Though he had not been in a while, Leon’s appreciation for the aesthetics of the Sacred Golden Empire hadn’t dimmed at all.  Their cities, and especially their capital of Evergold, lay sprawling out beneath the vast limbs of their titanic palace-trees, though not so much that the sky was not visible.  Natural lines that accentuated this chosen aesthetic abounded even in the city’s layout, though not so much that it prevented air from circulating throughout the streets.

From the air, it all looked even more spectacular.  The massive palace-tree in the center of Evergold stood thousands of feet tall and was surrounded by a tall grove of trees forming the Imperial Palace.  So tall was this tree and its grove that even flying in the Grand Druid’s personal ark at fifteen hundred feet, they were still flying quite clearly beneath the leafy canopy.

The couple weeks between Leon’s return to Occulara and the Grand Druid’s ‘religious ceremony’ that she’d invited Leon to had come and gone, and to attend this ceremony—and take a look at the ark Evergold had found—the Grand Druid herself had given Leon and his chosen retainers a ride.

Along with him and the Grand Druid, Leon traveled with Valeria, Maia, Gaius, Anna, and Helen.  More nerve-wracking than all of them combined, however, was Nestor, whom Leon explained away as a ‘personal project’ accompanying him for field testing.  Fortunately, the dead man had made not a sound, playing the part of a non-sentient golem marvelously.  The rest of his people were all busy with either personal business, or Heaven’s Eye business that he’d assigned them.

Were it not for some projects that Leon had involved him in developing some prototypes ahead of schedule, Gaius, too, would’ve been indisposed.  As it was, Leon had not only brought the other man along to help him test these prototypes but also to get him out and about, for it was no secret amongst the retinue that Gaius had been antsy for a long time.

But Leon’s concerns for his retinue didn’t end at Gaius; giving Helen and Anna some time back in their homeland seemed just the thing for the girls who’d just so recently seen—or rather, caused—the death of their parents’ murderer.  Ever since the raid that saw Casimir dead, both girls had been rather distant, though Helen at least seemed more taken with her work than anything.  Anna, on the other hand, seemed far more affected and far more in need of some time away from Occulara.

As it was, in the past two weeks, Red had had to step in twice to help corral Nidar and Astar, Anna’s two young wyverns, from rampaging through the estate.  With her onyx bracelet, Anna had had to be quite distracted to lose control of her war beasts to such a degree, and Leon had been forced to get Eirene to keep them under far greater lock and key, lest they get loose and cause even more trouble.

Unfortunately, even as Anna’s girlfriend, Eirene hadn’t been as helpful in getting Anna out of her funk as Leon had hoped, though she’d at least confirmed that Leon wasn’t just imagining that things were significantly off about her.

So, Leon had ordered Anna and Helen to both come along despite neither of them having much to do on their little sojourn to the Sacred Golden Empire.

“How do you find my city?” the Grand Druid asked as Leon ‘stared’ out of the ark using his magic senses.  There were no windows on the thing, but the enchantments allowed magic senses originating from within to reach out of the ark.

Leon, having lost himself in thoughts of his retinue for a moment, had to take a moment to process the Grand Druid’s question, which he masked as thinking hard and pondering his words.

“It’s quite beautiful,” he said with sincerity.  “As with most things in your Empire, Evergold is a feast for the senses.  I grew up in a forest, and I feel almost like I’m coming home when I visit your Empire.”

The Grand Druid smiled widely as Leon moved past the opening generic platitude and offered his more personal opinion.

“That,” she said, “can be as true as you want it to be, you know…”

Leon simply nodded.  He’d given her the same answer so many times that he didn’t think it necessary to keep repeating himself, though he caught Valeria giving him a subtle look out of the corner of his eye and nearly lost his composure.  While his silver-haired lover had quite passionately reiterated that she wasn’t particularly attracted to women the past several times they’d slept together, she hadn’t been shy about what she wouldn’t mind doing to Cassandra if given the chance, many of which involved lots of chains, whips, and oil—in what order, Leon knew not.  Neither did he know just how much of it was serious and how much was just sex talk while Valeria demonstrated for him.

Leon found it hard to keep the scenes she’d filled his head with in those intimate moments from rushing forth again, and from the way she subtly smirked, they were on her mind, too.  Either that or she was silently teasing him about his own feelings—which he hadn’t quite worked out for himself—for the blond Princess.

Keeping his face impassive, Leon turned his questioning towards a topic that the Grand Druid had steadfastly refused to discuss until they were back in Evergold.

“So, this ark you’ve apparently found—”

“Nothing apparent about it, Leon, we have what I said we have; I’ve seen it myself.”

“Right.  I was hoping you could tell me a bit more about it.  I can hardly be expected to do what you obviously want me to do unless I know more, can I?”

As he spoke, Leon glanced over the Grand Druid’s shoulder to where Nestor stood in the back of the opulent ark.  The Grand Druid had a hefty retinue of her own, many of whom were not only in the large ark with them, but sat between where Leon and the Grand Druid sat and where Nestor stood.  Despite this, Leon had no doubt that Nestor could hear every word they were saying, and the slight shifting in his posture as his head turned in their direction only confirmed that he was right.

“That eager to see it, are you?” the Grand Druid asked with a wide grin.  She played with her long gray hair for a moment before turning to look over her shoulder.  Leon’s concern grew when she made a gesture and all sound from the rest of the ark’s passengers ceased.  They clearly hadn’t stopped making noise, but the Grand Druid had obviously activated some enchantment that Leon couldn’t detect that blocked that sound from reaching them.

“There,” she said, “I trust everyone here with my life, but it’s better not to trust them with my Empire’s secrets, wouldn’t you agree?”

Leon grinned back, though his lips were closed.  When he stole another glance at Nestor, he saw the dead man still staring at him in a clear signal that he could still hear them despite the Grand Druid’s enchantment, and Leon’s smile grew significantly more genuine.

“A fine policy,” Leon replied.

“Before we begin, Leon,” the Grand Druid began, setting off alarms in Leon’s head immediately, “could you tell me a little more about that golem you brought with you?”

“Haven’t I already—”

“Yes, yes, your ‘personal project’.  Did you build it yourself?  I wasn’t aware you were in golemcraft.  Or did you find it somewhere?”

“Little of column A, little of column B.  I’m still working out just what the golem can do, but I’ve found it to be quite the capable assistant for certain tasks.”

“What sort of tasks?”

“Administrative.  It’s a fantastic scribe, it can carry quite a bit of weight, and represents a portable source of magic power.  Other than that, well, it’s hard to say.  I’m still finding out myself just what the golem is capable of.”

“Interesting.  It has a wholly unique design compared to the golems you’ve activated for my Empire…”

“That’s… well, it’s a little shameless, but since it’s from my Clan, I suppose few have more right than me… but when it first came into my possession, it was in quite the sad state.  Further modifications were necessary to get it up to even acceptable standards, leading to the differences in appearance.  Some liberties were taken with its design, yes, but it’s certainly better than it was when I first laid eyes on it.”

“You’ll have to fill me in on the particulars someday,” the Grand Druid replied with a wink and a smile that she somehow made look both natural and quite greedy at the same time.

“Maybe.  But you still haven’t told me of your ark.  I don’t even know how big it’s supposed to be, let alone what kind of state it’s in.”

“Yes…  Let’s start with that, then.  We found it buried deep beneath a hill about twenty miles north of Evergold’s outer suburbs.  A small earthquake opened a rift at the base of a great tree, and upon exploring it to judge how feasible it would be to close, some explorers found a section of the ark’s outer hull embedded in the tree’s root system.

“The tree itself is quite large—it is an unmodified exemplar of the species our palace-trees were first created from—and its root system is extensive.  Despite this, only a small section of the ark had been entangled, for the thing is enormous.  Our explorers have found it to be about eighteen hundred feet long but buried completely under more than a hundred feet of rock and soil.  The ark may have even been longer at one point, with its nose crumpled inward after hitting bedrock.”

Leon’s eyes grew wider with every word the Grand Druid said, and he couldn’t help but constantly flit between greed and a desire to destroy this thing before the Evergolden people could get their hands on it.  By Nestor’s breakdown after his return from the Director’s personal ark stash, he knew that the only class of ark that was anywhere close to Storm Herald’s two thousand feet were the Clan’s supercarriers, the most valuable military arks that his Clan had ever managed to produce.  Larger arks existed, Nestor had assured Leon, but they were few and far between, and never mass-produced.

Individually, the supercarriers weren’t well-armed, but they could carry more than a hundred smaller arks, some as large as a hundred feet long.  They were practically small mobile cities unto themselves and represented the backbone of any planar invasion that the Thunderbird Clan ever launched.  They were logistical hubs and both attack and defense platforms.  In his Clan’s prime, they held large complements of powerful mages, and while their weapon systems weren’t comparable to more dedicated attack arks, they were still powerful enough that a single supercarrier, by Leon’s estimation and if Nestor wasn’t exaggerating by too wide a margin, would be enough to destroy all four Empires if its commander so pleased.

Leon couldn’t say whether or not this was a supercarrier just yet, but if it was, he was struck with the thought that he simply couldn’t let the Sacred Golden Empire have something that powerful.  It would upset the balance of power too much, it would be too much relative power for…

… Although the longer he thought about it, he supposed the situation wasn’t quite as dire as he might’ve thought.  The vast majority of what his Clan had built had long since decayed to dust over eighty-thousand years.  It was only those things that were particularly well-enchanted and well-fortified that had survived such an abyss of time.  It made a degree of sense that a military ark would last a long time as well, but eighty-thousand years beneath the earth, having crashed hard enough to crumple its foredecks…

‘There likely isn’t even much left on it apart from a damaged superstructure,’ Leon mused.

“Quite a lot to think about, isn’t it?” the Grand Druid said teasingly as her words pulled Leon back to reality.

“Quite,” he agreed.  “There are certain things that are easy to keep in mind about my Clan.  That they built quite spectacularly isn’t anything remotely surprising.  But the idea that they built something so large that could fly through the air under its own power—not only that, but to traverse the Void itself—boggles the mind.  The sheer amount of magical engineering and enchanting and so many other disciplines that would be required to build such a thing is…”

“Quite,” the Grand Druid repeated.  “Puts everything into perspective, doesn’t it?  How small we are here on this plane?  There are an uncountable number of other planes out there, and the Nexus, of course, and at any point, someone could decide that they’re next.  They’re the ones who might try to conquer Aeterna again, they’re the ones who will put my people and all the rest of this world to the sword.  And what could we possibly do to stop them?  We have a few tenth-tier mages, yes, but what can we hope to use to resist such potential threats?”

Leon frowned lightly.  “I think the construction of such a large ark would be…”

“Impossible,” the Grand Druid definitively finished.  “I’m under no illusion about that.  To build anything that could possibly match the works of your Clan would be so far beyond even the power of my Empire that it’s laughable to consider.  But we can build arks that fly through the air.  Entering the Void is even theoretically possible, though we’re bound by treaty not to try.”

Leon cocked an eyebrow.  He’d never heard of such a treaty preventing entering the Void.

“But I believe that we need means to defend ourselves,” the Grand Druid continued.  “Even if all we learn are how to improve the arks we’re currently able to build, then we need to learn them.  We can’t be babes in a basket, just sitting here in the universe ready for anyone to just come back and pick up as they please.”

“I… understand, though I have to ask, why not try and enter the Void now?  What treaty prevents this?”

The Grand Druid huffed and dismissively waved her hand.  “An old treaty, though one we’ve all kept in mind.  The Void is a dangerous place, and it represents powers that we don’t want to provoke.  Having arks up in the Void could be seen as a threat unto itself, not only to any potential extraplanar entities out there but also to our neighbors.  For to control the air is to control the land, and to control the Void is to control the air.”

“I… suppose I can follow that line of thinking.”

“Yet you don’t sound like you approve.”

“I’m not one that likes limitations, even if I wouldn’t normally push against my limits without some reason to do so.  If someone tells me I can’t go somewhere, even if I had no desire to in the first place, I suddenly want to go there, just to see what they’re trying to hide.  And maybe a little out of spite.”

“Just a little?” the Grand Druid asked with a knowing wink.

Leon shrugged with a wry smile.  “Back to this ark, though.  It’s quite a large thing.  Is it even still functional?”

“It had some power when we unearthed it, though it’s obviously quite heavily damaged and degraded.  All of the doors are still locked, but the hull has been rent open in a few places, allowing access to some of the outer decks.  All of the internal doors are locked shut, too, so getting further in to access any critical systems has been impossible.”

“Can’t even cut your way through?”

“We’ve tried, to no avail.  The internal bulkheads are thick and strong, and while there are, as you can see, still some power problems, they don’t extend to the internal security enchantments.”

“Anything you’ve seen that might be worth worrying about?  Internal security golems and the like?  You remember what Cassandra and I encountered in the Prota Forest, right?”

“No such security has been found, manually controlled or not.”

“No sign of any intelligent life within the ark, either?” Leon asked, thinking of the surviving wisp that had once been in charge of operating at least some of Storm Herald’s systems.

“None.  Well, some evidence of animal activity having entered the ark at some point, using the open decks as nests and the like, but no intelligent signs of life.”

Leon frowned.  “Well, that may still present some kind of problem.  Power attracts power, as they say.  I’m sure there’s some kind of dangerous monster or ancient evil operating in there somewhere.  Better to assume that and be pleasantly surprised than be taken off-guard, no?”

“A wise philosophy.  I believe it’s one that has served Cassandra well in her adventures in these past few years,” the Grand Druid said with a leading look in her eye.

Leon’s smile thinned slightly, not entirely appreciating the change in topic.  “How is she, by the way?  Last I heard, she was in the east investigating some ancient ruins she found in the Beloran or somewhere like that?”

The Grand Druid glanced at the wall, clearly seeing outside of it with her magic senses, and she grinned.  The ark had come to a slow stop, which Leon had barely even realized with their conversation.  Now, the ark was slowly descending through the branches of the central palace-tree toward a large arkpad that, despite its size, still seemed quite private with few people gathered for the Grand Druid’s return.

Leading the group was a young woman dressed in a gold tunic and light brown pants, a cloth-of-gold cloak over her shoulders, her blond hair shoulder-length on the sides and long enough everywhere else to be pulled back into a long braid that made it halfway down her back, her ruby eyes glittering with anticipation.

And at her side was Sunlight, displayed as prominently as her smile, which grew almost predatory as Leon’s magic senses washed over her.

As the ark finally touched down on the arkpad and the doors almost immediately slid open, the Grand Druid shot Leon a smirk and said, “Perhaps you ought to ask her yourself…”

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