Leon was rather quiet for the rest of the day following the tour of the ruins.  His group stayed for only another hour or so before it was time to leave, and his family split from Princess Cristina’s retinue at the gates.  The Princess herself tried to object, but after a whispered exchange with Valeria, she let them go, though Leon could tell she that wasn’t happy about the situation.

Regardless, he had other things on his mind than a pouting Princess, things that weighed on him throughout the rest of the date.  Elise tried to get him talking again while they were at dinner, but even though it was an expensive restaurant and rather early in the day, it was still crowded enough that Leon kept his quiet.  Even during the subsequent cruise around the lake, Leon remained extremely taciturn, for he didn’t want to talk around even the small crew of their tiny, rented yacht.

It wasn’t until they finally returned to the Heaven’s Eye guest house as the sun started to dip below the horizon that he started to speak about what was on his mind, and when he started to speak, he didn’t stop for more than an hour.  He ranted about the fall of his Clan; how much they deserved it; how bitter he was that they fell at all; the avoidable mistakes they made which caused their fall following Jason Keraunos’ death; how justified the Aeternan natives were in their war for freedom; and so much more.  By the end of it, he was just angry and barely even registering what he was saying anymore.

He felt better after it was over, but was immediately apologetic for ranting that like at his lovers.

“It’s fine,” Elise told him.  “Better to know what’s on your mind like this than to have you bottle it all up.”

“I agree,” Valeria whispered.

Maia didn’t say anything, but after Leon collapsed into an armchair, she draped herself over him and sealed his mouth with hers for a long moment, and any need she had to speak to get her thoughts across vanished.

When the river nymph disentangled herself from Leon, the conversation continued, with Valeria asking, “What will this mean?  If these people think that you’re connected to their mythical tyrants…”

“That might be an issue,” Elise said as she squinted in thought, “but with the backing of Heaven’s Eye, and with eighth-tier power from three different beings, we’re effectively above all but Imperial recriminations, and even then, we’d have to do something very eye-catching to be put on their map.”

“That’s going to happen sooner or later,” Valeria pointed out.  “I mean, how long do you think it’s going to take Leon to do something impulsive that’ll have everyone talking?”

Valeria and Elise shared a knowing look, while Leon could only scowl.  He wanted to argue against his silver-haired lover’s words, but he knew them to be true.

“It might be sooner than you think,” Leon whispered.  “My Clan’s arsenal was in Occulara.  I have a sneaking suspicion that that’s the reason Heaven’s Eye is headquartered there, of all places, so the chance that the arsenal hasn’t been discovered is extremely remote, and the chances that it wasn’t destroyed after Lord Koukouva retreated from it is even more so, but it’s something I want to keep my eyes open for, just in case.”

Elise grinned with an almost greedy look in her eyes.  “Arks are rare and extremely powerful; even the Empires only have a few apiece.  If there’s an undiscovered, and possibly even still intact arkyard below Occulara, then that’s something we have to investigate.”  Her look then fell, replaced by something a little more contemplative and resigned.  “But… you’re right, there’s probably little chance it hasn’t been discovered given it’s an all-but autonomous city within the Ilian Empire.  Heaven’s Eye has nearly unchecked control over Occulara, and they’ve built it up quite extensively.”

Valeria added, “At the very least, it would seem that if the Thunderbird Clan left anything behind, it hasn’t been put to any particularly unsavory uses, otherwise we’d probably know about it.  So little chance that a fleet of war-arks were left behind, or huge caches of weapons.”

“I think that maybe there were caches of weapons left behind, at least in small quantities,” Leon stated as he stared at the wall.  “The Bull Kingdom’s Flame Lances were supposed to have been based on Imperial weapons, weren’t they?  Now, I can’t say for sure, but I have a suspicion that the Imperial Lances, whatever form they take, could very well be based on Nexus-grade weapons my Clan left behind.”

“We don’t have any proof of that, though, do we?” Valeria asked.

“No, we don’t,” Leon conceded, “it’s just a suspicion I’ve had.  Still, it’s not the only consideration it leaves us with…”

Leon gave Elise a meaningful look, and the fire-haired woman said, “These planes, then?  Minor, Tiryns, and Kyprus?”

“Minos and Kypros,” Leon corrected, “but yes, those are the ones.  A palace-plane, a plane of unimaginable wealth, and a fortress-plane, all three of which made for the most important foundations upon which the Thunderbird Clan had been built.”  Leon paused a moment and looked to Valeria, who had the most knowledge of the Nexus out of all four of them.  “Have you ever heard of any of these places?”

“Not much,” Valeria admitted.  “A few off-hand remarks—‘fortress to shame Tiryns’, ‘not even Tiryns could withstand such might’, and the like.  Nothing concrete.  I’d have to ask my father about them.”

Leon grimaced, but nodded.

“I suppose we can’t make any definitive plans for them until we know more,” he said.

“Are you still intending to go to the Nexus, first?” Elise asked.

“Absolutely,” Leon replied.  “I have no idea how we’re going to get there, but by all accounts, it seems that arks capable of traveling the Void are more common there than anywhere else.  It would be better to struggle to reach the Nexus and gain the ability to travel anywhere, then struggle to reach anywhere, and continue to struggle to go anywhere else.  At the very least, it seems that traveling through the Void isn’t impossible for those who reach Apotheosis, but we’ll still need solid access to long range arks before thinking about reclaiming my Clan’s wider holdings.”

“I suppose that makes sense,” Elise whispered.

“Besides,” Leon continued, “I want to build up some kind of base in the Nexus, first.”

“Doesn’t the Nexus regularly destroy itself?” Maia asked aloud, speaking for the first time since they’d returned to the guest house.

“Every hundred-thousand years,” Leon replied.  “It’s been a little under eighty-thousand years since the last such Reconstitution, so we still have twenty-thousand years or so to accomplish this.  More than enough time to get established long enough to find somewhere more permanent, I’d say.”

“Hopefully…” the river nymph replied with a light frown.

Leon shrugged and sighed.  “I think that right now, we have so little information that making any concrete plan is a little foolish.  I want to go to the Nexus before anywhere else, but I don’t mind changing that plan if something else comes up.”

Maia mirrored his shrug.  “So long as we aren’t trapped,” she said.  Leon nodded in understanding.

“Is there anything else we need to bring up?” he asked the other three.

None had much else to say, so they moved on to making plans for the following day.  They didn’t have much time to explore Ancon, and they wanted to make the most of it.  After some discussion, they eventually settled on exploring a park in the morning, and then seeing a play in the afternoon.

After they broke for the night, though, Valeria went to see her father.  Justin was glad to see his daughter and was a little aggrieved that she’d come to him for information rather than any other motive, but when she started asking him questions, he gave her the answers she wanted.

She asked him about the planes that Nestor had told Leon about, and she was surprised to learn that Justin was fairly well-informed on the subject—apparently the three most important planes to the Thunderbird Clan were common knowledge in the Nexus, and there were many stories about them, not the least of which how they fell.

After getting her answers, Valeria returned to Leon, Elise, and Maia to relay what she’d been told.

Kypros was the most active, being the richest and most attractive plane to hold.  As far as Justin was aware, the planar cluster that Kypros was a part of was still controlled by forces from the Storm Lands, but the group that held the plane changed every decade or two.  Kypros was so rich a prize that oceans of blood were spilled to take and hold it.  It was considered common sense that only the next Storm King would have the power and authority to make it theirs, and there hadn’t been anyone powerful enough to claim that title since Jason Keraunos’ death, so Kypros remained a battleground.

Tiryns, however, was a different story.  It was an incredible fortress plane of legendary repute.  Supposedly fully staffed and supplied, it was able to defend the huge planar cluster that formed the core of the Thunderbird’s Clan’s power from attack with ease—it was the strongpoint that made all the other defenses of the planar cluster possible.  However, these days, it was practically deserted, held by squatters and forces no better than pirates.  Its great Tempest Cannons were silent, Tiryns’ occupiers unable to maintain them; the Hurricane Shield inoperable; its Castra satellite planes empty; its portals closed; its arkyards empty and broken; and its innumerable walls and citadels devoid of life.  Only the gigantic bands of Lumenite that arced above and around the fortress-plane that could encase the entire plane in a shield of invincible light if fully powered and that bristled with other magical weapons and defense platforms, were still inhabited, all else essentially abandoned.

Buried somewhere within the planar cluster it defended was Minos, likely just as abandoned, but Justin wasn’t sure.  The Thunderbird Clan, Justin had said, had always been incredibly stingy with the maps of the planar cluster where they made their home, and getting any information on it had been practically impossible.  In the millennia that followed their collapse, so many charlatans had made fake maps to sell that ferreting out any true maps that may have leaked from migrants and refugees had been impossible.

Hardly anyone wanted that planar cluster, anymore, and hardly anyone ever came out of it.  ‘Abandoned’, Justin claimed, or as close to it as a cluster of several hundred Aeterna-sized planes could be.  Devastated during the massive wars of succession following Jason Keraunos’ death, the place had become a backwater that wasn’t worth the time to occupy and rebuild, so shattered and ruined that no one even checked up on the cluster anymore.  Even the occasional bold scavenger rarely stayed long, usually scared off by the pirates and smugglers that occupied the few remaining intact fortress planes other than Tiryns in the cluster.

Tiryns, as the primary fortress that defended the cluster, had nothing of worth to defend anymore, and as the locus of power among those who aspired to seize the title of Storm King shifted, it became more and more irrelevant.  Likewise, Minos, despite being the central palace and spiritual capital of the Thunderbird Clan, was unlikely to hold anyone but looters, in Justin’s view.

When Valeria finished, Leon was left silent, unsure exactly how to respond to all of that information.  He wondered how much of it was true, separate from whether or not Justin might’ve lied.  It at least sounded plausible enough, with civil wars tracking with what he knew of the aftermath of the fall of his Clan, and depopulation and mass migration being the natural result…

’… But hundreds of planes?’ he wondered to himself.  ‘How could so much territory just be abandoned?  Along with Minos and Tiryns?’

He thought back to what he knew of his Clan outside of Aeterna.  It wasn’t much, but from a few off-hand remarks from the Thunderbird, he knew that the Clan survived in some form until at least the last ten thousand years, which meant that there were almost seventy-thousand years minimum between the death of Jason Keraunos and the final death of his last Clan member outside of Aeterna.

‘Did the Clan abandon Minos?’ Leon thought.  ‘And how did Tiryns fall?  Were all the planes it defended evacuated?  There has to be someone living there other than pirates and looters!  It can’t just be abandoned!’

No matter what, though, he was almost happy.  Tiryns was occupied by squatters, and Minos had been lost to history.  His Clan’s home cluster was empty at best, and quite possibly anarchic in truth, while Kypros and its cluster was a perpetual warzone.  Though the thought of these places being occupied by anyone else not of his Clan had his blood boiling, he also never wanted such places to just be handed to him.

‘Taking them back ought to be quite the experience…’ he thought to himself as a smile uncontrollably spread across his face.  The retaking of his Clan’s old centers of power would be the biggest proof possible that he was the true heir of the Thunderbird Clan, and not just an entitled child using power he was graced with by the accident of his birth.

He couldn’t wait to get started.

---

“What’s wrong, Leon Raime?” Penelope asked, her dark brown eyes narrowed in amusement as she turned from the play to watch Leon fight not to bury his face in his hands, though he’d already sunk low in his seat.  “I thought a man of your caliber would have a better resistance to bad jokes.  Are comedies not your forte?”

Leon grimaced in disgust, mortification, and muted rage as he returned the eighth-tier woman’s look with something more akin to disgust than amusement, and didn’t answer.

The play he and his family had gone to see was a comedy, and if he tried to distance himself from the subject matter then he’d say that the jokes were funny enough, especially with the jubilant reactions from the crowd, but the subject matter was too close for him to do so.

It was a comedic retelling of the life of one of the Ilian Empire’s founding heroes, one of the Brilliant Eleven, which Leon and his family hadn’t known before the play began.  The hero was born shortly before the Thunderbird Clan’s arrival, lived for a while beneath their tyrannical rule, and then rebelled—though Leon was mostly substituting the bird-headed ‘otherworlders’ that the play portrayed with his Clan, for these characters weren’t particularly accurate to what he knew to be the plane’s history.

But even though it wasn’t technically his Clan up on stage, their substitutes were still made out to be comically over-the-top evil, and oftentimes comedically incompetent.  Many jokes were made where the main character prepared for a long time to make some plan of resistance against them, only for them to destroy themselves before he could even arrive, leaving him confused and almost disappointed.

The crowd was eating it up, laughing uproariously at nearly every joke, but Leon’s family were silent, and Leon himself was beyond mortified.

Making the matter worse, Penelope was there with them, making it too awkward for them to just leave.  They had reserved one of the private boxes above the large theater’s main seating area, but apparently she was in another of the private boxes and noticed their arrival.  Contrary to what Leon would’ve expected had he known she was there, she actually left her box and asked to join them, reasoning that comedies are always more fun when watching with others.  Not being able to refuse without looking rude, Leon and his family were practically forced to invite her into their box to watch the play with them.

And so, they were stuck watching Leon’s Clan—effectively Elise, Valeria, and Maia’s Clan, too, now, given their connection with Leon—be denigrated and humiliated on stage, and couldn’t even explain to Penelope why they weren’t enjoying the play.

“I’m fine with comedies,” Leon answered the Heaven’s Eye agent through gritted teeth, “I just don’t think this one is very funny.”

Penelope cracked a smirk.  “I would normally be loath to agree with someone like you, but in this case, I simply must.  I’m more entertained that this is the only part of the theater not shaking with laughter right now…”

“It only takes a few people laughing to make something funny,” Elise whispered, the only sign of her relative anger at the mockery of Leon’s Clan being a slight tinge of red in her cheeks.  “If a few people start, then it’s just easier for everyone to follow suit.”

“Maybe…” Penelope whispered.  She took a deep breath and then completely changed the subject, letting the raucous roaring of the throngs below drown out everything else.  “Lady Elise, what are your intentions for Heaven’s Eye?”

Elise blinked in confusion for a moment at the sharp change in topic, but she didn’t let the question throw her off for long.  “I had no immediate intentions, Lady Penelope.  I have to see to my family’s household first and foremost.”

“An understandable issue that needs sorting,” Penelope replied, her almond eyes narrowing, “but I was speaking of after that.  Surely, after your mother assumes her new role, you will be looking to increase your duties, too?”

Elise smiled at Penelope, but from the way the corners of her mouth tightened, Leon could tell that it was forced.  “My mother has released me from my role as her secretary,” Elise said.  “I’m free to work on my personal projects.  I don’t have much interest in rising through the ranks of Heaven’s Eye right now.  That might change in the future, but right now, my plans start and end with my family.”

Penelope stared at Elise for a long moment, and then seemed to relax.  “That’s… unfortunate to hear,” the woman said, not looking even remotely sincere as the words passed her lips.

Elise let the matter go, though, and seemed to turn her attention back to the play for a few minutes before Penelope spoke again.

“Do you have any idea where you might decide to live once you’ve reached Occulara?”

“We’re still hammering out the details,” Elise politely replied, not once looking at the Eye of the Director.  “We need lots of land for what we’re planning, and we’re unsure of what’s on offer in the city.”

“I’ll help you out,” Penelope said, not seeming to even entertain the idea of Leon and Elise refusing.

Which they didn’t, at least not in those words.

“There’s no need for that, Lady Penelope,” Leon stated as he rose slightly from where he’d let his body slouch in his seat, “we’re more than capable of finding a villa suitable for our family on our own without taking up your undoubtedly valuable time.”

“I was ordered to escort you to Occulara,” Penelope bluntly stated.  “After the report of that little vampire attack you had to suffer made its way to headquarters, it was decided that you needed a little extra help.  My father is eager to see all of you welcomed to Occulara, and to that end, will likely order me to help you, regardless of how any of us feel about it.  Get used to it now.”

Her tone remained steady, but when Leon glanced at her, the corners of her eyes were tight and her cheeks were slightly raised in a barely-suppressed squint.  She was about as happy about this arrangement as he was.

Something they could commiserate together over, he supposed, but he’d still rather that he and Penelope had as little to do with each other as possible.  He and Elise shared that sentiment later when the play was over, but for the time being, Leon just did his best to ignore the representations of his Ancestors being portrayed as bumbling, incompetent villains on the stage below.  Thankfully, Penelope didn’t speak to them much after that, and left as soon as the play was finished.

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