A tiny beat.
It snapped him out of his meditation like an arrow to the heart.
He was utterly still.
It felt impossibly far away, and it was there for less than a heartbeat.
Almost nothing.
But it was not nothing.
Almost was almost as good as is in this realm.
That made a strange sort of sense to Vell.
Somewhere beyond, beyond the impossibility that separated their worlds, he found her.
For just a moment.
A fraction of a fraction.
His theory had been correct.
For some reason.
He had spent all that time searching for himself, trying to find some remnant of the person he had been before this realm had taken him.
And he had found nothing.
Then he had stopped looking for himself.
He had looked for Sonder instead.
And there she was.
He did not know why it had worked.
There was no obvious connection between searching for himself and searching for Sonder.
If anything, the latter should have been considerably more difficult.
Yet somehow, she had been easier to find.
Maybe because she was trying to reach him somehow?
Perhaps whatever had awakened his power had originated with her.
Perhaps Sonder had become considerably more powerful since he had seen her last.
He hoped she hadn't gone down any path she would come to regret simply because of him.
If none of those were true, then he had no idea why.
Vell had never particularly liked problems whose answers depended upon something he couldn't possibly know.
Still, he had something now.
He tried to follow the faintest impression of Sonder, reaching through layer after layer of the strange realm.
He had enough time and power to notice even the smallest detail.
And after some time, he could sometimes feel a connection.
Sometimes closer.
Sometimes farther away.
Sometimes immeasurably far.
But it never disappeared.
And every time he felt it, the connection grew stronger.
He could feel Sonder's exhaustion, though not clearly enough to understand it.
It wasn't enough to know what was wrong.
There was a heaviness to the connection.
And there was something strangely familiar about it that wasn't related to Sonder herself.
Something cold.
And every time he felt it, it made the connection feel thinner.
He began constructing possibilities for what it could be.
Interference caused by reaching so far?
Perhaps it was Sonder herself.
Her magic could have grown darker over the time he had been gone.
Perhaps she was injured.
Perhaps Vell had simply forgotten how to use magic.
It must have been a while since he had wielded anything so extraordinary.
Perhaps it was the state in which he wielded it.
Being what he was, and where he was, nothing had to work in the way he remembered it working.