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[indent][indent][indent][color=gray][sub][right][color=92278f][b]Location:[/b][/color]The City of Thorinn, Aetheria[/right][/sub][/color]
[hr]Seele didn’t like the implications of what Artemis said, but they were fair. She didn’t think it was an accident, personally—it was too targeted, too…intentional—but the idea that they might be looking for a [i]what[/i] rather than a [i]who[/i] had not escaped her. Part of her hoped for it, even. Some kind of intelligent creature going after mages would ease her conscience over actual people doing this to each other. But this wasn’t about her conscience, and her mind was still set on this being the work of someone awful. 

Sif explained it well enough. Clever one, her, good head on her shoulders and a good track record as a player. Probably. Seele had never looked too closely into those things, but she’d made it through that dreadful dungeon at the start so that counted for a lot. 

[color=DD9C00]“Seele, you're out of your damn mind.”[/color]				[color=#2E2C2C][i]you sleep too much[/i][/color]

Fair point, she probably was, but she listened anyway. Siegfried was a sweet boy, well-intentioned if a bit excitable, and even when he was nervous he still managed to speak sense. What [i]if[/i] things went wrong? She didn’t want to think about it, but the hard truth was that they didn’t really know how much time these missing people had. Failure here could mean another day, or week, or month they didn’t have, or worse, it could put whoever was really behind this into a panic. Who knows what they’d do to the victims then. 

[color=92278f]“If this doesn’t work, you’ll deliver all of this theory to the fraternity, or the queen—someone who can do something about it—and hope they’re fast enough to stop it before anyone else gets taken.”[/color] 

She’d dodged his real question, and not artfully either. The reality was that she didn’t know what to say. Was she afraid? It was impossible to think of things going wrong without imagining the worst case scenario, and the thought of being tortured to death, or left to rot in a cell, or any number of other terrible things [i]did[/i] scare her. But they had to do something, and while it might have been hypocritical of her to insist on putting herself in harms way when she knew that, had anyone else proposed to do it, she would have fought them tooth and nail not to, it also just…made sense. It was practical, in a way she couldn’t explain to them. 

After all, who better to take the risk than someone with literally nothing to lose? [right][color=#2E2C2C][i]promise me[/i][/color][/right][color=92278f]“I trust Graves,”[/color] Seele said, rounding back to Siegfried’s question, and once more she shot the blood hunter a smile. [color=92278f]“And we can’t get much more south than Thorinn anyway.”[/color][/indent][/indent][/indent]