Taken

As a favour to the Duke Balwan of the Northlands, Remus agreed to deliver a letter to the Duke's daughter who he had neither seen nor met before but somehow, he was sure that he would find him.

The daughter is revealed to be Rhaeya, the invisible thief.

Remus is glad that he resisted the urge to take a peak at the letter despite encouragement from Andrea because Rhaeya also reveals that the letter was booby-trapped and would've rendered him blind for a few days.

The message in the letter gives Rhaeya instructions for a secret mission that she must successfully complete with Remus's help.

"Are you going to help me or not?" Rhaeya asked.

"You haven't even told me what you need me to do yet," Remus replied.

"That's fair," Rhaeya replied. "My father and I believe that King Belsarius has a dark secret that he works hard to keep from everyone. Including from me, his fiancee."

"If you're his fiancee then why are you trying to discover his secret?" Remus asked. "Shouldn't you be on his side?"

Rhaeya rolled her eyes. "Don't be so naive, our marriage is one of necessity," Rhaeya asked. "My main goal was to maintain ties between the Northlands and the Midlands and my secondary goal was to get close enough to the King to spy on him from the inside but he keeps me at a distance and won't even summon me to his chambers to perform my wifely duties."

"I will build a camera for you with my last remaining basilisk eye but that's as far as I will help," Remus said. "I've had enough of scheming and manoeuvring to last a lifetime. I build, create and destroy things. This whole politics game isn't fun anymore."

"I can respect that," Rhaeya said. "Hopefully, this will be the last time that we see each other."

</Item Created: Hidden Camera! />

That night, after Rhaeya left, Remus tossed and turned as his dreams were bombarded with images of people he had never met and places that he had never been. Amongst the images, two stood out; an image of a large floating object in the shape of two pyramids joined together at their largest ends and of a girl with a tattoo of a green triangle on her forehead.

Also that night, there were intruders at Autumnshade that went undetected by everyone. They silently moved through corridors and passed through walls until they found what they were looking for.

They didn't come to steal any of Remus's valuables, they came to kidnap him.

Remus was rendered unconscious and taken to a lighter-than-air ship that resembled an oversized wasp.

"Is he strong enough?" one of his abductors asked. "The last one expired too quickly and forced us to find a replacement. We can't afford to land again and reveal ourselves to our prey until we are ready to strike."

"He is," the other assured him. "This one will provide more power to our ship than those other useless ones we took before. I can feel it."

He was then carried to a coffin-like enclosure in the bowels of the ship. There were 64 identical enclosures arrayed along the wall in groups of 16. As the ship powered up to take flight, Remus felt an unimaginable amount of pain. There were also screams from those who inhabited the other 63 enclosures.

Remus couldn't tell how long the pain lasted but it suddenly stopped and he felt like he was in free fall.

The ship rapidly descended from the sky above an island as it forcefully broke apart. Remus's enclosure was thrown clear of the ship as it crashed into the ground and exploded.

Now free of the enclosure, Remus blinked open and crawled past the broken glass and sat down gingerly on a rocky surface. He was battered and bruised. "Where the hell am I?" was the only thing he could manage to say before collapsing.

Three figures appeared next to his unconscious body. A man with red skin, a girl with a tattoo of a green triangle on her forehead and another girl with blue skin.

"It's just like my dream," the tattooed girl said. "But what does it mean?"

"He may be here to harm us," the red man said. "We should destroy him now while he is weak."

"Maybe he doesn't have good intentions but he is unarmed and injured. Our customs dictate that we heal the wounded and feed the hungry even if they're our enemies," the blue girl replied. "After that, we can take him to see the masters. They will know what to do."