Elise led Leon into the villa, and despite the fact that he was deep into his enchanting work, he had no issues immediately setting that aside to follow her inside.  There he found Maia and Valeria waiting for him, along with a host of Heaven’s Eye personnel leaving after carrying their things into their rooms.

“About time,” Valeria quietly said with a cheeky smile as Leon stepped inside.  “I almost thought we were going to have to haul you in here kicking and screaming.”

Leon cocked an eyebrow in amusement.  “Really?  How long have you all been back?”

“A couple of hours,” Valeria replied.

Leon’s heart almost stopped at the thought that they’d been back that long and he hadn’t noticed, but Elise almost immediately said, “No, we’ve been back for about ten minutes.  The only reason it took me this long to come and get you was because we almost couldn’t believe that you hadn’t heard us…”

“You didn’t have to let him on that quickly, we could’ve had a little bit more fun with it…” Valeria murmured as she cast a mock-resentful glare at Elise, though her playful smile betrayed her.

In fact, Valeria looked happier than Leon had seen her in a long time.  He hoped that meant good news from her, but he wasn’t going to hold his breath.  If she needed more time, he’d be happy to wait.

Leon smiled at all of them as he caught them up to speed on all that had happened since he’d gotten back from the meeting with King, to Marcus, Alcander, and Alix now formally signing on with him.

“I never thought those two would’ve done that…” Valeria whispered when Leon finished, while Elise’s focus was locked on the events surrounding Octavius.  Maia, meanwhile, hardly seemed to be paying attention; she’d latched herself onto Leon’s arm once he’d sat down on the sofa and just laid there with her legs over the armrest and her head resting on Leon’s shoulder.

“Have there been any updates on the traitor Prince?” Elise asked.

“None,” Leon replied.  “Or, at least none that have been significant enough for the King to send word to me.  So I’ve just been spending the past few days here, thinking and studying enchantments.”

Elise seemed to notice something peculiar that he said, for she cocked her head slightly and asked, “Is that all you’ve done?  You haven’t been to see my mother?”

Leon rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand a little sheepishly, but when he replied he had a little more iron in his voice than the gesture would’ve implied.  “No, you were only a few days behind, and I had other things on my mind.  I suppose I had the time after all of that, but she’s the local Tower Lord, I’m sure she was busy.  Besides, we don’t have to keep her informed of all our comings and goings, do we?”

Elise looked about ready to respond a little angrily, but Leon saw her catch herself and take a deep breath.

“No,” she said with a bitter and slightly apologetic smile.  “I suppose we don’t.  Still, it would’ve been polite, but at least this way we can go together.”

Leon grimaced lightly, but he didn’t push the point.  It wasn’t like he was trying to avoid Emilie for any reason, he just hadn’t thought about going to visit her without real cause.  But, at least this way, he’d be able to check in on how his armor was being—

Suddenly, bare minutes after the Heaven’s Eye caravan departed from the villa, someone knocked on their door, and with a brief pulse of magic senses, Leon saw that it was Emilie.

“Huh,” he murmured.  “Speak of her and she shall appear, it seems.”  He rose from the sofa, disturbing Maia enough for her to shoot him a reproachful look, and went to the door to see in his future mother-in-law.

“Emilie,” he said with a smile as he showed her in, Elise right behind him with a wide smile of her own.

“There you two are,” the Tower Lord said as she walked in, her shoes disappearing into her soul realm once out of the atrium.  “I can’t believe that I had to learn about the two of you coming home from our delegation!”  She pulled Elise and Leon into a tight hug, and when she released them, she added, “It’s good to see you back here safe and sound.”

“Thank you, you’re looking well yourself,” Leon said a little woodenly.

Elise echoed his statement, though hers was much warmer, “It’s good to see you, Mother, we had a successful trip!”

“So I heard,” Emilie replied.  “I would love to hear more of it later, but unfortunately, I can only spare a few minutes.  I only came here to check in and to drop something off…”  Her eyes found Leon for a moment and winked as she walked over to the nearest available table and waved her hand, conjuring a large package from her soul realm.

Leon, intrigued, immediately went to open it while Elise made some small talk about how they were planning on going to see Emilie later.  Emilie sounded like she was agreeing that Leon didn’t need to see her, even if she was disappointed that was the case, but Leon was too absorbed in opening the package to hear much more.  His heart was thumping in his ears, drowning out all other sound.  He felt like he knew what was in this package, and he’d spent far too long without it.

The package itself was just plain brown wrapping paper tied with string, but Leon could see its basic shape from its contours.  Leon swiftly pulled the string and began to unwrap his armor from the package, the gleaming black metal and dull charcoal gray Skyflax padding soon revealing itself.

His breath caught in his throat, the emotions of finally reuniting with his armor almost as great as his reunions with Elise or Maia.  This armor had saved his life on many occasions, it was an invaluable tool that was as sentimental to him as his family’s sword.  He hadn’t realized just how naked he’d felt without it until he ran his hands along the repaired Magmic Steel and felt the silver griffin emblazoned on the chest of the cuirass.  All of the enchantments he’d placed upon it were still broken, but this was still his armor.  It was back in his hands, ready for his use, as loyal as the sturdiest of steeds.

Leon wasn’t one for crying, but his vision still started to blur as he reveled in reclaiming this lost armor that he’d gone so long without.

After what seemed like an eternity, Leon finally turned back to face Elise and Emilie, whose conversation had died in favor of watching him, and he said to Emilie, “Thank you.  I’ve been too long without this.”

“Don’t mention it,” she whispered with a quick wink.  “I know you’re going to be hip-deep in this Octavius thing soon enough, and I can’t send you off without making sure you come home to my little Butterfly.”

“The Old Gods and the Ancestors themselves couldn’t keep me from coming back,” Leon said with a challenging smile.

“I’ll hold you to that,” Emilie replied.

Following that short exchange, Emilie brought Elise up-to-date on some of the things that she’d missed that were of consequence to Heaven’s Eye, and then left.  She still had work to do, and so did Leon.  He spent a few more minutes catching up with the ladies before returning to his enchanting workshop.

Unfortunately, it didn’t seem that Valeria was yet ready to give him an answer, especially since she, too, left once they were finished catching up.  Apparently, her father was being brought to a Heaven’s Eye hospital for rehabilitation, and she wanted to be with him for a while.

Leon couldn’t help but wonder if she was just trying to avoid him, but he recognized that thought as uncharitable and stamped it out as much as he could.  Still, he occasionally wondered…

---

Over the next two weeks, Leon spent a significant amount of his time cooped up in his workshop, hunched over his writing desk scribbling on spell paper or preparing his armor for re-enchantment.  He made great progress in his skills and knowledge thanks to Nestor, but two weeks was hardly enough time to bring his gear back up to the standard it was at shortly before the civil war, let alone raise that standard higher with his new skills.

He also spent a great deal of time training to keep his skills sharp and his body ready for whenever word came down with results of the manhunt for Octavius.  Much of his time in his soul realm was devoted to trying to help it to grow, but doing so slowly enough so as to not injure himself as the King had done.  The last thing he wanted was to keel over and only wake up ten years later.

About the only times he was able to pry himself away from training or studying was when Elise or Maia dragged him away—oftentimes literally, in the latter’s case.  The pair, even when they didn’t say anything, could be more than persuasive enough to get Leon to come to bed, and it was almost only for them that Leon was able to set aside everything else.  Besides some time spent between the sheets, Leon always made sure to carve out a little bit of time to spend with his lovers every day without fail.

The only other way he was able to tear himself away from his work was when Alix, Marcus, and Alcander all showed up about a week later to finalize their formal induction into Leon’s… well, he didn’t know what to call it.  They weren’t his knights, he wasn’t of high enough rank to knight people and they’d all either resigned or been stripped of their titles.

‘Maybe faction?’ Leon had wondered.  ‘Nah, sounds too much like an organization, it might come with undeserved expectations…’

He wasn’t sure what to call them.  Friends was too informal, especially since he was the acknowledged leader, but faction or organization went too far in the other direction.  In the end, Leon and Marcus managed to settle on ‘company’, though one of a more civilian bent rather than Legion.  That would imply that they were all social equals, even if in formal matters Leon was expected to lead them.

Leon liked that name, but he put off putting a name to whatever it was they were.  Names could come later, after they’d done something to earn one and solidified their association through battle or something else equally strenuous.

The group only met once.  Leon wasn’t too keen on enforcing his leadership, so once everyone was on the same page, he was content to let everyone be until it came time to head off after Octavius.  He occasionally thought about heading out and trying to forge some kind of meaningful friendship with Marcus and Alcander, at least, since they were the two he was most unfamiliar with, but he always found himself back in his workshop instead, studying, or making more spells, or planning out how he was going to re-enchant his armor with his rapidly-advancing knowledge.

And then, finally, the day came.

---

“There, that’s it,” Nestor said from the ruby as Leon poured over a large sheet of spell paper on the same desk.  “Don’t overthink it, your muscles remember what to do, so let them guide you.”

Leon almost tuned the man out completely.  His advice was useful, but Leon was in the zone and didn’t need the distraction.

The sheet of spell paper he was working on was covered in hundreds of runes, rapidly approaching thousands.  The entire enchantment was built around three triangular glyphs of lightning runes, with the rest of the runes written to form lines that arced away from them in the fractal patterns of lightning.  Many of these arcs collided and merged with each other, forming what Nestor described as a ‘storm’ of runes.

Leon wasn’t even finished, and it already looked as chaotic as a thunderstorm.  But he could see the pattern within, he could see the logic behind the enchantment.  Many of the intersections between the three near-distinct ‘clouds’ of runes acted as either enhancements or checks upon the power of the others; in other words, if he wanted to, Leon could raise or lower the power applied to every function of this enchantment with barely more than a thought.  All it would require would be a slight deviance in how he channeled his magic power into it—assuming the enchantment was ever applied to something, of course.  What he was making wasn’t meant to be practical, not in the shape that it took, but it was of Leon’s design, and he hoped that by making it at least functional on flat spell paper, he’d eventually be able to adapt the same design to his armor.

When it was finished, and assuming it worked, Leon’s armor would have a built-in system for absorbing lightning magic, amplifying the strength of his attacks for almost no additional magic power, and make him stronger and faster at the same time.

Nestor had inspired Leon to create this enchantment design when he spoke at length of ‘magic engines’ and ‘magically powered armor’ that went beyond the simple scope of a few enchantments on armor.  If Leon could make this work, he’d be taking his first steps toward building a suit of armor that could do so much more than simply protect himself.  In fact, he was barely half done with his current design and he’d already thought of a possible way to include light runes in order to use the armor to aid his natural healing capabilities.

The biggest problem, however, lay in the power supply.  The Bull Kingdom had many smaller accessories that could store magic power, but nothing with the sort of capacity that Leon would need to make his armor something truly special.  The power crystals of Nestor’s lab or the prison would’ve sufficed, if he could cut them down to size a little and mount them on his armor, but he’d already resolved not to use them.

With all of this, Leon’s hand moved steadily and relatively slowly as he drew perfect runes on the paper, but his mind was firing on all cylinders, going a mile a second as he thought about how to apply new enchantments to his armor, and where and how to build a host of other things.  In this, he was, perhaps, in the middle of one of the happiest moments of his life.

Sure, Octavius was missing and he hadn’t heard anything about the man in a couple of weeks, but he went to bed every night with Maia and Elise, he was studying something he was passionate about, and the direction he wanted his life to go in after leaving the Bull Kingdom was becoming clearer and clearer in his mind.

So, of course it was in this state of mind that Leon found himself being shaken back into the physical world by Elise, vanishing from his soul realm and leaving Nestor and Xaphan alone.  Vaguely, both of them could hear Elise telling Leon that the Penitent Paladin had come to the villa, but neither particularly cared about the troubles of the Bull Kingdom.  Xaphan was simply meditating and keeping an eye on Nestor, while Nestor used what little magic power his ruby prison was capable of providing him with to look over Leon’s work.

“Careful there, dead man,” Xaphan rumbled from his pavilion not too far away.  “Touch anything of Leon’s and I’ll tear your magic body a new asshole.”

“What a wonderful turn of phrase,” Nestor haughtily replied.  “I’m not sabotaging my kinsman’s work, I’m simply looking it over.  I am his teacher, after all.  And a damn sight better one than you, by the looks of things.  I daresay Leon has learned more in the few weeks I’ve been with him than in the years he spent with you.  I mean, I almost think I ought to thank you for leaving Leon so unknowledgeable about the art that I don’t even have to correct any bad habits.”

Xaphan’s fires briefly flared in impetuous anger.  “You focus on lightning too much.  When Leon moves on to showing what he can do with fire, he’ll show off what I’ve taught him.  The skills that I’ve taught him in that higher element are nothing to dismiss…”  The demon felt strange saying those words out loud—he’d certainly never share them with Leon—but the ghost had impugned his honor and questioned his teaching skills.  He was a Lord of Flame, his knowledge of fire was nearly unparalleled in the universe.  Leon had a damn fine knack for enchantments, to be sure, but Xaphan took pride in knowing so much about fire magic that he could explain it in a way that made sense even to a five-year-old.

“Somehow, I doubt that,” Nestor shot back.  “I mean, Leon is quite prodigious with this art—almost as good as me back in my prime!  Almost.  But I can’t imagine he learned anything of substance from your useless tinder box!”

Xaphan’s bright yellow eyes started to burn a little bit brighter, almost turning white with their heat.  He had to almost literally force his jaw to remain closed in order to not rise to Nestor’s insults.

“We shall see, dead man,” Xaphan replied, resolving to wait until Leon could show off his learned skills and then shoving them in Nestor’s face.  “We shall see.”

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