"Well. There go all our best hopes for getting answers quickly."

His wife is alive, he's not apologizing. 

"We'll still find the phylactery. Eventually." 

"Yeah."

"...I realize that a dysjunction probably took care of it, but I would really like to go somewhere very far away and be checked over very thoroughly for any remaining enchantments now."

They can do that (and detect thoughts on the baby, just to make sure it's unharmed). 

It seems so. That, at least, is a relief.

Naima wakes up in complete darkness, in a chamber where the air smells stale. She tries a light cantrip, which fails, as if she hadn't prepared it. She's not wearing any of her gear - no headband, no robes, no belt, no haversack full of potions and items, no ring of sustenance and invisibility on her finger, no wedding bracelet to summon Elie to her side. She is, at least, wearing clothes this time, which is arguably an improvement over the first time she died and woke up in one of her clones. She doesn't remember dying. If she did, that means -

She puts a hand to her stomach. Flat, smooth, unmistakably empty.

Elie? she thinks, but no one answers. Because she died, and the permanent telepathic bond is on the dead body, probably. Obviously.

She can, when she thinks about it, faintly feel that Wishbone is reading something. Something calm, absorbing. There's no worry over the empathic link - at least not at first, not until she begins to feel feelings that mirror her own. Wishbone will know something's wrong, then. And for now... she has to get out of wherever her clone has been taken to. She tries a teleport to Sothis, which ought to be in range. Once again, nothing happens, as if the spell hasn't been prepared. Maybe she managed to lose all of them upon coming back to life, this time.

She finds her way out of the chamber by feel, and then along the hallways, out into the outer crevice, until at least she can see the sunlight peeking through the top. There isn't much of it. It'll be setting, soon. She can't prepare a fly spell - or any other spells - without access to her familiar, who is hundreds of miles away. She sets to work climbing, which is very difficult - for all her power, Naima is still not physically strong. By the time she reaches the surface, it's night. Shawil's body is gone.

The others should be here, by now, if they were going to come back for her. They can't have missed it, if she died, but she's admittedly very confused about what she's doing here, and not safe in the demiplane where the party keeps their clones. It... suggests that the lich was able to make a clone without her knowledge, which she knows is possible because Shawil had it done once, and it's not something that will immediately occur to anyone.




In the morning, she walks to the village. It's a few hours. She heals everyone in the village who is currently sick, charging hardly anything for it. She buys passage to Quantium, in a cart - they have no wizards to teleport her, and no sendings to contact the city. That takes a week, and by the end of it she is driving herself crazy by calculating how many resurrections and reincarnations and ordinary healings the world has gone without in that time. At night she cries, thinking of her baby. She reminds herself that Elie won't allow the child to grow up in the Boneyard, that they will think of something as soon as he's able to find her.

He should have found her by now. He should have discerned her location and found her. 

When she reaches Quantium, she goes to the church of Abadar and asks to make a withdrawal - which, of course, they grant her, because Naima Cottonnet's savings with the Church of Abadar are so large that major projects are funded by lending them out, so large that they've apologetically explained to her that it would be impossible for her to receive all of them back at once. Enough for a teleport, though - that's easy. She teleports in to Absalom, and from there it's easy to find a teleport to Diobel, where it's another forty-five minutes to Catherine's old estate and the recently rebuilt and expanded wizard tower. She can feel Wishbone getting more stressed out. Probably that's just because she's getting more stressed out the closer she gets to the house.

Something's wrong. Not with the house, or with the grounds, which are as she left them. But no one is rushing to see her. No one is concerned. Nothing is out of place, except for her.

She exits the carriage, walks up to her front door, takes a deep breath, and... knocks.

A minute later, the housekeeper informs Elie that his wife is at the door, and does not seem entirely well.

Which is odd, seeing as she's supposed to be in Katheer and hasn't told him otherwise. 

Naima? Is something wrong?

She is, indeed, in Katheer. 

Not particularly, why do you ask?

I've just been informed you're at the front door and don't look at all well. 

Well, I can't say that I can see the front door from here. Do you need help?

I hate to take you away from your work, but coming so soon after the incident with the lich, it might be safer not to take chances. Meet us outside? 

He tells someone to tell Rasima to take the children on some sort of excursion. Now, please. He goes downstairs to greet his "wife." 

Coming. Invisibly.

And here she is, looking stressed out and exhausted and without any of her magic items, and - otherwise very much like herself.

She waits a second to see if Elie is going to hug her, or otherwise demonstrate any abject relief that she has been found after a week of fruitless searching. Apparently he's not. She - tries not to look upset, but Elie knows her well enough that this isn't going to be terribly effective at actually hiding anything. That's not really why she's doing it, anyway. She would like to not immediately accuse him of anything when he probably has some sort of explanation.

"What happened?"

No visible illusion magic – no magic of any kind, in fact – but that can be disguised. It's obvious at this point that they're dealing with something much subtler and stranger than they'd supposed. The mannerisms, he notes abstractly, are very accurate. He hasn't seen Naima so distressed in quite some time. For a brief, mad moment, he wants to comfort her – but these days he doesn't have much patience for people who take their greivances with him to the house where his children live. 

"I think you'd know that better than I." 

She looks extremely frustrated for a moment, and then swallows it, at least partially. "All right, then. One week ago, I woke up in the complex where we fought the lich, absent baby, magical items, and spells. Unlike you, I cannot prepare or cast spells without access to my familiar, so I physically crawled out of the cave, hiked my way back to the village, healed everyone in it for pocket money, spent an entire six days riding in a maddeningly slow cart to get to Quantium on the off chance that it would take you longer than that to find me, which it did, at which point I made a withdrawal from my bank account and was able to hire a teleport to Absalom and then to Diobel, where I really hoped that you would be waiting with something resembling an explanation."

Okay, so maybe she's not very good at swallowing her frustration. She's trying.

It would be odd for anyone to attempt to gain his confidence by pretending to be his wife, when his wife – as all the world knows – is alive and perfectly well. Probably some failsafe set up by the lich before he died, then. Oddly sophisticated if so. Might even believe herself to be real. 

Are you reading her mind?

And then, to "Naima" – "Well, one of us must be mistaken. A week ago, you left the complex with me."

I haven't been. I can. Give me a moment.

Well, that explains some things. And is extremely concerning.

- it is odd that she woke up in the complex. If she woke up in a clone, it suggests that the lich had access to her. But - it shouldn't be possible to duplicate a person at all, and most ways of faking it shouldn't duplicate the abilities of an archmage - but someone must have, if no one has noticed yet -

"Has she been raising people?"

...the confusion is honest. She believes she's me. Or, well, she's trying to determine which of us she believes is me.

Oh no. 

Gently, then. "Yes. She's been on her usual healing circuit. She – she thinks you're telling the truth." And then he remembers, because his Naima would need to know – "the baby is safe."

- on the one hand that's a good thing and on the other hand it means that she really is - 

" - but that doesn't make sense! I can heal! I have an empathic link with Wishbone!"

– Wait, what?

She drops invisibility. 

"...he's been worried about me. It would explain some things if he's been sensing your emotions. I agree that I don't know how that could have happened."

"I should check in on Drosselmeyer. Immediately. If the lich – we should finish collecting his notes, we should find out his name – has a way to effect your link with Wishbone, he might have done something to Dross."