“Look at him go,” Valeria marveled as Leon scrambled about their guest house, putting himself together as quickly as he was able.  He’d spent most of the previous night having his endurance as an eighth-tier mage put to the test by Maia and Elise, both of whom seemed utterly insatiable after spending the fifth day in a row flying around.  However, as much as he would’ve loved to spend as much of the morning as he could in bed with his two lovers, Valeria had walked in bearing word that the tailor Princess Cristina had commissioned to make the physical suit that Leon would inscribe his flight enchantments upon had finished.

Consequently, Leon had bolted up and started rushing about to try and get to the Heaven’s Eye workspace he’d been borrowing for his enchanting practice, where the suit was waiting for him.  He wanted to get to work as soon as he was able, and he wasn’t going to get distracted as he’d been the night before, when his alluring wife and captivating mate pulled him to bed with only a few words and a couple articles of discarded clothing.

“You should’ve spent enough time around by now to have seen it,” Elise murmured, half asleep, still naked beneath the bedsheets but not at all shy at having Valeria there to see her as she started to rise.  “When he gets something in his head, it’s nearly impossible to get him to focus on anything else…”

[You always seem to have a way of bringing him back around, though,] Maia whispered into their minds as she stirred, then rolled over until she was resting her head on Elise’s thigh as the red-head sat up in bed, showing about as much shame in her lack of attire as Elise did.

Elise could only smile and shrug in response as all three ladies drank in the sight of the naked Leon scrambling about in complete disarray, looking for where in the hells his clothes had landed after being almost literally torn from his body.

Valeria had been somewhat bashful when she’d first entered the room and found the three knocked out, sprawled across the bed, their limbs practically tied together, but she’d quickly overcome that embarrassment.  The first couple of times she’d walked in on Leon sleeping with either of the other two, she’d apologized and left.  However, over the past several months, she’d gotten somewhat used to it, especially since Maia and Elise didn’t much care for restraint when at home or in private, and now that Valeria was in a relationship with Leon, they didn’t restrain themselves around her, either.

Leon still scrambled about, but when the words the others were saying finally registered, he stopped for a moment to actually think about the situation, and realized just how flustered and in a rush he’d been—he could’ve just immediately dressed himself in clothes from his soul realm.  So, he did just that, and then began striding toward Valeria by the door before Elise loudly cleared her throat.

He froze and turned around just in time for the glorious view of Elise getting out of bed with a flirtatious smile, reveling in the way his eyes roamed her spectacular body.  She subtly grabbed something off a nearby writing desk as she sashayed toward Leon, but he was so distracted with staring at her that he didn’t see what she’d picked up.

“Here, husband,” she whispered, reveling in using that word as she pushed a pen and several rolls of paper into his hand.  She then kissed him on the cheek, brushed a hand against his well-built chest, and then gave him a smoldering wink that put all kinds of ideas into his head.  “Take your time,” she breathed as she pushed herself up onto her toes and leaned in to whisper into his ear.  “We’ll still be here when you get back, so focus on your work, for now.”

Leon smiled as Elise pulled back until her face was just an inch or two away from his, their eyes locked onto the other’s, the two communicating their desire for the other without needing words.  But Leon decided to use some words, anyway.

“Thank you, wife,” he softly said as he pressed his forehead against hers, relishing her title just as much as she did with his.  They locked lips again, and then Elise pulled back.  Leon, with a look of both pride and embarrassment on his face, turned around to head back outside with Valeria.

They were fairly quiet as they walked through the marble halls of the relatively small—but still objectively quite large—guest house, but as they exited the building into the front courtyard, Valeria whispered, “I’m not sure I’m ever going to get used to that…”

“Walking in like that?” Leon asked as he tried to avoid his embarrassment with the conversation by shuffling through the papers in his hand that Elise had stopped him from leaving behind.  He’d been refining his flight suit design to work on the Princess’ much more elegant and expensive clothing, and he’d taken his work home with him intending to put in another couple of hours after dinner.  Maia and Elise’s desires had altered his plans, though.

“Yeah,” Valeria replied.

Leon shrugged as he did his best to just bury his embarrassment and speak openly about this topic.  It wasn’t like he was ashamed or anything, and he and Valeria were in a similar, if slightly less physically intimate relationship, now, too.

“It’s a good thing to see how comfortable they are having you around,” he said.

“I’m sure you think so,” Valeria cheekily responded.

“It also shows how comfortable you are with them,” Leon pointed out with a cheeky smile of his own.  “Maybe one day you’ll find yourself in the same bed with them…”

“Don’t count on it,” Valeria shot back with a playful shove.  “They’re beautiful and sexy and gorgeous, but I’m not into them like that.”

Leon shrugged again.  “To each their own.  But it’s still good to see everyone getting more adjusted to what we have.”

“It is,” Valeria honestly agreed.

The two went quiet for a few seconds.  Eventually, they began to speak about the flight enchantment that Leon was going to make, and which Valeria was going to assist him with.  If they wanted to do this properly and without destroying the expensive materials that the Princess had picked out, then they had to do this right.  Plus, this was their first commissioned work, and it was for a Princess, so Leon and Valeria were feeling the pressure, even if they didn’t show it.

The process of applying the enchantment within the workshop went fairly straightforward, though.  The boots, gloves, and belt that Cristina had commissioned were works of art unto themselves, with the boots made of the finest and sturdiest leather that had been trimmed with stark white fox fur; the gloves were woven from dark green silkgrass; and the belt was a cord of silk, primarily green but accented with thin strips of what seemed like actual threads of gold.

Leon had managed to suitably alter his enchantment scheme enough to fit on the proportions of these garments without Nestor’s help, which he was quite proud of.  And with Valeria’s help, the work of inscribing these items with the flight enchantment was completed earlier than expected, clocking in at only about six hours of focused work.

At first, though, it seemed like it was going to take much longer than that, as both were extremely nervous when starting out, neither quite wanting to be the one to start applying the runes and potentially do irreparable damage.  But after Leon bit the arrow and got underway, their tensions quickly evaporated.  They had studied enchantments together for months, now, and they just fell into the same routine, each simultaneously hyper-focused on the task at hand, while being extremely aware of the other.  Working like this might’ve been too distracting for many other pairs to make work, but for them, it allowed them to work in sync with each other.  Valeria would fetch materials exactly when Leon needed them and hold an article of clothing steady as Leon applied flowing lines of runes along the seams of the boot’s leather, so that when the final enchantment was activated, they would faintly glow, giving the boot an appearance of having been trimmed in silver.  Then, when Leon started to slow in his work, his focus slipping in his mental fatigue, Valeria took over, with each continuing to swap out the roles of inscriber and assistant as needed, breaking up their work into chunks that each could easily manage.

When everything was done, the flight suit was, in a word, perfect.  Leon knew such a thing as perfection was fleeting, dependent on the perspective of the viewer, and ultimately impossible to truly achieve, but for the skills he and Valeria possessed, combined with the obvious skill of the tailor who’d made the pieces to begin with, he knew when examining them that they were as close to perfect as they could reasonably attain.

A quick battery of tests proved the flight suit to be safe and functional, and so they sent word to the Princess that her flight suit was ready and returned to the Heaven’s Eye guest house to await its pick-up.  Neither were entirely expecting the Princess herself to show up, practically breathless, less than half an hour later with about as manic a gleam in her eye as her Royal dignity would allow, her entire guard detail in tow.  Notably absent was Asiya, though Leon then remembered that she and her parents had headed over to the Samar side of the Gulf a couple of days ago.

They met Cristina in the front courtyard, and the Princess rushed over to Valeria, practically throwing herself into the silver-haired woman’s arms in greeting, while almost ignoring Leon entirely, doing no more than saying his name to acknowledge his presence.

Leon returned that with a quick nod of his head, and then silently directed her attention to a nearby table where the flight suit was waiting.

Cristina walked over, her eyes wide, her lips turning upward in a bright, cheery smile.  At first, she delicately reached out a hand to touch the gloves, almost seeming like she was afraid they’d shock her.  After a moment, though, she was pulling the gloves onto her hands, and Dame Maxima, the head of her guard detail was rushing forward.

“Your Highness, perhaps it would be better to have these things tested a lit—”

“No,” Cristina replied, not speaking loudly, but punctuating her command by freezing in place and turning her eyes back upon her knightess.  Her deep brown eyes, normally so warm and friendly, were ice cold, and though Cristina was only second-tier, and Maxima was sixth, it was the knightess who shrank back.

Leon watched in awe as Cristina put the flight suit on.  She was the descendent of the Bull Kings, cut from the same cloth as Trajan, and she’d more than showed that off over the past couple of months.  The same young, eminently curious young woman that Leon had helped escape from the Royal Harem more than a year ago was still there, but now she had found some steel to reinforce her will with, commanding attention and loyalty among her followers just as Trajan had done.

But it was her curiosity, not her steel will, that seemed to be propelling her into putting on the flight suit without waiting around for anything else, though Valeria did step in to reassure the Princess’ guard detail that the suit had been tested and was safe enough to use.  That calmed them down a bit, but then the Princess activated the flight suit as soon as she’d put it on.

Immediately, she was catapulted several dozen feet into the air, terrifying her bodyguards who began to shout in alarm, while Leon and Valeria were practically pushed aside as the knightesses swarmed the ground beneath the Princess, ready to catch her if she were to fall.

But Cristina didn’t seem at all like she wanted the help.  Instead, she cried out in joy as she pushed more of her power into the suit, causing her to rise even higher upon a jet of air that sent the dust and dirt below scattering about the courtyard, loose clothes flapping, and the Princess herself rocketing into the air.

‘Shit,’ Leon thought, knowing that even if his enchantments were powerful and efficient, they wouldn’t make up for Cristina only having a second-tier level of power.  With how high and how quickly she was rising, she was going to run out of power before she knew it and would come crashing back to the ground from a height more than great enough to inflict serious harm, if not outright death.

The Royal Guardswomen lost their minds in concern and horror as their charge left them behind, flying further away from the guest house and over the city, with Maxima in particular shouting and begging for the Princess to come back down.  The knightess then turned her attention toward Leon and Valeria, hoping they could do something.

But Leon and Valeria were already moving completely in sync.  Valeria had her flight suit donned and she was taking off to follow the Princess, while Leon’s body was growing, twisting, and changing before everyone’s eyes.  So drastic was his transformation, and so shocking was the sound of the tearing of his clothes, that it silenced the guardswomen long enough for Maxima to get control back and to start shouting orders.

Neither Valeria nor Leon stuck around to hear them.  Valeria had already taken off in pursuit of the gleefully reckless Princess, while with a mighty beat of his enormous wings that knocked over several of the weaker members of Cristina’s guard detail, Leon took off after her.

He was an eighth-tier mage, and in his Thunderbird form, his command over wind magic was more than considerable enough to hurl him higher and faster than either of the other ladies.  And it seemed that was a good thing, because the reality of her situation hit Cristina as soon as she looked straight down, causing her joyous laughter to catch in her throat as, in her panic, she cut off her flow of magic power to her flight suit and began to fall.

With the roar of the wind in his ears, the screams of terror from the knightesses below, and the frantic screaming of Valeria as she tried to catch up to the Princess, Leon accelerated, pushing his power over the air as much as he could to catch up.

It only took a few seconds, but those few seconds felt like half a lifetime.  Leon thundered past Valeria, almost knocking her out of the sky in his bid to reach the Princess.  He didn’t worry too much about his silver-haired lover, for at the fifth-tier, it was hardly more than an inconvenience to her.  He then braked hard as he approached Cristina, who’d flown surprisingly high up and far away from the guest house in her short flight.  It was almost nothing to him to turn in the air and start falling with Cristina right next to him, matching her speed and angling himself closer.

He didn’t pull out of the fall until he could feel the Princess grabbing onto his feathers and holding on for dear life.  Then, he adjusted his position so that Cristina was right between his shoulders, leveled off, then spread his wings.

He and the Princess came to a gentle landing in a small grassy park within the Heaven’s Eye enclave, and with hardly a chirp, he bent low and let Cristina easily slide off his back.

Only then did he realize that he was in pain—he dimly remembered a white-hot flash of pain during the landing like someone had stabbed him with a needle, but now it was just a dull, annoying throb.  And turning around, he immediately saw the cause: Cristina fell to her knees in the grass, the widest smile on her face as she stared up at the sky, while clutched in her fingers was a massive brown feather the size of her entire arm, her fingers locked around it so tightly that her knuckles were completely white.

‘Ow…’ Leon bitterly thought as Valeria landed right next to them and the knightesses led by Dame Maxima sprinted over to secure their Princess.  There were a few other onlookers, too—all Heaven’s Eye personnel who were in the middle of walking through the park as they went about their day in the guild’s complex.  They stared in wonder and confusion at the sight before them, at a Princess who’d fallen out of the sky on the back of a gigantic raptor.

Valeria, seeing that Cristina was seen to by the knightesses of her guard detail, took a moment to conjure an opaque wall of ice to cover Leon as he shifted back into his human form and dressed himself.  He considered himself fortunate that he hadn’t been wearing clothes he particularly cared about when he did transform, and he vowed to look into some possible solutions to the problem of destroying all of his clothing every time he wanted to change into his Thunderbird form.

When he was dressed, Valeria shattered the ice wall into snow to melt in the relative heat of the Ariminium afternoon, and she and Leon walked over to the Princess.

“Are you OK?” Valeria called out as they approached.

Cristina, instead of responding verbally, disentangled herself from the throng of guards and threw herself into Valeria’s stunned arms, laughing the whole while.  She seemed energetic and upbeat, but Leon could see a few traces of fatigue in the corners of her eyes—she was filled with joy, and that gave her physical energy, but she’d likely used a significant amount of magic power during that flight.

“I’m better than OK!” Cristina shouted.  “This is amazing!  We HAVE to go on a flight together, sometime!”

As she shouted her last statement, she leaned back while still in Valeria’s arms, and gave the silver-haired woman a glowing look of expectation, locking their gazes together.

Valeria clearly didn’t know what to say, and after an awkward moment, carefully extricated herself from Cristina’s embrace.

“I think… we might be able to manage something,” she said.  “You can’t do anything like that again!  You could’ve died if you’d flown too high to safely get back down!”

Valeria continued to reprimand the Princess, and in stark contrast to how Dame Maxima had done so only a moment ago, Cristina actually shrank back, looking rather chastened by it.  But when Valeria gave her a more concrete acceptance of going out flying together later, the Princess’ face lit up like the dawn.  But then Valeria leaned in to whisper something into the Princess’ ear, and Cristina stiffened as she slowly turned her head to look at Leon.

Then, she relaxed and sauntered over to Leon.  “Thank you for your assistance, Leon,” she said with the perfect poise and demeanor that would be expected of a Princess, acting as if Leon had merely passed her a stack of papers or something else of no consequence rather than saving her from potentially serious injury or death.

Not that Leon cared about the apparent snub.

“Don’t worry about it,” Leon replied with a dismissive wave of his hand.  “Just, uh, don’t go expecting another ride like that.  I’m not a horse…”  He gestured to the huge feather Cristina was still clutching onto which hadn’t disappeared or changed at all with his return to human form, and the Princess suddenly went beet-red.

“Ah, I apologize for that, pulling this didn’t hurt, did it?” she said with genuine embarrassment as she held out the feather for him to take.

Leon seriously considered taking it back, but he could see as the Princess’ eyes darted back and forth between his face and the feather, she didn’t want to give it up.  To an extent, he could understand why: it was a beautiful shade of healthy brown, and the tiny flecks of gold interspersed throughout it had it sparkling in the sun.  It even still carried a hint of his magic within it—not enough to pose much of a threat to anyone or really be useful in any way, but enough, he estimated, to keep the feather looking healthy and freshly-plucked for many years.

He extended his hand, but instead of reaching out for the feather, he just pushed the Princess’ hand back to her.

“You can keep it,” he said.  “Consider it a reminder and trophy for having survived a dangerous endeavor.”

The Princess smiled and clutched the feather to her chest.  “Thank you, Leon,” she said without a hint of antipathy in her voice.  “I didn’t mean to pluck it, I just—”

Leon interrupted her with another wave of his hand.  “Don’t worry about it.”

“Your Highness,” Dame Maxima whispered from behind Cristina.  Both the Princess and Leon directed their attention to her, who then nodded toward a handful of Heaven’s Eye personnel hurriedly escorting a Legion Tribune and several Centurions toward their group.

Cristina composed herself, the knightesses got on her flanks, and Leon and Valeria quietly stepped aside, knowing this to be a group of messengers with some Legion business for the Princess.  Neither one listened in on the conversation, seeing it as none of their business, and instead passed a few details they’d noticed during Cristina’s flight regarding the function of her flight suit that they could use to further refine the design.

They got deep enough into their conversation that when Cristina suddenly ran over to Valeria, a look of horror on her face, it took both of them by complete surprise.

“Val!” she hysterically shrieked.  “They took her!  They arrested her!”

She continued in that vein a little longer, but her emotional state had collapsed enough in these few seconds that she grew more and more incoherent with every word.  Eventually Valeria grabbed the Princess’ shoulders—ignoring the reproachful looks that the Princess’ guards gave her—and shouted, “Slow down, Your Highness!  What happened?!”

Cristina didn’t immediately answer, and the look on her face betrayed the fact that she was barely holding back her tears—tears that, to Leon’s eyes, seemed both of fury and terror.

From behind the Princess, Dame Maxima informed Leon and Valeria, “Dame Asiya and her parents have been arrested across the Gulf.”

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