A/N: I know that through all of this I've sort of been ignoring the team, but I promise that I'll bring them into a more central role really soon. I just had to lay the groundwork for what's coming later in thr story. Thanks to everyone who reviewed! If you want to see something that's not here, feel free to mention it. Hope you like the chapter!


"Well," Jordan said after Sara had explained their situation "That's...interesting."

"Just interesting?" Sara raised an eyebrow

"I honestly don't know what to say to what you just told me. You sort of blindsighted me with all of it."

"I understand." She sighed and dropped her head into her hands "I mean, it took me by surprise too. I'm so confused."

"Well, you seem to have a pretty good plan in place already, so that's something at least."

"You call what we have a plan?" Sara looked up at her with a bitingly sarcastic expression "Walking to places we think are mentioned in hopes that we find the scroll before the rebels? That's not a plan; It's practically going in blind."

"You're being melodramatic."

"I am not. Do you even know where we're going?"

"You just told me, remember?" Jordan asked dryly

"Yeah, and they're dangerous. I mean, when was the last time you've been to the realms of despair? They've only gotten worse, and the people there won't be too friendly towards us. Then there's going underground with the possibility of a cave-in or being cornered in a narrow stretch of tunnel..." She groaned "We're all going to die."

"Oh stop it." Jordan smacked her hard on the back of the head "You are not going to die. You are going to find the scroll before the rebels, you'll destroy it, take back the GCM, imprison them all, and everything will be just fine. Understand?"

"You didn't need to hit me."

"I did and you know it. So are you going to stop obsessing over what might happen?"

"I don't know, alright?" Sara snapped "I don't know half the people who are supposed to be on my side, and there's a glaringly large possibility that we'll fail, or even if we find where it's hidden that I'm not the one they're talking about and we won't be able to do anything, so excuse me if I'm freaking out just a little bit."

"Just relax. You'll do a great job and you'll be fine."

"Yet you keep saying 'you' almost as if you're not planning on joining us. That doesn't exactly put me at ease since you're supposed to be fearless."

"First, I never said I was fearless. Second, I'm not sure if I want to do this a second time. The first one was hard enough for me, and I have a pretty steady thing going back on in the mortal world."

"Are we talking about your steady thing with Damien, or a stable life overall?"

"Overall, and leave Damien out of this."

"That's a factor though, isn't it?"

"Of course it's a factor." Jordan said angrily "Everything's a factor. You know what happens if I die here. I don't get to come back in the mortal realms, and I won't live forever regardless like you will. I have everything to lose here. I would think that with as much as you know about my past that you'd understand why I don't want to give up the life I've built for myself."

"Well I don't. I thought I was supposed to be your friend. You always said that you'd stick by me no matter what, and here I am asking you for a favour, and you balk. Am I just supposed to take that after all the promises you've made!?"

"Just because I'm your friend doesn't mean I have to give up my life for you."

"I just always thought that you were the one person I could trust." By this point, both women were yelling, angry tears streaming down both their faces. A few heads were turned their way, easily hearing every word exchanged.

"I am, but that doesn't mean I have to do this!"

"So are you saying that the one time I need you more than ever you're just going to abandon me!?"

"Who gave you the right to tell me what I should and shouldn't do!? You can't order me around like you can the rest of these people!"

"That's what Ruler means!"

"Am I your subject or your friend?" Jordan asked, her voice suddenly dropping. There was a slightly tortured expression in her eyes.

"You're both."

"I can't be a subject to you while still being a friend." The tears, even though they hadn't stopped, were clearly those of sadness. "And since you didn't say friend, I'm more your subject than anything."

"Jordan, you know that's not true." Sara whispered, instantly on damage control "It's just my title that makes this hard."

"If I'm really your friend, then there shouldn't be any confusion."

"There isn't."

"There is and we both know it. I would have helped you as a friend, but as a subject I choose not to." she waved a hand around herself, letting a shimmering wave cover her "Bye Sara." she said quietly, and then she was gone.

"We didn't need her anyways." Sara mumbled to herself. Looking towards the horizon, she noticed the shadowed faces of those who were watching her and Jordan. After a glare from her, they all dissapeared and she realized then, looking off into the distance and seeing nobody, that she felt more alone than ever.

-------

"You're not really as callous as you seem, are you?" Sara groaned and rubbed her eyes as she woke up. She looked around and noted in annoyance that it was still dark out and she should have still been sleeping.

"Shut up." she heard another voice say. Looking in the direction of the voices, she saw the man they had taken captive - Akona - and the two guards watching him. The one who had ordered him to be quiet - a man named Donnie who she wasn't immediately too fond of and another named Jacob who she rather liked.

"Were you talking to me or someone else?" she asked Akona, walking over to the three men.

"You." he answered pleasantly, seemingly unaware of the fact that his hands were bound and that he was being guarded.

"About what?"

"Your little fight with your friend."

"Apparently we're not friends." Sara said bitterly before realizing who she was talking to "But we're allies." she corrected defensively.

"Apparently not." he said with a sympathetic smile.

"I thought I told you to be quiet." Donnie said gruffly, glaring at him.

"You guys can take a break." Sara said to the guards, looking at Akona with a calculated neutral expression "I can handle him."

"You sure?" Jacob asked, standing up and stretching his arms

"Positive. I'm awake anyways."

"Thank you." he shot her a grateful glance and walked off with Donnie.

"I'm still watching you." Donnie said darkly, glaring at Akona. Jacob smiled faintly and then they were out of sight.

"He's something, that dark haired one." Akona said with a short laugh.

"Donnie? Yeah, he is." Sara smiled lightly and sat down a short distance from him.

"So, about your friend."

"What's your fascination with her?" Sara asked angrily

"I just think that you're making a mistake."

"Oh really? So enlighten me. What should one do in this situation?"

"I think you should make up with her."

"Do you now? And why would that be?"

"I know that you don't really want to be mad at her - that you're just acting like this to hide from everyone how you're really feeling because you think that if they see you hurt that you'll seem weak, and you're the type of person who doesn't like to be weak. That's why you two are such good friends in the first place - because she's the only one who you'll let inside your brain. She knows you, and you know her, and that's why her choosing not to join us hurt you so much." he said matter-of-factly. Sara froze and stared at him, trying once again to figure out what he was. He described her thoughts perfectly and her relationship with Jordan even more perfectly. She knew he wasn't a mind reader because she had looked for it the first time she had tested his abilities, but his knowledge of the inner workings of her mind were extremely in depth and it scared her more than a little.

"You could just ask, you know." he startled her

"Ask what?"

"Who I am. You keep trying to figure it out yourself, and by the look on your face you're not getting anything from it."

"Fine then." she said, hiding her growing discomfort "Who are you?"

"Akona from Yelago." He smiled "I'm a mage. Level nine. Born to two mages. Born in the Garilin village. What else?"

"How can you read my mind?" she asked instinctively, not thinking of time or place or anything other than the man sitting in front of her and the question at hand.

"Now that is an interesting predicament. Can you take these off?" he asked, gesturing to his restraints. She paused, studying him for a moment. With a small nod, she put her finger on them and they broke, falling from his wrists to the ground. Almost immediately after, she grabbed his palm and placed hers above it, letting a brief swirl of her magic draw a design on his skin. It would restrain him if he tried to do anything harmful, but it was more comfortable than traditional restraints.

"Thanks." he said with a small smile

"You were saying?"

"Oh, yeah. About the mind reading thing?"

"How can you do it?"

"I don't know." Sara could tell that he wasn't lying, though she didn't know exactly how or why she was so sure. "It's just...I can look at you and almost sense or...feel what you're feeling. It's like your face is a book and I can read every single page."

"So you just know?"

"Yes. It's strange because I don't know how I can tell. When you two were arguing I could almost feel the tension and emotion as if I were arguing with her myself. I don't understand how I could be so sure about something, but it goes without saying that what I see and think about you is completely correct." Sara studied his face for a moment, not looking for anything but trying to get a handle on what he was saying. She knew that he wasn't lying partially because she felt the same way he did, in the exact same inexplicable way that he had described. There was something between them that she could just vaguely feel. It felt almost as if there was a path between the two of them that allowed their perceptions and emotions to travel freely from her to him and in turn from him to her. She was confused because she had never heard about something the likes of which she felt, and since the realms were full of gossip, she would have expected to.

"You're confused." he said knowingly, meeting her eyes.

"Not at all." Sara replied smoothly. The one thing she remembered through her racing thoughts was that she still knew very little about him and that to protect herself and her warriors she needed to hide any vulnerabilities from him. Even if he knew her thoughts perfectly, he could still use them against her at any time, especially since he had been so hostile earlier that day. She knew that as much as she wanted to trust him, she couldn't until she knew who he was and what he was capable of.

"I'm very hesitant to believe that."

"Then that would be your problem alone, not mine."

"Hmm." he said with a small smile that seemed to have some hidden meaning behind it. She didn't want to find out what it was since the possibility to know him inside out with merely a look unsettled her.

"So," he continued, breaking her thoughts "Tell me about yourself."

"As the leader of a group as big as this, what makes you think that I would reveal information about myself to you willingly?

"I fascinate you, and you know that unless we're talking you won't be able to find out anything more about me. You also know that the only way I'll keep talking is if I hear what you have to say about yourself. The reason you know all of that is because you can sense my thoughts the same way I can sense yours - though only if you're looking at me, which you won't do unless one of us is speaking, and as of now that person is going to have to be you." Sara silently cursed whatever force had brought this unwillingly closeness between them. She glared at him, though she doubted that he could see it in the early morning's darkness.

"That's aggravating." She pointed out. He simply stared at her and motioned with one hand for her to talk. She shook her head and rested her chin in her palm, waiting for him to break the silence. He didn't.

As the time passed in silence, Sara couldn't help but look at the man across from her. He confounded her in a way that she had only experienced a handful of times before, and only once with another person - Grissom. Both men were the same in the sense that they were an enigma to Sara. Grissom because of his brilliant mind and strange emotional responses to everyday situations; This man simply because he was a mystery. She didn't understand anything about him from his thoughts and emotions to how he could sense hers flawlessly. She rolled over in her mind the very little she knew about him, and the things she wanted to find out. Something that kept recurring in her thoughts was the same thing that bothered her the most - how much she wanted him to know her inside and out. It was an illogical response on her part since she had been trained to keep everything from someone like him if she were in a position of power. She wanted to find out more about him so she could base her trust on something other than a strong gut instinct, but the only people truly capable of discerning between truth and lies was someone with the power of a divine. Sara mentally cursed again because she had only recently lost the goddess given power that she had received on her last big trip to the realms. The power she had been given - that with the force and strength of a divine - was only temporary and though it had worn off shortly after her first major journey had ended, it had taken time after that to fade completely. She looked up into his eyes, once again marvelling at the complexity of them, and noticed that he was also staring at her. He raised an eyebrow and nodded his head to prompt her and she sighed.

"Fine. My name is Alkina of Kantara, usually referred to as Sara, which is my mortal name. Born to two mortals in the mortal realms, brought to Kantara by a Goddess, given my ability by divines. I'm 38 in the reality, but I'll live much longer than that if I don't get killed here."

"You're immortal." he phrased it not as a question but a statement. She nodded, though she understood that he was just clarifying. He knew that she was immortal as did everyone who met her when she wasn't cloaking her state of being. It was easy to tell simply by a person's appearance whether or not they were immortal or divine, though nobody could quite put their finger on why that was.

"So, tell me more about yourself."

"I work for the Ministry of Defence and Informative Services in Yelago." he said without dropping a beat. It became clear to Sara that he trusted her much more than she trusted him. "I work in the Collective Knowledge Department."

"Espionage." she said, leaning forward in interest.

"Roughly, yes. I collect the information for my realm that needs to be collected."

"You spend much time in the mortal realms?" The air about him and the way he carried himself suggested that he didn't leave the magical realms much, and any information she could get about his day to day life would only solidify Sara's mental profile of him.

"Rarely. I prefer the freedom of being in these realms. The mortal realms are full of confusion and chaos in my eyes - everyone doing different things and striving towards different goals. I see no sense in it, so I choose not to take part. This way of life is similar for everyone, in the sense that priority one is always the protection of the realms. There is good and evil and two sides to every argument. No neutral area to confuse you like there seems to be in your realms."

"That's one way to look at it." she said, amused with his point of view. It was like talking to a child, and in a brief reflection she realized that he reminded her of a child in many ways. His face - his eyes in particular - were softened by a pure innocence that, even though she knew he had seen many things in his job as a spy, made him seem like he knew very little of the world at all.

"Why don't you trust me?" he asked suddenly, surprising her with the intensity in his voice.

"Because I can't." she replied honestly, sensing only confusion in his voice. That coupled with the innocence all his questions possessed would have made lying impossible.

"If I can trust you, how come you can't trust me?"

"I don't know who you are."

"I told you."

"You could by lying. I hear that spies are good at that."

"But I'm not. You know that. I know you can feel it."

"I also know that powerful mages can dumb down their abilities to lower their perceptible level, and that the same kind of power can make someone feel things that they aren't really feeling."

"You think I'm controlling your emotions? Deceiving you?"

"I'm sure I don't have to tell you that I don't want to think that, but it is a possibility that I have to keep in mind in order to keep everyone here safe."

"You couldn't just trust me based on instinct?"

"No." she answered solemnly, though the thought of throwing away all of her training to trust him the way she wanted to was appealing to say the least. She battled internally over the idea - one side of her mind against the other; logic against heart. It was surprisingly hard to think about him - about trusting him - and the intensity of both sides of the argument happening in her head surprised her.

It hurts me to see this happen to someone I care so dearly about, A deep male voice said, projected straight into her mind. Sara whirled around in surprise, letting blue-green fire engulf her hands.

Oh, stop. The voice said No need to be overdramatic. It clearly pains you to think about trusting this man, so you must test it. Keep in mind that this is only temporary. Very, very temporary. Just remember, during your quest, that you're not just a child of the night. Then Sara felt a surge of power overcome her, though she couldn't see it. When it was over, she looked at everything with a strange new feeling of being able to understand all of it. She knew that the power she had just received could only be from a divine, though she didn't recognize the voice or understand why someone other than Nyx or Ammariah would bother with her. With her newly heightened senses and mental ability, she realized that the power she now held would give her the ability to set a formal truth spell on Akona to tell if she could trust him or not. A smile slowly spread over her face, and she let a wave of her new strange coloured magic creep towards Akona, wrapping around his legs and snaking up his body until he was completely wrapped in it. Then, it grew tiny tendrils that seeped into his skin and travelled through his body and mind, searching for anything he could be hiding - any answers to her questions that he had kept to himself. Sara was almost shocked when the spell finished and flowed back to her, relaying the information. It told her what she had partially already known - that what he told her was the truth and nothing but. She could trust him absolutely now, knowing that even though he had the ability to, he had hidden nothing from her, even if his life had somehow depended on it.

"Now do you believe me?" he asked casually, acting as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

"Maybe." she shook her head in disbelief. Yes, she believed him, and she knew that he understood that. Even with this new trust in someone who she didn't know, some things had to remain a secret, which was something that annoyed her to no end. Everybody Sara knew or had met - even those who she trusted absolutely with her life - didn't know everything about her. Her state of being, which was uncharted territory even for her, was something that had to remain a secret from everybody. The fact that she was so latently powerful coming from two mortal parents and the fact that she had the ability to draw strength from all of the elements and chance power at her will was an indicator that she had a power level higher above most of her type. It was something that both her major Goddess, Nyx, and her minor goddess, Ammariah, had stressed since they had first met her and realized what she could do. Even if she trusted someone as absolutely as she did with few like Jordan and now Akona, she had to keep it from them, for, if they were ever captured, tortured and forced to tell all they knew about her, the consequences would be disastrous not only for her and her allies, but for all the citizens of the realms she ruled.

"You don't talk much, do you." Akona said calmly, looking at his surroundings almost as if he were bored.

"I just met you." she snapped, becoming annoyed with his inability to sit quietly while she thought. Even though he could somehow sense her feelings, he couldn't read her mind, and for that she was grateful.

"Yes, but you know you can trust me." Her annoyance vanished as his innocence shone through. He seemed to be truly confused - not stupid in any way, but perplexed to meet someone he could understand so completely but whose reasoning was so different from his own. In his mind, the moment he knew that he could trust someone absolutely, he would tell them everything and do anything for them. If Sara had asked him to bite off his own arm to help her, he would have done it simply because he trusted everything about her - every decision she made and every action she took he would believe was for the best, even if it wasn't, just because she was who she was in his mind. Sara, on the other hand, looked at things in a big-picture sense. She looked at everything logically, and with the past that she had, she had to get to know someone before trusting them, even if she knew that trust was a given and that lies weren't an option.

"I know I can trust you," she tried to explain patiently "but I don't know you at all. You're just as much a stranger to me as you were when we captured you. I don't trust like you do."

"So...where does that leave us?" Akona didn't want this person who had just become someone in his mind to resist from having a relationship with him. Even if she didn't want to be a pair the way that he wanted them to be, he wanted some sort of connection with her other than the inexplicable one they seemed to have.

"How about we just be friends first?" She suggested. He gave a mental shrug. It was better than nothing.

"Alright," he held out a hand in a greeting traditional to the magical realms as well as the mortal. "Friends it is." Sara smiled and shook it, not realizing that she had unknowingly gained a strong ally and with it more power than she ever could have imagined. Whether it was the power of numbers, the power of trust, the power of friendship or a new type of power was something that she would find out later, and that would change her life forever.


A/N: Okay, I know it was kind of a Hallmark ending, but there'll be more sooner rather than later (I hope) so thanks for sticking with it! Please R&R and hope to see you all next chapter!