Asking Valeria to be a part of his future was a spur of the moment decision, but it wasn’t one that Leon took lightly.  Neither Elise nor Maia seemed to be too surprised or perturbed by his statement, though he could feel their grips on his arms tighten so he knew there would have to be a discussion later.  Given that both had expressed their support for his pursuing a romantic relationship with Valeria—to varying degrees of enthusiasm, to be sure—he felt confident that this wasn’t too big of a step.

For her part, Valeria had frozen in shock as Leon, Elise, and Maia all stared at her.

“You don’t have to say anything,” Leon said in an attempt to lessen the pressure upon her.  Trying to put social pressure on Valeria wasn’t how he wanted any relationship between them to start, but he wanted everyone present to know exactly what was on his mind.  “I just have to say something right now while we’re all here and in private.”

Leon glanced to Elise and Maia, and while he saw some confusion in their returned looks, neither stopped him from continuing.

Turning back to Valeria, Leon proceeded, “I like you.  A lot.  Ever since I first saw you fight and found myself entranced by your skill with a weapon, I liked you.  However, after learning your name and your…”  Leon paused, almost bringing up her family’s role in his family’s downfall.  But he felt like doing so right now would be a little manipulative, though he didn’t see much of a way to get past it.  It would have to be addressed, even if only indirectly.  “I suppressed those feelings after learning your name,” he said, hoping that would be enough.  “Things have always been a little complicated for me when it came to you, and my indecision in these matters have led me to making great mistakes and causing you pain.  I would like to…  If you’re willing, I would like to see where we might take our relationship.  But if you don’t think that we could ever be anything more to each other than we are, then I’ll accept that.  But I, uh, also…”

Leon scowled as he trailed off on that decidedly less-than-inspiring note, his regret at doing this in a spur-of-the-moment decision growing exponentially.  He greatly wished that he’d planned this out a little more instead of just rambling on with little idea of what to say to get across what he wanted.

Fortunately for him, Valeria didn’t seem all that put off, and even seemed to be smiling a bit as he floundered.  At the very least, she seemed to take some small pleasure in seeing him at a loss for words.

Elise, however, was significantly less entertained, and she soon sighed and pulled away from Leon.

“I think that staying quiet for a moment would do you wonders, love,” she said teasingly, and Leon couldn’t help but agree as he stared at his fire-haired lover with confusion and interest as she approached Valeria.  “Val,” Elise whispered as she reached out and took the silver-haired woman’s hand, “I don’t think it’s any great secret that you like Leon.”

Valeria’s cheeks went scarlet and she averted her gaze in embarrassment, though a moment later, she cleared her throat, straightened herself up, and looked at Elise in the eye.  She was clearly caught off-guard and unprepared, but she’d summoned the inner strength that Leon found himself equally attracted to and didn’t run from whatever this was turning out to be.

Elise continued as she slid a little bit closer to Valeria and dropped her voice to a more conspiratorial whisper—though both Leon and Maia could still hear her just fine, “Maybe it’s a little more of a secret, but Leon likes you back; he wasn’t joking when he admitted as such a moment ago.  He likes you, and it seems that he wants to start something with you.  I don’t think any of us expect you to answer right away, though, so let’s drop things for now.  But know this, while I can’t speak for Naiad, I support the two of you getting together whole-heartedly, just so long as you don’t mind sharing him with the two of us…”

Valeria’s eyes drifted in Maia’s direction as they widened in shock, and Maia subtly nodded her agreement with Elise’s sentiment, though her face remained relatively impassive.  Then, Valeria looked to Elise once more.

“Thank you, Elise,” Valeria said as she squeezed her friend’s hand.  “I think I might take you up on that offer of time.  I don’t think my eventual answer will change, but I’ll need some preparation before I can give it.”  Her sapphire-blue eyes drifted in Leon’s direction once more, then flitted between him, Maia, and Elise in turn.  “Things seem a little crowded, and I never thought I’d be a part of that kind of relationship.  My father and I come from a place of monogamy, and while I don’t look down on relationships like yours, I still never really thought that I’d be in one myself.  If I say yes, then I’d have to get used to things between all of us being this crowded…”

Leon gave her a strange look.  He felt like she must’ve contemplated it at some point given how much their relationship had changed over the past few years—and especially over the past few months—but if she needed time, he wasn’t going to press on that issue.  With the look that Elise gave him as she looked over her shoulder, he felt like he was going to need some time, too, before hearing her answer.

“I think that’s more than fair,” Elise replied as she let Valeria’s hand drop and turned back to Leon.  “Now, I believe we were here for a crystal?”

Leon nodded, sharing one last lingering look with Valeria before moving on.

“That orange crystal in the center of the platform is what I want,” he said.  “But before taking it, I would like to take a few minutes to examine this place.  I’d hate to destroy all of it without even a cursory look.”

Elise nodded as she took Leon’s arm again.

“Lead on,” she said.

Leon smiled and obliged.  He led the other three across the bridge over the massive multi-story drop to the bottom of the sphere, his eyes constantly locked above them on the flowing runes.

He could feel his heart race—or rather, continue to race after the brief exchange with Valeria—as he contemplated the power that would’ve been required to construct such a place above ground, let alone so deep beneath a mountain.  It was such an enticing display of power that Leon felt himself begin to salivate at the idea of reaching a point in his life where he could duplicate, or even exceed this.

He wanted to know everything about how this place was constructed, about the enchantments that filled it, about the intricate and no doubt absurdly and mind-bendingly complex ways that magic was manipulated to let this place function.

‘No…’ he thought to himself as his thoughts turned to the future, ‘I need to know everything about this place…’

To match and exceed such a feat of magical engineering, that was something he needed to do, he could feel that in his bones more than just about anything else he could think of.  He wanted to see his mother, of course, and Kamran was a force that he needed to deal with, but without faces to go by, without knowing them personally, it was difficult for him to muster the passion that he felt for the runic arts as he stood in the center of the prison’s control room with the women he loved more than anything sharing the moment with him.

Above him, he could see a ‘constellation’ of light, lightning, and darkness runes spiraling around each other, a host of other runes linking and modifying them to create some kind of effect that he was too illiterate to understand.  Not too far away, he saw one of the few runes on the spherical wall that wasn’t moving, an ancient rune that he couldn’t recognize.  Below and around that spiraled out thousands upon thousands of other runes, each one filled with power and purpose.

It was a humbling thing.  He felt like exactly the person that so many in the Bull Kingdom had decried him as: a barbarian pillaging the works of his betters, hoping to leech off their success and ape their works.

His ancestors had built a place that could imprison and drain the power of beings like Xaphan, individuals of cosmic power, creatures that could cross the great empty expanse of the Void with seemingly little trouble.

He’d figured out a crude and inefficient way to fly and a few good ways to kill people—and even then, he’d had a great deal of help from Xaphan and the Thunderbird herself.

Leon felt his jaw clench so hard that he half-worried he’d crack a tooth.

‘Those people were right,’ he thought as his heart began to sink, many of the thoughts he’d been trying to suppress since Nestor’s lab roaring back to the fore of his mind, ‘I’m just a barbarian with no idea what he’s doing, playing with the remains of men greater than I could ever hope to be…’

It was a depressing and sobering thought, a terrible realization that he’d always known but had never truly felt before; he’d done so little except kill, he’d created nothing of value, nothing that he could point to with great pride and declare was his.  As his eyes drifted lower in shame and swept across his lovers, he realized that, while they might love him now, he never would’ve had a chance in the endless hells of being with any of them without his name, without his blood, and without the Heaven’s Eye vault that his family left behind.

He’d done so little with his life.  He was a child playing in the ruins of long-dead people who pissed away more value every morning of their lives than he’d ever brought into the world with even the greatest of his labors.

Worse, those who built this place weren’t even that great, now that Leon was thinking about it, yet they were still better than him.  Justin’s words about the Thunderbird Clan not being missed and why rang in his ears, and his mind brought forth images of Xaphan and Justin in their prisons.  They were tyrants and slavers, and he wasn’t even worthy of cleaning their boots.

His heart slowed as a scowl spread across his face.  Suddenly, he wanted nothing more than to leave this place as quickly as he could as if he could hide from these realizations.  He didn’t want to take the power crystal.  It wasn’t his, he’d never earned it.  In that moment of realization, he didn’t even want the power crystal he’d taken from Nestor’s lab.  He’d picked it off the corpse of his Clan like carrion picking at dry bone.

And just a few days ago he’d been so excited to see what he could do with it, but now he didn’t even want to think about it.  He wanted to summon Nestor’s power crystal out of his soul realm and hurl it into the great pit of the spherical chamber.  It was much smaller than the power crystal of the prison, so it wouldn’t have quite the cathartic release he hoped it would, but such a thought did little to help.

“I…” Leon began, his voice cracking as he faced Valeria and his two lovers, unsure of what to say now.  All three were already looking at him in various combinations of worry and expectation, and he realized that he’d been standing there for several long minutes, his emotions not concealed by his stoic exterior as well as he’d thought they were.

“Is everything all right, Leon?” Elise asked as she stepped forward and filled his vision with the most vibrant green eyes he’d ever seen and hair as bright red as fire.  There was no judgment within her eyes, only concern.

Concern and acceptance.

No matter how their relationship started, she loved him, Leon could see that in her eyes as plain as day.  Same thing with Maia, her clear lake-blue eyes staring him down in an almost challenging way.  She could feel what he was going through, and even though she wasn’t saying it, she seemed to be challenging him to be better than he was, to pull himself back together and actually do what he needed to do.

Valeria was the most difficult for him to read.  She was still quite stoic, but from having been with her almost constantly for months and knowing her for years, Leon could tell that she was far more concerned about him than just a friend would be.

“Yeah…” Leon replied as he pulled Elise into a loose embrace.  “With all of you here with me, everything’s fine…”

“You don’t seem fine,” Elise insisted as she took his face in her hands and forced his eyes back to her.  “What’s going on in that handsome head of yours?”

Leon paused a moment as he weighed his words.  He didn’t want to reveal everything that was going through his head, especially since he hadn’t yet devoted much time to working through it.  But he trusted Elise with his life, so he wanted to at least say something.

“I’m… just…  The scale of what I need to do has never seemed quite so real before now…  I guess it’s just really hitting me that this place, as important as it may have been to my Clan, was nothing special, and yet to me it’s so amazing.  The road ahead is going to be long, and I’ve never really thought about how long it was.  Or how little distance I’ve covered on it.”

Leon’s cadence was slow and his tone was depressing, but as he closed his eyes, brought up a hand to cover one of Elise’s on his face, and took a long, deep breath, he forced himself to cheer up.

It wasn’t so bad being humbled in this way, by seeing the works of his Ancestors.  It was a far less dangerous and maddening thing than having someone like Nestor humble him.  It didn’t even come with a dead man violating his body and imprisoning him within his own soul realm.  What was harder for him to work his mind through was what all of that ingenuity and power was devoted to: a prison built to suck out the power of sentient beings, leaving them husks of their former selves.

Leon turned his gaze back to the power crystal.  If he ever wanted to create great things, he couldn’t rely on such boons.  He couldn’t count on Thunderbird facilities handing out knowledge and power like candy.  He’d need to do this himself and rely upon his own power first and foremost.

Strength and knowledge.  Once he acquired these two things, the rest would follow.  But if he was anything, these past few days had taught him that he was weak and stupid.

Naïve.

Young.

Inexperienced.

As he stared into the orange of the power crystal, he knew in his heart of hearts that if he took it, he might gain a great resource, but it would be at the cost of what little confidence he yet held onto.  But this thing was once built, which meant that he could replicate it, given enough time.  More difficult than that would be to redeem the Thunderbird name, assuming he felt like it was even a name worth redeeming.

Leon stared into the crystal and quietly murmured, “We have a lot of work do…”

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