[This is definitely some kind of blood ritual,] Xaphan whispered to Leon as they watched a couple hundred marines set about removing the corpses from the ruined square around the serpent colossus.

[You’re sure about that?] Leon asked as the scowl that had perpetually marred his face since arriving at this grisly scene deepened.

[Look down at the floor,] Xaphan directed.  [Notice the grooves in the tiles and how the floor isn’t perfectly flat?  The floor around the colossus is a couple of feet lower than the floor at the edge of the square.  Blood is meant to drip from sacrifices and flow down toward that idol.  Given the size of this place, it was designed to facilitate large sacrifices.]

[I seem to recall you saying multiple times to me in the past that you didn’t have much knowledge of blood rituals,] Leon stated, though his tone was casual and not particularly accusative.

[I’ve said many things, boy,] Xaphan testily responded.  [I’m not overfond of blood sacrifice, and I’ve never put too much of my time into studying it, but for things this crude and this blatant, a demon will always know.  Much blood has been spilled here for the benefit of whatever that idol is meant to represent.]

Leon sighed deeply as he turned his eyes toward the massive serpent statue in the center of the ruined square.  He and his squad had been here for long enough that the sun had started to rise, and not long after their arrival, he’d sent word back to Sigebert detailing what they’d found.  Not long after, the Fleet Legate arrived to personally witness what Leon had found, and he’d brought half a marine battalion with him.  Even still, despite working for several hours, not even half of the bodies had been cut down, leaving the serpent statue still covered in dozens of corpses nailed to its exterior.

The area was covered in blood, though strangely absent scavengers.  As Marcus had pointed out during their trek through the jungle, Leon noticed that despite these corpses having been here apparently for days, they were largely untouched by rot and wild animals had left them alone.  From what his magic senses told him, this was hardly due to lack of animals, but it seemed that anything larger than ants kept a wide berth from this place, and nothing touched the corpses.

The whole thing gave Leon the creeps beyond the sheer visceral revulsion of seeing hundreds, perhaps even a few thousand people so murdered and mutilated.

And yet, Leon could sense very little magic in their surroundings that could be considered notable.  With so many mages running around, hauling tools and bodies or securing the surroundings to keep the ruin safe from predators and any potential Islander attacks, the ambient magic in the air had certainly gone up, but Leon couldn’t detect any enchantments in the ruins, any traces of magic power flowing through the rubble, or even any magic seeping into the serpent idol in the center of the square.

As far as he could tell, the ruins were completely mundane, absent any noticeable enchantment or magical augmentation.

[Can you sense anything else here?] Leon asked Xaphan, hoping that the demon could provide any other insights that he was missing.  Without much else to go on, Leon feared that this would be nothing more than a grisly sideshow, devoid of meaning.  But all of this had to have been set up for a reason, he couldn’t imagine that Jormun—and he couldn’t believe that anyone but Jormun could’ve done this—would’ve gone to all this trouble for no reason.

Or at least, he didn’t want to believe that all of this had been meaningless.  Whether it be power or perhaps related to what Leon believed to be Jormun’s intent—releasing the mythical Serpent of the legend he’d relayed to Leon—Leon didn’t want to believe that someone had done all of this for no practical reason.

‘Could this by why Octavius was kidnapped?’ Leon wondered, remembering one of the stories that Jormun had told him back in Kraterok in the guise of Turiel—Jormun had said that there was a rumor about him that he was stealing people with Inherited Bloodlines to sacrifice to some dark god.  Leon had pondered that, but had wound up largely disregarding that particular tidbit, chalking it up to Jormun just screwing with him and the rest of the Legion.

But now, seeing what Jormun had seemingly done—and Leon had no doubt in his mind that this was Jormun’s handiwork, despite a lack of conclusive evidence—Leon found himself revisiting that rumor.

‘Maybe Jormun just admitted to what he was doing and reveling in the fact that he could’ve said anything back then…’ Leon thought to himself.

[I can’t sense anything in particular,] Xaphan admitted as he answered Leon’s question, [but that’s not to say there was nothing magical here.  Surely you realize just how quickly magic will dissipate into the environment when an enchantment has been destroyed or erased.]

[I do, but if this was to be a sacrifice, why erase the enchantment?]

[There could many reasons, too many to say for certain…]  Xaphan began to list out those that he felt most likely, but Leon stopped paying attention as he tried to contemplate the problem.  He remembered again Jormun’s story of the sealed Serpent beneath the Isles, and he wondered for not the first time how true that story was.

‘Was this done to release that Serpent?’ Leon wondered.  ‘Maybe if there was an enchantment here, then it contributed to the seal that keeps that Serpent sealed.’  After that particular thought, Leon’s mouth turned upward in a self-deprecating smile.  ‘Or maybe Jormun was just feeding a load of shit and is now watching with glee as I gulp it all down…’

Leon tried to dismiss that theory; he very much did not want to imagine that Jormun was going to release some dark god that would bring ruin upon all of Aeterna.  But no matter how hard he tried, the evidence that Jormun was trying to do just that was all around him, displayed and crucified.

After a few minutes, during which Xaphan realized Leon wasn’t paying attention and just went quiet, Leon started making his way through the veritable forest of strung-up corpses that had yet to be cut down, eventually arriving at the statue of the coiled serpent.  He didn’t have much room to inspect it with how packed the square was with bodies, but he didn’t need much room, he simply moved an errant leg of one of the victims a few inches to the side and pressed his hand to the cold stone of the statue.

He almost immediately pulled his hand back in shock at how bone-chillingly cold the stone was, but he managed to hold on just long enough for his magic power to enter the statue and probe around, searching for anything of note before Leon had to pull his hand back, his skin turning red as it fought off the profound cold of the statue.  Leon scrunched his face up in confusion and concentration, for he could find no trace of magic power within the statue that would betray the presence of hidden enchantments or anything of the like, and yet the statue was still somehow cold enough to be too uncomfortable for his seventh-tier hands to bear for long.

[There was something here,] Leon whispered half to himself and half to Xaphan.  [There’s no other explanation I can think of.  Something used to be here, some kind of power, but this blood sacrifice must’ve… I don’t know, released it or something.]

[Did you sense something specific, or is that just speculation?]

[A bit of both,] Leon replied as he rubbed his fingers together to bring a little bit of warmth back into them, quickly filling Xaphan in on the cold he felt as he did so.

[It was cold, yet you felt no magic power?]

[Yes…]

[Perhaps it was something… divine?  Or maybe a better word would be Primal?]

[What do you mean?]

Xaphan didn’t say anything more for a few long seconds.  Leon could practically feel his hesitation and reluctance to speak again as if those emotions were his own.

[I… I’m not sure,] the demon finally growled, shame pouring out of him in such a torrent as he admitted his ignorance that Leon could feel it through their contract.  [This might be… something that the sparkly pigeon might be better at explaining, but… well, let me put it to you like this.  During the process of Apotheosis, you’ll slowly start to generate and use divine power, or Primal power, whatever you might want to call it.  You can think of it like a tremendously more potent form of magic, or maybe a purer form.  I used it when I was at my peak, but now it’s been so long since I tasted of such power that I’ve almost forgotten what it felt like…

[Anyway, this power is extremely rare; even in the strongest beings in the universe, they’ll only generate about one part of divine power for every ten thousand parts of magic power.  But beyond its potency and rarity, it’s also almost nigh-undetectable on its own.  It’ll usually create magic power as it dilutes and dissipates in the environment—so I suppose ‘concentrated magic power’ might be a better way to put it, rather than pure or potent—which allows it to be detected by proxy, but divine power itself cannot be detected without using divine power in turn.]

Leon nodded as he started walking back out of the square, ignoring the questioning looks and occasional actual questions he got from the marines as he went, his attention fully focused on his conversation with his demonic partner.  [So, there was power in that moon stone back in Nestor’s lab that I couldn’t perceive?]

[Probably, but with how much magic power it was emanating, its divine power might’ve been lost even to post-Apotheosis mages without a very in-depth examination—think of it like the sun blocking the stars.  Not a perfect comparison, but it works well enough.]

Leon nodded again.  That made some degree of sense, Nestor had told him that, during his inspection of the stone after the Clan first acquired it, his initial hypothesis was that the moon stone had come into contact with a Universe Fragment before he and the Thunderbird clarified that it had actually been ‘touched’ by a Primal God.

[But…] Xaphan continued, [if divine power were here, there’d be magical signs, much like that shitload of light magic that poured out of that moon stone.  So…  I’ve got nothing, but I suppose that your theory that some power was here at some point might hold some water.]

Leon grunted in acknowledgment.  He hadn’t the tools to really know what happened here, but from what he could piece together, disregarding the idea that Jormun was planning on releasing the Serpent from his story would be a mistake.

Leon sighed as that realization crossed his mind, while a muted feeling that he was in way over his head started to cause his stomach to sink to his knees.  But after taking a deep breath, Leon battered that feeling down; it wouldn’t help, and he wasn’t about to just let Jormun finish whatever he was going to do.  This wasn’t something he could just ignore, nor was it someone else’s problem.  It would take two months minimum for the Bull Kingdom to send someone else if reinforcements were requested, and Leon couldn’t imagine that they’d arrive in time.  At the very least, Leon didn’t want to risk it.

He was the most powerful person now actively opposing Jormun, and that made this his responsibility to fix—at least in part, for there were others in positions of power in the task force, as well.

Glancing around, he saw Sigebert busy directing the marines as they moved the bodies into a nearby mass grave, and Gaius not too far away.  He began walking over, but he only went a few steps when he paused.  He’d decided to pulse his magic senses to check up on his squad and saw Alix, Marcus, and Alcander a ways into the trees, keeping close enough to everything going on as to be safe, yet also maintaining a good distance from the field of death that they’d stumbled into.

Maia and Anzu, meanwhile, were just lounging around the ruins, not paying anyone too much heed.  The sight of so many crucified people had clearly not affected either of them in any noticeable way.

But the former three concerned Leon.  Alix was hunched over and looked to be quietly sobbing in horror.  Marcus and Alcander looked to be a little more put together, but Leon could also see their hands shaking and their eyes wide with shock.

Without a second thought, Leon turned toward his squad.  They came before Sigebert, he could always speak with the Fleet Legate later.

A couple of minutes later, Leon was taking a seat on a large tree root close enough to Alix to lightly clap her on the shoulder as a show of support.  She was, indeed, quietly sobbing, her eyes shut tight, her hands clasped in front of her face so tightly that her knuckles were white.  Leon wasn’t too forceful when he joined her, he merely wanted her to know that he was there.

“Everyone all right?” Leon asked, his smooth voice pulling them all out of their weird headspaces long enough to make eye contact with him.  The answer was obvious, of course, but he wanted them to get talking and to maybe start feeling something other than horror at what they’d just seen.  “That was a… tough scene to witness.  I can’t blame anyone for being a little bit shaken.”

Leon waited a moment for anyone to say something.  He almost thought no one would, but Alcander proved him wrong.

“That… was more than tough,” he whispered.  “Don’t get me wrong, Leon, I’m no stranger to seeing a great deal of death, not after what we’ve all seen and done, but…”

The large man trailed off, leaving it to Marcus to pick up the statement where he left it.

“That was something else entirely,” Marcus finished.  “It’s one thing to see dead soldiers—they died in battle, fighting with everything they had.  Those were… civilians.  Children.  People only a few years from joining their Ancestors anyway.  People who shouldn’t have been treated… like that.”

Leon didn’t interrupt them, he just wanted them to talk.  He couldn’t pretend that a sight of a couple thousand people horribly murdered left him unaffected, but his entire childhood was filled with blood and death, albeit the blood of monsters and animals, not humans.  At the very least, he could compartmentalize well enough that his shock and horror wasn’t quite so debilitating.

It helped that he didn’t know those people, so suppressing his empathy for a while wasn’t the hardest thing to do.  Focusing on Jormun, speculating on the pirate’s goals, and how to stop him also made this a lot easier—Leon did his best to focus not on what he couldn’t do, but on what he could.

“This doesn’t change anything, though,” Alix said, her voice iron hard as her hands fell from her face a few inches.  “Jormun has to die.  That’s what we’ve been working toward, right?”  Her deep brown eyes turned toward Leon as if she were both asking if she were correct and daring him to disagree.

If Leon hadn’t personally met Jormun as Turiel, then maybe he would’ve disagreed.  He’d originally agreed to go on this expedition because of Octavius’ escape, but at this point, the runaway Prince was practically meaningless to Leon, only kept relevant in his mind for his part in Trajan’s death.  But now, Leon’s thoughts were different.

“I can’t say that nothing’s changed,” Leon replied as his golden eyes met Alix’s, silently telling her not to interrupt until he’d said his piece despite seemingly disagreeing with her.  “When we set out, hunting down Jormun wasn’t that big of a priority.  He was a target, to be sure, but for the Bull Kingdom, and us by proxy, the mission was to bring the Serpentine Islands back under the Bull Kingdom’s suzerainty and to retrieve Prince Octavius.  That was it.”

“‘Was’ it?” Marcus asked, noting Leon’s tone and his specific phrasing.

Leon glanced at the young nobleman and nodded.  “Was,” he confirmed.  “After speaking with the man, I had my suspicions about his motives.  Now that we’ve seen this… I’m only more convinced about what he’s trying to do.  And we cannot, under any circumstances, allow him to succeed.”

“What is he trying to do?” Alcander asked, his eyes narrowing in concern, his tone deadly serious.

“I believe he’s trying to unseal some kind of great beast that used to rule here,” Leon explained, his voice slow yet steady enough to project confidence—it was a bit of an insane theory, and he didn’t want his voice to waver as he told it.  He wanted this to be taken seriously, he didn’t want this mass sacrifice they’d stumbled upon to be disregarded as nothing more than wonton sadism by a psychopathic pirate.  “Some ‘Serpent’ with great power.  I’m uncertain as to the exact details, but… if all of that is anything to go by, then what he’s trying to bring back is unfathomably large and powerful.  From what I was able to gather, there were thousands of people back there, all used to fuel some kind of blood sacrifice that—and this is only a guess on my part, but I have some confidence in it—has released a magical seal or lock or something of that nature here.

“And the Fleet Legates aren’t even focusing on it.  They’re too focused on the political angle, they only see the Serpentine Islands and Octavius, but… well, I can’t say that Jormun doesn’t care about them, I don’t know enough about the man, but I simply can’t shake this feeling of dread in my bones whenever I think about this thing that Jormun is trying to unleash.”

“Assuming your guess is correct,” Alix whispered, her expression of horror slowly deepening, showing Leon that while she was giving voice to skepticism, she was a little more convinced by his words than that might imply.

“Assuming that, yes,” Leon said just as quietly.  He was about to continue when he saw the Thunderbird-like bird out of the corner of his eye.  He froze for a moment, his instinct to inform the others dying on his tongue for reasons that he couldn’t quite fathom.

The bird alighted on a nearby tree, stared at him for several seconds, then took back off in the direction of the square.

Leon stood back up.  “We’re going to get this fucker even if we have to leave the Legion behind to do it.  Let them play Earl-maker here in the Isles, let them bring their Prince back to their Kingdom.  Jormun has to be stopped.”

With that said, Leon walked away from them, leaving them a little clueless and flabbergasted at his sudden departure, but also giving them some space to digest his words and their own feelings about what they’d found.  He followed the bird back toward the square.

He watched it soar—seemingly unnoticed, for not once did Leon ever see a head turn in its direction—over the working marines and strung-up bodies, past the corpse-covered serpent statue, and toward one of the ruins on the other side of the square.  Without hesitation, Leon made his way over, eager to see what the bird had to show him.

The bird led him to one of the larger of the ruined buildings that was little more than one partially-standing wall and a pile of rubble, the remains of perhaps the most important structure in this temple complex if its size was any indication, and one that had only light Legion presence around it—most of the marines were working around the square, and the bird had led Leon to the side of the building opposite to the side that opened onto the square, giving them manner of privacy.  It watched as Leon approached, its eyes narrowing like it was watching a clueless field mouse approach, but Leon couldn’t sense any power in its gaze.

He stopped a few paces shy of the bird, just at the edge of the massive pile of rubble that the bird had perched upon.  He stood there in silence for a few long seconds, he and the bird simply staring at each other.  This was the first time they’d ever done this, ‘standing’ face-to-face long enough to possibly exchange words.

Not wanting to waste this chance, Leon soon broke that silence by asking, “What… are you?”

The bird’s eyes only further narrowed.  It raised one of his its talons and tapped the stone it stood upon.

“Why are you helping me?” Leon asked, hoping that it might respond in some way that he could understand.  It was only a bird, though, and while it obviously had some kind of intelligence, its beak couldn’t make human sounds.

The bird tapped the stone again as its feathers began to puff out in seeming anger and indignation.  Leon’s eyes dropped down to that stone, what looked like a gray brick more than twice his height in every dimension.  It didn’t seem particularly special, but the bird was obviously trying to tell him something, so he started making his way through the rubble to give it a closer look.

As it watched him come closer, the bird hopped a little bit higher up the pile of rubble, ensuring that it was never quite within reaching distance of Leon.  He didn’t mind much, and focused instead on the stone it had drawn his attention to.

On closer inspection, it didn’t seem any different that it had first appeared, but much of it was still buried beneath the stone pile.

After taking a deep breath, Leon planted his feet to get as good of footing as he could, grabbed the broken brick and started to pull it up.  It was heavy, and with the rest of the rubble acting as pretty unstable ground, Leon had a fairly hard time pulling it up.  But he was still a seventh-tier mage, he didn’t even have to power up the strength enchantments in his armor before he had managed to lift one end of the brick up.

It was just as large and heavy as it had appeared from afar, so Leon wasted no time twisting and turning it until gravity took over; the massive brick fell down the pile of rubble to where he could inspect it better.  He was disappointed, however, to find that it still appeared to be quite ordinary.

Leon glanced back at the bird, hoping it might give him some indication of what it was trying to show him, only to find that the bird was staring back at him with such intensity that Leon felt like he was being judged.  He paused there for a moment as his eyes locked with the bird’s, but then the moment passed, and the bird glanced back down at the depression in the rubble where the brick had just been.

Leon got the message quickly enough and scrambled back over to take a look.

What had been beneath the stone was another big piece of ruined stone, but this one had faint grooves upon them, like they had once been some kind of relief that had been deeply weathered over the course of thousands of years.  Leon figured, given where they were, that this would be some kind of artistic depiction of relevant to the worship, sacrifice, or whatever else had once gone in this place.

It took a little bit more work, but Leon was able to dig this new stone out of the rubble in about fifteen minutes.  He propped it up against the rest of the rubble where the morning sun could reach it and gave it a good long inspection.

His initial impression about the grooves hadn’t been entirely accurate, but neither had they been entirely inaccurate, either.  What he saw wasn’t so much an artistic carving as it was a geographic one, though one that had been made slightly three dimensional by the carving.

It was of an island—the third, if Leon guessed correctly—the huge volcanic mountains in the center of it rising perhaps an inch or two off the stone’s surface.  Most of the southern coastal regions were lost since the stone was broken, but Leon still found himself looking at a map of the third island about four or five times the size of his head.

Almost as if it had planned it, with the way the sun was shining and where the bird had perched itself, its shadow fell across this stone map in such a way that the shadow of its beak drew Leon’s eye straight toward the faint carving of an eye deep into the third island, along the slope of one of its volcanos.  The map had been ravaged by time, but Leon was still able to identify that eye as reptilian in shape.

“What… is this?” he wondered aloud, but when he turned to look at the bird again, it had vanished without so much as a sound.

Leon blinked in confusion.  He would’ve sworn that it had been right there only a moment before, and he doubted that with its mere fourth-tier power, it could’ve flown away without him taking some kind of notice.  And yet, it was gone, and he hadn’t noticed.

Suddenly, Xaphan’s voice rang in his ears again as the demon asked, [Leon… are you feeling all right?]

[Hmm?  Yes, I feel fine,] Leon answered, the question only adding to his feelings of mild confusion.

[You… you were talking to yourself as if something else was there with you, and then you unearthed that… map?  That looks like a map.]

[Yes, it does look like a map,] Leon responded as he narrowed his eyes.  [But you didn’t see that bird?  The one that led me here?]

[I saw no bird,] Xaphan replied.  [As far as I could tell, you just left your little human followers and came here, asked questions of empty air, and then dug that thing up…]

[You… didn’t see the bird…] Leon whispered as his blood began to run cold.  Just in case, he summoned the power of the Thunderbird and sent it coursing through his body.  For a handful of seconds, his body sparked as wrist-thick arcs of silver-blue lightning danced across his form.  Most of these arcs either began or ended on his head, for Leon wanted to be absolutely sure that nothing was affecting his mind or senses.  The power of the Thunderbird was supposed to free the mind of all magical fetters that have been placed upon it, and Leon knew for a fact that the illusory and domination effects of darkness magic were largely helpless before it.

However, once that was done, he felt just as fine as he did before.  But his eyes found the map of the third island again, and the serpent’s eye carved upon it.  Something had led him here and shown it to him.  Or maybe the bird had the power to only show itself to those it wanted to see it.  Or maybe there were a hundred or a thousand different explanations.  Leon knew one thing for certain, though.

[Xaphan, I think this might be a bit of a problem…]

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