"You were the one who provided the information, correct?" The man in military uniform stepped forward, the Estellia family crest displayed clearly on the insignia at his right shoulder.
"Yes," the clerk replied, visibly nervous now, and perhaps regretting how quickly he'd chased after the reward the Estellias had promised for information about Annabelle's whereabouts.
"Where is she now?" the guard asked, and behind him a full platoon of armed men had secured the perimeter around the teleportation station.
"F-Frosten," the clerk stammered.
"FROSTEN?! WHY?! HOW?!" The man slammed his hand against the counter and the wooden surface snapped clean in half.
"She came requesting two tickets, and she was with a young man who had a scarf covering his face, I couldn't make out his features," the clerk explained, his voice shaking badly now.
"AND YOU GAVE HER THE TICKETS KNOWING FULL WELL WHO SHE WAS?!" The guard grabbed him by the collar and lifted him off his feet.
"Denying service was against company policy!" the clerk stuttered.
He didn't care about any reward anymore, he just wanted to get out of this alive.
"Take this fool and detain him," the guard said, gesturing to the other uniformed men nearby.
"Understood, sir."
"Please, I didn't know, please let me go!" the clerk screamed as they dragged him away.
"Pray we find her in Frosten, or you'll lose your head for this," the guard called after him.
"Sir," an officer approached and held out a small device.
The guard turned to face him.
"What do we do about this?" the officer asked, showing him the relic. "It seems whoever has her is smart enough to freeze the tracker."
The guard sighed, because the situation was bad enough already, and now that it was confirmed someone was actually holding her it had gotten considerably worse.
"Send word to base, the shadows need to be dispatched to track them, the lord is losing patience," he ordered.
"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
Anna pulled at her hair like she was losing her mind, because she very nearly was.
"THIS IS THE TENTH CAVE! THE TENTH! WHAT ARE YOU EVEN LOOKING FOR IN CAVES AT THE NORTH POLE?!"
She was completely livid, because yes, she had done terrible things to him before, but this was something else entirely, and he was somehow continuing to torment her without even trying.
He wasn't listening to her at all, which she already knew, because he was floating lazily through the air using the flight ability he'd commanded her to maintain on him, drifting along without a care in the world while he recovered his ether, and meanwhile she trudged through ice and snow on foot and got sent into cave after cave to retrieve anything that looked useful, most of which turned out to be useless anyway.
She had fought giant cobras so long she couldn't see where they ended, enormous manticores, gigantic spiders she barely managed to put down, and after every fight he gave her barely enough time to catch her breath before sending her somewhere else, draining her ether faster than she could recover it until she couldn't feel her legs properly anymore.
"Go, there's another mountain up ahead, that should be it," he said, drifting forward through the air without so much as looking at her.
"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
She was going to lose her mind if she didn't do something soon, and now here she was inside yet another cave, huge and dark and somehow more unpleasant than all the previous ones combined.
"I have to find a way to deal with him, but he already said I'd die if he dies," she muttered, biting her nail, then yanked at her hair again. "What if I paralyze him instead, he wouldn't be dead that way, right?" She shook her head almost immediately, because he'd said she couldn't go more than twenty meters from him, which meant paralyzing him would just mean she'd have to carry him everywhere herself.
"And I can't even cast spells on him directly," she said, pressing her hands to her face.
She was completely stuck, and she'd already tried everything she could think of, because the slave contract had no loopholes she could find and no weaknesses she could exploit, and every attempt at rebellion brought pain and every thought of escape hit a wall she couldn't get past.
Her whole life she'd been the one giving orders, the one in control, the one people deferred to, and now she was crawling through frozen caves fighting monsters for someone she considered completely beneath her, and the fact that she couldn't find a way out of it was making everything worse.
But even so, her pride wouldn't let her accept that this was it, because she was Annabelle, daughter of a duke, one of the most powerful young nobles in the kingdom, and there had to be a way out of this.
The cave stretched further into the mountain, its walls coated in a thin layer of ice that caught her torchlight and scattered it in odd patterns, and strange formations hung down from the ceiling, and the air got colder the further she went.
Something about this cave felt different from the others, which had either been empty or full of monsters and nothing more, but this one had a quality to it that was harder to place, like it had been sitting here for a very long time.
Then something crawled down the wall.