When Leon imagined his group leaving Akhmim, he imagined that it would be quite extensive, but when he finally laid his eyes upon the convoy that Emilie had arranged, he found that his imagination had been rather limited, even with his experience in marching with tens of thousands Legion soldiers.

The convoy stretched for more than a mile, with most people boarding huge carriages that could bear a dozen people in luxurious comfort.  These carriages were in turn pulled by teams of six enormous white horses almost too big to comfortably ride by anyone.  At the front and rear of the extensive column were large units of chariots, and each with teams of four operating them.  Interspersed at regular intervals throughout the convoy were additional chariot teams—Leon knew them to be the convoy’s guards, for even though every chariot and carriage was prominently stamped with the golden seals of Heaven’s Eye, some people had more greed than sense and might make moves against them as they traveled.  He took comfort in the fact that their convoy had himself, Maia, Damien Makedon, and Xaphan with it, all eighth-tier equivalent beings, making the power at their command more than enough to ensure safety against essentially all conventional threats.

Leon and his family had an entire carriage to themselves, while his retinue would travel just behind him in a carriage of their own.  To Leon’s understanding, they would largely spend their time quietly meditating and focusing on their training, but Leon wasn’t going to be too strict with their training while on the road.  Already, he was dreading the long ride, though he was pleasantly surprised to find that the carriages had been extremely well-enchanted, perfectly controlling the temperature within and absorbing every bump in the road with ease, ensuring the most comfortable journey south that Leon could’ve ever asked for.

As his family was boarding their carriages, Leon found that Justin Isynos was riding in the carriage just ahead of theirs.  When he saw the man, Leon found that he was staring at the horses pulling the carriages with a look of such nostalgic longing that Leon couldn’t help but approach and ask him about it.

“I had horses just like these not too long ago,” Justin had told him.  “Saternan horses, they’re called.  Mightily expensive; I spent a significant amount of the resources given to me upon my arrival on this plane to purchase some.  Incredibly impressive beasts, and in such numbers…”

“They certainly look impressive,” Leon remarked, feeling somewhat awkward about speaking with Justin even though he initiated the conversation.  But he agreed with the man, these horses were quite beautiful.  Each one seemed to be greater than the second-tier, and Leon could even sense a few that were as high as the fifth.

“The extravagance of this trip boggles the mind…” Justin murmured.  “Of all the carriages, all the wealth that Lady Emilie is traveling with, those horses are by far the most ruinously expensive part…”

Leon slowly nodded, unsure how to respond.  So, at the first opportunity he found to bail on the conversation, he took it, leaving Justin as politely as he could—Anzu was being loaded into his family’s huge carriage, and the griffin wasn’t too thrilled about it.  So, Leon walked over and let the griffin stay outside for a while.  Even if Anzu would spend most of the trip in a carriage with him, the griffin hadn’t gotten much exercise in a while, so Leon arranged for him to travel alongside the carriage instead, attended by at least one of his beastmasters at all times.  Leon himself chose to ride the first couple of hours on Anzu to spend some more time with his griffin.

It took a while for the convoy to get moving, requiring a great deal of coordination and planning.  Making matters more complicated was the fact that they took on new traveling companions for their journey to Occulara, for in the course of Emilie’s investigation into Talal, she found sufficient cause to have him removed from his post.  Leon wasn’t too privy to the details, but Emilie informed him that Talal regularly abused his position.  Not enough to have him expelled from Heaven’s Eye entirely, but he was to be recalled to the Heaven’s Eye headquarters for judgment.

Consequently, about a hundred people were added to their convoy, representing Talal himself and his household.  Leon hadn’t seen much of him since the introductory meeting.  He got the distinct impression that the Samarid was avoiding him; an impression that only grew stronger when he noticed Talal staring at him briefly many carriages down the line, and hurriedly stepping into his when he realized Leon had noticed his gaze.

Trusting that Emilie had Talal in hand, Leon put the former city manager out of his mind and focused instead on greater things.  After riding for a couple hours, he stepped into his carriage where Elise, Maia, and Valeria were relaxing.  Leon was tempted to join them, but he’d spent the past few days relaxing, and his hands were getting restless.  So, he instead laid down and cast himself into his soul realm, where he spent the rest of the day practicing his enchantment skills under Nestor’s experienced supervision.

When he emerged back into the physical world, he found that the convoy had traveled a staggering hundred miles.  He knew how far they had to go and the timeframe they were planning to do so in, but to see it happen was another thing entirely.  At that rate, they’d finish this leg of their journey in only about a month at the latest.  Less, if they weren’t sidetracked.

Unfortunately, after a few days, it became clear that their journey wasn’t to be completely without excitement.  During those few days, Leon largely spent his time studying enchantments, reading up on the basics of smithing, and further preparing himself to learn the new art by having Xaphan tutor him further in fire magic.  So, while he wasn’t able to see it for himself, he was informed that after they left the Samar Kingdom, they started encountering destitute refugees fleeing the regions ahead of them.  It was hardly a great diaspora, but there were enough that it was becoming clear something was going on.

Given that, this far north, they were skirting the border of the Cortuban Alliance to the east and the Halcyon Federation to the west, Leon dearly hoped they weren’t going to get caught up in some kind of border dispute between the two states.  The road they were following swung eastward soon, leading further into the more populated—and thus, safer—regions of the Alliance, but that wasn’t for several more days of travel.

Leon counted them lucky that his fears were less dramatic than a war—at least, on this side of the Alliance.  After getting some more information from the passing refugees and a few passing trade caravans, they found out that it seemed that the war the Alliance was fighting with Asturias in the mountains far to the east was the primary problem the Alliance was facing, and it was causing many more issues out in the poorer border regions, for the war was eating up so many of their resources that they weren’t able to properly pay their soldiers patrolling the western border with the Federation.  Those troops, unable to get support from their commanders in the Alliance, then turned to raiding the villages and towns they were ostensibly supposed to be protecting.

The issue had been going on for long enough that now people were fleeing these border regions for places that were better protected.

Emilie, when meeting with Leon and the rest of the convoy’s leadership to discuss the matters, was confident that they would be untouched.  Damian Makedon, the man who’d been sent from Occulara to ‘investigate’ her, had apparently gotten through the area with no trouble on his trip north, but after she brought this up, Damian himself, who was part of the convoy, disagreed.  He’d moved with a small contingent of relatively elite Heaven’s Eye guards.  They’d moved quickly and with obvious force.  He was worried that these unpaid soldiers who’d turned to banditry in desperation, might just be desperate enough to try raiding their convoy before they reached the safer regions of the Alliance.

Leon shared those worries, and during the following day, he hopped onto Anzu and took to the skies, scouting out ahead and around their convoy with both physical and magic senses, searching for any sign of imminent attack.  He was tempted to shift into his Thunderbird form, but he decided to save the power until something truly warranted its use.

He was rather dismayed to see his initiative pay off.  He’d hoped Emilie was right and that no one would dare try anything against the Heaven’s Eye convoy, but he detected no less than five small groups of heavily armed, though lightly armored men shadowing their convoy from the hills and sparse forests they were passing through.  Though their equipment was largely in tatters and clearly in need of good maintenance, Leon could see that all of these people following them wore hard, determined expressions, like they’d already experienced the worst that the hells had to offer, and were set on surviving their current hardships, no matter what.

Flying down to the convoy, he met with Emilie and the rest of the convoy’s leaders, telling them what he’d seen.  The guards were put on alert, and when Leon took back to the skies, it seemed the extra caution Heaven’s Eye showed spooked their followers, for they’d disappeared into the hills.

He didn’t take that to mean they were gone, though, and so when he flew back down again, he remained alert and on guard with his magic senses projected, just in case.

But nothing more happened for the rest of the day.  The convoy sped into a fairly sizable city of about twenty thousand with sturdy, if simple, walls.  The farmland that surrounded the city seemed reasonably peaceful, so many let themselves relax, safe in the knowledge that even for soldiers so desperate that they were resorting to banditry, Heaven’s Eye was still an untouchable existence.

But Leon wasn’t so ready to relax.  He’d seen just how many scouts were out keeping an eye on them, and when it was clear that the convoy was raising its defenses, they disappeared—they didn’t run away, terrified and lacking all semblance of order, they’d vanished.  Leon took that to mean that they had methods of hiding in their surroundings that he couldn’t quickly penetrate.  He was a man of the forest, and the outdoors was where he was most comfortable, but magic senses and his skills as a ranger weren’t infallible, and having even just a few warded camps or other sorts of safe places would be all someone would need to hide from him, especially in unfamiliar terrain.

Leon couldn’t sleep that night, no matter that Elise, Maia, and Valeria did their best to wear him out, worried as he was about this new, unknown threat.  So, early that morning, as the convoy was getting ready to leave the city, Leon rounded up his retinue and made sure that they were ready for violence.  They could stay relaxing in their Heaven’s Eye carriage, but they had to be fully armed and armored and ready to drop everything and join him if he needed them.

He just hoped that he was being needlessly paranoid.

---

“… they’re moving damned fast, though,” the buck-toothed bandit said as he ran his greasy finger over the crude map that had been spread out across the table.

“The mountain of silver each of those horses must be worth…” another bandit whispered from behind him, the others in their group practically able to hear him salivating at the thought.

Not that anyone could blame him; they were living in a hole in the ground that one of their leaders had dug into the side of a heavily-wooded hill only a couple of years ago.  It was meant to be a fallback point and storage chamber for emergency supplies in the case of an invasion by the Halcyon Federation that might penetrate their border defenses.  In the worst case scenario, they would’ve used this place, and the many others like it, as a base for lightning-quick hit-and-run attacks on their enemy’s supply lines.

Now, these places were used as camps from which they could monitor the heavily-traveled road cutting through the Cortuban Alliance and leading up into the northern Kingdoms.  It was a critical supply line for anyone trying to trade with Samar, Asturias, the Bull, or Talfar, and as such, was supposed to be heavily patrolled and defended…

…by them.

They hadn’t been paid by the Conclave in years, and they’d received no supplies in almost as long.  That meant that anyone who traveled along these roads was fair game, for the alternative was to starve and die like abandoned animals.

They hadn’t been doing this for long—only about a year or two—but many of their number had already deserted after their first few raids.  Most of the former soldiers didn’t want to be bandits, but when left with no other choice, they participated in the initial raids willingly.  Once they were fed and had a little coin, though, their number began to melt away into the night, disappearing without so much as a goodbye.

Those that remained were more dedicated to their new lifestyle, and there were quite a few of them.  Twenty-thousand men had been assigned to guard the border along the northwestern corridor, the only real route that Halcyon could take to invade the Alliance.  The bandits that those men had become now numbered less than half that number, though not all remained unified under one leader.

Those affiliated with the men in this cave numbered almost four thousand and were spread all across the safehouses that watched the road.

“Careful,” rumbled a deep voice from the head of the table the map had been spread across, “you don’t want your eyes to outgrow your stomach.  This is Heaven’s Eye; they don’t leave their people out undefended, and a group this size will be well-defended, even more than we’ll be able to see.”

Their leader was a sixth-tier mage, a veteran of many battles in the east.  He’d been assigned to the west for his meritorious service to the Conclave, but even with their change in circumstances, he was still widely respected among the former soldiers.  When he spoke, even those few of the same tier listened—though how much longer that might continue, he couldn’t say.  Already, some of his former immediate subordinates had begun to grow more assertive as military discipline among their ranks broke down.

He was a tall man, and handsome, with short blond hair, a heavily-muscled and perfectly-toned frame.  His most striking feature, however, was his eyes—a steely gray that shone like silver in the light, and constantly seeming unfocused, as if his attention was on something a thousand miles away.

“We don’t need to kill them all,” another bandit said, his look appearing almost the polar opposite of their leader’s.  He was similarly handsome, but his lips were always turned upwards in a perpetual smirk, as if he regarded everything he ever saw as one giant joke.  “We just need to steal some of their horses.  Maybe some of their women, too; it’s been too long since we last had some fine pussy to sate ourselves with.”

This strategy meeting was attended by some six or seven dozen other bandits—former captains of their old military regiment—and more than half raised their voices in a great cheer of support.

The bandit leader could only sigh.  This was their life, now, and he had to see to his people first and foremost.  And as he glanced around the room and saw the greed in his people’s eyes, he could see that if he didn’t order this assault, then he’d be facing a mutiny soon after.

He hated it.  He made a point to avoid Heaven’s Eye where possible.  They weren’t as powerful as the Central Empires, but the Imperials stayed in their own lands, which made Heaven’s Eye the most powerful group that they could possibly encounter.  And he knew better than most that they defended their own.

‘At least I might be able to maintain order if I go with them,’ the bandit leader thought, unable to shake the feeling that this was a terrible mistake.

“What do we know of those within the convoy?” he asked the buck-toothed bandit, the captain of the scouts that kept an eye on the roads for targets worth their time.

“Their guards are mostly relegated to their chariots at the front and rear.  A few more are interspersed throughout, and some of the more important carriages have guards of their own, but the line is long and their guards can’t be everywhere.”

The smirking bandit laughed.  “Using chariots on our roads?!  With the size of those carriages, those at the front and back won’t be able to reinforce their people without dismounting if we hit them in the middle while they’re moving through the hills!  And we’ll have more than enough time to take what we want before they do!”

Another great cheer rose up from the bandits, and their leader frowned in thought.

‘This might actually be a good thing,’ he thought to himself, a plan forming in his mind.  He could see the way that things were blowing—with those most pre-disposed for banditry being the vast majority who didn’t desert after their first few raids, his more discerning attitude wasn’t doing him any favors.  The smirking bandit would likely try to usurp his position within a few months if things kept going the way they were.

And here was a brick wall that the smirking bandit and those he seemed to speak for more and more were all-too willing to hurl themselves head-first against.

“All right, here’s the plan,” the leader said, and the room went quiet as he spoke.  For just a moment, he allowed himself a moment of pride to swell within him, for as much as he was losing their hearts, he still maintained enough of their respect to get them to listen in these moments.

He then pointed to the map and began spelling things out for his less-than-educated fellows.  Given its size, the Heaven’s Eye convoy had to stick to the main road with no deviations, and that made them predictable.  His people, if they ran through the night, would be able to set up an ambush further ahead, and take them unawares.  If they were lucky, then they could get away with all the women and horses they could snatch.  If they weren’t… then they wouldn’t be his problem to worry about anymore.

It shamed him greatly to treat his people like this, but how much longer until they made it clear they weren’t his people?  He couldn’t say.  He could only help those of his people who weren’t willing to bring the wrath of the heavens down upon them.

When the silver-eyed leader was finished, the smirking bandit’s titular smirk thinned, and he looked at the leader with suspicion.

“Are you sure about this plan?” he asked, his tone both questioning and tempting.  “This way, you’ll miss out on all the fun.  I’ve heard that there are some true women of quality riding in those carriages…”

The leader waved his hand.  “I have no such problem getting pussy that I have to force it.  I understand that the rest of you hopeless whoresons aren’t so blessed, and I’m not so greedy as to take away this golden opportunity.  I’ll provide the distraction, the rest of you go wild—but stick to the timetable!”

Another great cheer went up around the cave, this time from just about every single one of the bandits.  The smirking bandit just shook his head, but he said no more.  Only a few minutes later, the meeting dispersed, and the captains returned to their own subordinates to explain the plan and to prepare their late-night march.

The mood among the bandits was electric.  They’d gotten away with raiding villages, then towns, and then even a city here and there.  They’d killed nobles and fat merchants alike, and over the past year, had been practically untouchable with the Alliance’s attention taken by Asturias in the east.  Now, they were about to embark upon their greatest raid, and hit Heaven’s Eye where it hurt.

And it would happen in only a matter of hours.

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