have felt Natasha’s presence near him, through him, and in him. She doubted he would be able to think of anything else but . . .

“Where is Sera?” Ethan asked. “Is she okay?”

Sera smiled at the bond the two had. Hopefully, they would make it through this, though she doubted it. The woman spent a few minutes explaining to Ethan who she was, what had happened, and where they were now. After the failed ceremony, a dozen supplicant fighters had escorted them out of the city, where they had met up with over two dozen more soldiers, and they headed out on the road to the northwest that led to Fort Royal. With an escort of 40 fighters, there wasn’t much hope of rescue or escape.

As Emoyen motioned to the men marching around them, Ethan noticed for the first time that her hands were shackled together. They were at least in front of her since she was supposed to keep Ethan alive and healthy. It would do no good if he died before they got to the temple. Then the Supplanter would just have to kill someone else to make the Elemental transfer. Emoyen had tried to convince her captures that Sera would do a much better job attending to the young man, but Quarton had only laughed at her. It had been worth a try, but looking at the despondent young woman in front of the cart, she wasn’t so sure Sera would have been more effective.

“Sera is walking a few dozen yards ahead. Natasha is walking behind. You can’t walk, so you get a cart, and it is my job to ensure you are as healthy as possible when we reach the temple in a few days.”

“So the Supplanter can kill me and take the Elemental for himself,” Ethan stated bluntly. “You were planning to take it out of me before, and I assume you weren’t going to kill me. How is that possible? Can you still do it now?”

Emoyen shook her head. “Jenn, the woman who betrayed us, was responsible for studying the process, and she said she would be able to do it once she had the source of all life inside her. It makes sense that it takes human life to experience the elements, and moving the Elementals – the source of those elements –takes a full human life. If Jenn has that source inside her, theoretically, she could expend the power without taking a life in the same way Natasha can produce fire without a match, but I doubt she will offer that assistance now.”

“But there must be another way,” he pleaded. “You might not have been focused on the process of transferring the Elementals, but you studied them more than just about anyone. You were a sage in the Elemental Order, and then you started your own religion centered around these powers; surely, there must be something.”

Emoyen shrugged. “I studied how to integrate the power into my mind and then how to use it afterward. I didn’t spend much time on how to get rid of it once I had it. I suppose, for my specialty, since the mind Elemental would become the source of all my knowledge – the source of all knowing – I would have to un-know it to lose it. Have you ever tried to forget something on purpose? To forget it, you have to think about forgetting it, and by thinking about it, you know it. It is like trying to pull yourself up by your boots.”

Ethan nodded, understanding the inherent contradiction. “What about the others?”

She shrugged. “I am only speculating, but for the life Elemental, since it is now the source of your life, any effort to remove it would end your life. Same with the body Elemental. All of Sera’s bodily functions are now driven by the elemental, including her brain, heartbeat, and muscle movement. To give that up would shut her body down.”

“But what about mine?”

This made Emoyen wonder. The heart was a tricky subject. It was really just a metaphor because the body controlled the heart. Ethan’s Elemental was his passion, his desire. “You would need to give up your desire.”

“My desire for what?”

“For everything,” she replied. “The Elemental is now the source of all of your passion and desire. In order to be able to lose it naturally, you would have to become an unfeeling, uncaring automaton. And again, desiring to lose your desire is another self-contradiction.”

“What if I found a new way to desire something without using the Elemental?”

Emoyen shrugged again. “I don’t know what that means. What if you found a new way to know something without your mind or a new way to live without life? I am sorry, but we have ventured into pure speculation at this point. I am a woman of knowledge. I can’t help you.”

The two lapsed into silence as Ethan stared up into the stars.

“What about Sera? You said she was despondent during the fight and didn’t even resist when the Supplanter’s people came. What do you know about her condition?”

Emoyen frowned. “She has lost her desire. Your friend had done a remarkable job balancing her life around her Elemental, but I’m afraid that ended with the revelations I showed her and the reality she experienced. Now she is exceedingly unbalanced.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Surely she has talked to you about how she thinks the Elementals are meant to complement each other. How the mind balances the heart, the heart balances the life, and so on.” Ethan nodded. “I’m sure you’ve sometimes felt unbalanced and acted irrationally or lost your temper.” Ethan nodded again. “Well, now she is unbalanced. Her body is so strong that all her other elements are weak by comparison.”

“But isn’t that how you and your sisters would be, each with one of the Elementals but not the others.”

“True,” she admitted. “But we had trained for it and planned to support each other. In the same way, we would make everyone else whole, we would make ourselves whole. But Sera doesn’t have that training or support. Right now, she feels like she doesn’t know anything. She has no desire for anything, and because of that, she has no will to go on living. She has seen her faith crumble before her and her friends leave her.”

“I haven’t left her,” Ethan insisted.”

“She doesn’t feel that way. Surely you have seen how jealous she is of how you interact with Natasha.”

“I don’t love Natasha.”

Emoyen managed a smile. “But because of the Elemental and who she is, you desire her in a way that Sera can’t understand. And Natasha desires you even more. It was just too much for her to handle in her unbalanced state. Add to that the loss of Sir Gerhold, and I don’t think she will recover anytime soon.”

“What do you mean? What happened to him?”

As Emoyen broke the bad news, that part of Ethan’s memory slowly returned, and he wept. As the sun began to rise behind them, they traveled in silence.

Sir Terrance Stark stood before the antique shop in the early morning, wondering about his next course of action. In the Elemental Order, he was a young paladin and didn’t outrank many other members, but he had managed to drag two recruits with him for backup. When Emoyen had not shown up at the order all day, he had gotten worried. He had expected some update on how they planned to secure the Elemental weapons. Because he hadn’t heard anything, he didn’t give a report to his superiors. If it was found out later that he knew where these weapons were and hadn’t said anything, and now they were lost, there would be severe repercussions.

Of course, he hadn’t known where they were. Emoyen had said she was taking them to a secret location and didn’t say where that was. But last night, a group of Supplanter soldiers had raided this antique shop and created quite a commotion. Local residents had complained about the noise, and the news had filtered through the city. There was no accusation of an actual crime, so the city guard reacted slowly. With so many competing religious beliefs in the town, they tended not to take sides and didn’t want to act against a group unless violence had been committed. So far, no one from the shop had leveled a complaint against anyone, and all the guard had to go on was second-hand reports from people who had been disturbed by a loud commotion, with no accurate description of what had actually occurred.

Terrance felt it was too much of a coincidence and came to investigate. His only hesitation now was that the store still said it was closed. It was long past the time of day when all the other stores in the neighborhood were open and busy, but this shop had no lights on inside and still hung a closed sign in the window.

“Are we going in?” Steven, one of the recruits, asked.

“We could try the back,” Rick, the other recruit, suggested.

“Good idea,” Terrance replied. There was no gap between this building and its immediate neighbors, so they had to go to the end of the street before finding the alley leading behind the row of shops. Terrance thought he might have to count steps to ensure they were behind the correct building, but the one they were looking for seemed obvious. The door in the back of the shop was broken and hanging open.

“Don’t touch anything,” the paladin said as he led the two young men into the dark rear of the store. Once inside, they had several choices, but a mass of dusty footprints told them that if a group of soldiers had entered last night, they had gone to the right and then down a flight of stairs. The door to the underground chamber was also hanging open. Terrance pushed through and gasped.

The room looked like a warzone. Scorch marks lined the walls and ceiling. Blood pooled beneath the body of a dead woman, and one corner of the chamber was completely caved in. “Don’t touch anything-” Terrance began to repeat but was cut off as they heard voices from the demolished section.

The three men ran over to the rubble, calling out that they were coming to help. The desperate voices became louder, urging the strong young fighters to excavate the mess before them as quickly as possible. Qualifications for becoming a paladin were rigorous, and these three were up to the task, hurling large chunks of brick, stone, and pieces of timber as if they were rooting through a simple junk pile. Soon they revealed a wriggling boot and then a hand, and the cries for help became less muffled and more urgent.

Terrance had no idea how anyone could have survived this accident but soon had his answer as he and Steven worked together to move a massive chunk of stone. Both men stood back in shock. The piece they had just rolled away revealed a large cavity within the pile where Sir Gerhold and Dame Celaina lay cuddled together. The hollow section was made possible due to a large wooden beam stretched above the two paladins. Terrance was a bit confused about how this beam hadn’t just crashed onto the couple, but after some of the dust cleared and his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw a bent human form just beneath the beam.

It was a woman, her dark skin blending perfectly into the shadowy recess, but there could be no mistake about it. She was bent over at the waist, her arms stretched out before her with her hands anchored securely on a large stack of bricks. On her back lay the wooden beam, and on top of that, tons of rubble piled up, waiting to crush anything beneath it.

“Well, come on,” Gerhold cried. “Help us out of here. She can’t hold it up all day.”

That begged the question of how long she had been in that position, but Terrance didn’t waste time asking. The three able-bodied men carefully extracted the older paladins, noticing patches of fresh blood on their clothes and trying not to injure them further. Gerhold had a bloody shoulder and favored the fingers of one hand, while Celaina limped on her left leg and clutched at an older wound on her back. Once the injured paladins were resting on the ground, over a dozen feet from the pile of rubble, the men turned back to the woman holding up a building on her back.

She looked to be in some kind of trance, barely a quiver in any of her limbs. So it surprised them all when she spoke. “I will give you my hand,” Persephone said slowly. “And then on the count of three, you will yank me out of here.”

There wasn’t room for all three of them to lean into the small cavity at once, so Terrance moved into position to reach into the hollow without putting his head beneath the mass above them. Slowly and carefully, Persephone relaxed her left arm, unlocking her elbow and then reaching it out to the waiting paladin. Terrance took the offered hand, clasping it firmly in his own and then clamping his left on her wrist. Now he did see her body shaking, and her voice quivered as she slowly counted down from three. On cue, the knight pulled with all his might. His feet were braced against two large chunks of stone, and he fell backward, heaving the woman through the air and over his head. To her credit, the former acrobat landed gracefully, somersaulting to a crouch and turning to see what she had left behind.

The moment her back left the wooden beam, the rest of the floor above crashed down with a thunderous roar. Persephone reached back to Terrance’s extended arm and dragged him away from the avalanche, saving his feet from being crushed. Everyone let out a sigh of relief and then coughed on the dust cloud that enveloped them.

As soon as it was clear everyone was relatively safe, Terrance moved to Gerhold to get a report. “What happened here?”

“I can explain later,” the older man said, gingerly getting to his feet. “Right now, we need to get back to the keep and organize a pursuit. The Supplanter has taken the Elementals. We have no time to waste.”