Apotheosis.  The process of becoming divine.  Now that he’d achieved it, Leon could understand why it was named as it was.

Power filled him like it never had before.  An ocean of magic was available to him, and not just stored in his soul realm, but flooding his physical body, too.  So much magic that a mortal would likely explode if they tried to contain even a fraction as much.

And origin power on top of that…  Origin power was pure, concentrated magic.  The magic power that Leon had used and generated before this was runoff, origin power so diluted that it barely resembled what it could’ve been.  With origin power now spilling from his Origin Spark, he felt… invincible.  Not only that, but he also felt all-powerful.  He felt like anything that he envisioned he could create with a snap of his fingers.

More than that, the way that magic flowed through his soul realm made a kind of sense to him that he simply couldn’t describe.  It was instinctual knowledge, an awareness of the world around him that he hadn’t had before.  Like how a bird knows how to angle its wings to propel itself through the air, Leon simply knew his magic.

He closed his eyes and reveled in this sensation, in this knowledge that eluded words.  However, he could only stand it for a short moment before his eyes cracked open and turned upward, landing on his Origin Spark.

It was a beautiful sight; the orb of light hovered a mile above his Mind Palace, but he could sense that if he wanted it to, it would descend.  So, he did just that, falling toward his Mind Palace with his own personal star in tow.  As he approached, he had his Origin Spark halt about five hundred feet above his throne.  Then, he landed.

“Does it have to be so damn bright?” Xaphan complained almost as soon as Leon’s feet touched the ground.

Leon grinned, and with but a thought, the light emitted by the Origin Spark dimmed.  However, in another way, it didn’t.  If he looked up at the Origin Spark, it was just as bright as before, but when he didn’t, his soul realm was perfectly lit, as if this thing of tremendous brightness was at a much greater distance than it was.

“Better, demon?” Leon asked with a cheeky grin.

Xaphan huffed.  “Yes,” he begrudgingly replied, crossing his arms.

Leon found himself distracted looking at the demon.  Xaphan’s fire was magical, but he could see other energies within it, woven like a few disparate black threads in a weave of silver.

‘Demonic power,’ he knew without having to ask.

Beyond the fire itself, Leon found that he was able to see past it with a clarity that he hadn’t expected.  Whereas Xaphan was usually a barely visible shadow within the flame, now Leon could see his obsidian body with almost perfect clarity, but he could also see the fire just as well.  His eyes hurt a little bit like he was going cross-eyed the longer he stared at Xaphan.

“Careful,” the Thunderbird said as she landed and assumed human form.  “You might need some time to get used to all that’s changed.”

“Usually takes a few days,” Xaphan said as his posture relaxed.  “For you, I’ll estimate a few months.”  He paused, then lowered his head slightly, a crooked smile upon his gleaming, glassy face.  “And well done, Leon.”

Leon gave his demonic partner a genuine smile before averting his eyes.  “Thanks, Xaphan.”

He was about to say something similar to the Thunderbird, but as he turned toward her, he found himself almost assaulted.  She threw her arms around him, laughing like a little girl given a present.

“Leon!” she shouted.  “Leon!  My boy!  You’ve done it!”

“Couldn’t contain yourself that long, could you?” Xaphan grumbled.  “No sense of dignity or gravitas, this one.”

The Thunderbird spared him a glare.  “I’m imperious enough, demon.  Shall I show you?”

Xaphan shrugged, but backed off, leaving Leon and his Ancestor to speak with relative privacy.

“So,” the Thunderbird said as she released Leon and took a few steps back, “how do you feel?”

Leon took a long moment to evaluate himself before answering.  He inspected his soul realm, his magic body, and his physical body.  He was a little startled to see just how trashed the meditation chamber had become while he was preoccupied, but otherwise…  “I feel better than I ever have before.  Like I’m a new man.”  His tone was tinged with awe, and the Thunderbird’s smile grew wider with every word he said.

But then, her expression froze as she took on a more didactic tone.  “Do you understand now why I told you that you didn’t need that device?”

Though he didn’t need to, Leon looked up and inspected the sky.  Whatever remained of his wireframe was gone, reduced to nothing at all from the sheer power of his Origin Spark’s birth.  Regardless, it had performed its job magnificently.  Still…

“I know I didn’t,” he said.  “It helped in the beginning, but it wasn’t necessary.  I just wasn’t thinking about magic in the right way.”

“You enchanters, always trying to study your way out of a problem!”  The Thunderbird knocked him on the head a few times with her knuckles.  She didn’t do any real damage, but the gesture alone was enough to force Leon to shrink back slightly in embarrassment.  “Some things have to be felt more than they have to be known!  Some things can’t be fought, they have to be convinced!  And some things will do what you want them to do, if you can only get it through your head that your power is not separate from you!  That it’s an intrinsic part of you as much as your heart or your lungs are!  Tell me: over the past fifty years of attempts, what was your biggest mistake?  I’ll give you a hint: you only corrected yourself at the very end.”

Leon sighed, then with his newfound instinctual knowledge of magic, considered her question.  He arrived at an answer in moments, and he felt no small amount of shame in the admission.

“It’s as you say, I wasn’t thinking and controlling my magic properly.  I was fighting it, but in my assumption that it would fight back, it did.  Magic isn’t coerced, commanded, or controlled.  I don’t think about twirling my arm around to move my sword when I train or fight, and use of magic should be the same.  It usually is, but I lost sight of that in creating my Origin Spark.”

“It’s more complicated than that, but yours is a good summary.”

Leon nodded in thanks.  He knew that it was more complicated than that, but that mental block had been his biggest mistake, not his only mistake.

“Now,” the Thunderbird continued, her tone turning more thoughtful as she glanced upward for a moment, “let’s talk about that device of yours.  While you now know that you didn’t need it at all, it still functioned quite… interestingly, wouldn’t you say?”

Leon grinned.  “I would.  The magic compression it achieved was astounding!”

“It was more than astounding,” his Ancestor declared, “it did something I didn’t think was possible.  It created origin power.”

Leon cocked his head slightly.  “That was the purpose it was built for, yes.  If magic is diluted origin power, and the way to condense an Origin Spark is by compressing magic back down, then it stands to reason that compressing magic would create origin power.  Throw in plenty of filter enchantments to make sure that only magic is being compressed and none of those diluting impurities are present, and magic should revert to origin power.  Right?  Is that… not what happened?”

“That’s exactly what happened,” the Thunderbird confirmed.  She turned her dreadfully serious eyes back to Leon.  “Many have tried to do what you accomplished.  As far as I know, all have failed.”

Leon’s eyebrows shot upward, but he took a moment to contemplate what she said.  Certainly, none of his other attempts to use the wireframe had ever gone so far, and none had ever created that pinpoint of light that heralded the creation of his Origin Spark before.  Now that origin power was steadily entering his soul realm and physical body from the Origin Spark, he could say with some certainty that that bead of light had been origin power, condensed within the wireframe.

“So origin power isn’t created from anything other than living beings?” Leon asked.

“Of course not,” the Thunderbird replied.  “Think about it, Leon: the same is true of magic power, too.  All magic in the world is generated either from a living being, then enters the environment from the being’s aura or from the dissipation of some expression of that power, or… when the Origin Spark at the center of the universe, the one at the heart of the Nexus, emits origin power, that origin power will almost always dissipate.  It turns into the magic power that inundates the Nexus, and when the Nexus destroys itself every hundred thousand years, all of that power is flung out into the universe, or carried away by those who travel to and from it in relatively small quantities.  Most of it follows the fragments of the Nexus that fall outward and become new planes, but all of that power that doesn’t do that radiates even further outward until it reaches the Elemental Planes of the demons.”

Leon nodded along, absorbing every word.  When she paused, he asked, “Is there no way to capture that origin power emitted from the… Universal Origin Spark?”

The Thunderbird chuckled.  “In my day, we called it the Primal Origin Spark.”

Leon made a face and nodded.  “Of course you did.  I’m guessing there were a lot of things named ‘Primal’ this and ‘Primal’ that, weren’t there?”

“Idiot,” Xaphan scoffed from his pavilion.

“It wasn’t known as the ‘Primal Age’ when we were in it,” the Thunderbird chided.  “That moniker only came later, after Khosrow led humanity to overthrow the Primal Gods and Devils, and then declared his Law.”

“OK, then.  Fine.  Primal Origin Spark it is.”

“Don’t get sullen, my boy.”  The Thunderbird laid a hand on his cheek, and though in their human forms, she was shorter than he was, he felt like a small child being scolded by his mother.  “You’ve achieved something great today.  This is a time for celebration!”

Leon grinned, but before he launched himself back into the waking world, he turned back to what they had been discussing.  “Was there no way to capture that origin power from the Primal Origin Spark?”

“It is captured.  Or at least, back in my day, it was.  I’m not sure if it still is.  It’s a precious resource, used to power the greatest and more devastating weapons, enchantments, and other marvels of magical engineering all over the planes.  But there’s only so much of it to go around.  If you can’t get ahold of it, then you have to have a post-Apotheosis mage handy to power whatever requires origin power, and those don’t come cheaply or in large quantities.

“Consequently, many have tried to create origin power outside of these two sources—the Primal Origin Spark or a post-Apotheosis mage.  Perhaps some have succeeded, but I never heard of any.”

“Doesn’t seem like many had access to work done by an old monk studying devilish magic,” Leon mused aloud.

‘Who were you, Laylen?  What kind of mage were you, to realize runes like those?’  He wished he could’ve spoken to Tir’Anu’s monastic brother, but unfortunately, the man had long been a resident of Death’s Kingdom by now.

He sighed in dejection.  His best tutor in the arts of enchanting was Nestor, but Nestor, though highly skilled with a diverse knowledge base, only knew so much.  Even he hadn’t cottoned onto the possibilities of the wireframe Leon had created, even as Leon used him for reference alongside the notes he’d taken from Laylen’s work.  Nestor had only noticed the possibilities that such magic had for transportation…

If Leon could create more wireframes and replicate what he’d done in his soul realm back in the physical world, then he might have a monopoly on a new, extremely potent power source.  There was a huge problem he saw, however.

“That was a lot of magic absorbed to condense even a little bit of origin power.”

“It was,” the Thunderbird agreed.  “But origin power is worth it.  When you’re more familiar with it, you’ll see.”

“I’m not arguing that, I’m more concerned about how much magic I’ll need to generate to condense that much origin power.  Creating origin power in that way won’t be subtle.”

“No, I suppose it won’t be.”  The Thunderbird frowned.  “It warrants study, but… perhaps wait on using such techniques until you’re more established in the Nexus.”

Xaphan piped up, “Or just find a way to make it subtle!  It can be done!”

“I’ll look into it later,” he said, his eyes drawn back to his throne.  “Right now, I think maybe I’ve let this carry on too long.  Looks like the meditation chamber was trashed, so I doubt my ascension has gone unnoticed.”

“Go to them,” the Thunderbird replied with a smile.  “Celebrate as you will.  Preferably by making more attempts to continue the bloodline.”

Leon grimaced, hiding his insecurity behind a too-thin smile.  “Still working on that.”  Without another word, he strode to his throne, shared one last celebratory look with both the Thunderbird and Xaphan, and then took a seat.

A moment later, he opened his physical eyes and found that he was lying in a small crater.  The floor of his meditation chamber had been torn asunder, the enchantments that had powered the Lumen Staff ripped to bits.  Fortunately, the Lumen Staff was made of sterner stuff and had survived intact, though its plating had been scuffed.

The walls and ceiling, meanwhile, were burned in differing ways.  The lower half of the walls and the ceiling directly above Leon had been completely scorched black as if Leon had been burning.  The upper half of the walls, meanwhile, were now decorated with dozens of lightning pattern burns that he found rather pleasing to the eye, if not to the nose; the meditation chamber stank of ozone and burned material.

The door was still intact, thankfully, and Leon could hear everyone outside vigorously debating whether or not they should enter.  He put all those arguments to bed when he pushed himself to his feet and threw open the door, emerging into the center of what seemed to be the prelude to a battle.

Most of his friends and family were standing in front of him, their backs to the door.  They were blocking the second group from accessing his meditation chamber, largely consisting of his ministers and most of the Tempest Knights.

In contrast to this rule, however, the Jaguar stood with his family and retainers, while Maia stood next to Iron-Striker, her aura flexing more than anyone else’s.  Leon could feel her panic and concern and knew that he’d exited the chamber at just the right time to stop her from barreling everyone over and rushing inside to see what had become of him.

Instead, everyone had a mere second to notice that he’d opened the door before she barreled through all of them and threw herself at him.

[Leon!] she screamed into his mind.  Her arms wrapped around his neck, taking him by surprise.  He had barely a moment to savor the feel of his river nymph lover in his arms before she was practically crawling all over him, peeling and poking at his tattered clothing to evaluate any damage to his body.  A moment later, Elise, Valeria, and Cassandra joined her as everyone else waited with bated breath.

Iron-Striker, the Jaguar, and the other tenth-tier mages around, however, stared at Leon with nothing less than reverent awe.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Leon said as he took Maia’s hands and stopped her inspection.

She pulled her hands from his and took his face in her hands.  She stared at him with severity.  [You scared me,] she said.  [You scared all of us.]

Leon furnished her with a warm, calming smile, then expanded the subject of his expression to include the rest of his family, then his friends.

“No need to be afraid,” he whispered, taking her hands into his again.  “I succeeded.  I achieved Apotheosis.”

Though his declaration came quietly and without much fanfare, the celebratory shouting that followed from all those in the courtyard more than made up for it.  The entire palace shook as the auras of nearly all of those present practically exploded with jubilation.

“Our King!” the Jaguar roared.  “OUR GOD!”

“Let it be known!” Iron-Striker shouted, joining his voice to the Jaguar’s.  “THE TEN TRIBES FOLLOW DIVINITY ONCE AGAIN!”

The shouting from the others was no less grandiose—not that Leon could blame them.  However, he put it out of his mind as he made eye contact with those most important to him.

Elise’s emerald eyes were watering, likely from concern, relief, and excitement.  Her lips were moving, but it seemed she was having trouble finding the words.

Cassandra simply looked awed, and she seemed to be drinking in Leon’s aura with a look of avariciousness and anticipation.  With ambrosia, this power was in her future, too—not that she couldn’t enjoy having a husband with that power beforehand.

Maia was still concerned, but now that Leon had confirmed his status, she relaxed into his embrace and trembled in his arms as the energy in the courtyard seemed to double with every passing second.

Valeria’s response, however, surprised Leon the most.  A knowing look graced her heart-shaped face, and she asked in a soft, though still more than audible voice, “How did that creation of yours work out?”

Leon smiled.  “Fantastically, though not as I originally expected.”

“The darkness runes?” she asked, referring to Laylen’s work that Leon had heavily borrowed from.

Leon nodded, his eyes flitting to the edge of the courtyard where a stunned Nestor stood, seemingly unsure of what to do with himself.  Given his faceplate had no way to express emotion, Leon couldn’t tell exactly what he was feeling, but his stance seemed a cross between uncertainty and a deep desire to run to Leon and talk his ear off.  Given how he was slowly edging his way through the peristyle in Leon’s general direction, Leon felt like he knew which emotion was winning out.  The dead man wanted to talk, but he was reluctant to show that want before everyone present.

“We’ll have to talk about it later,” Leon said.

Before anything more could be said, he felt magic senses crashing into his palace from just about everyone on Kataigida, and some originating from outside of it.  All of them were scattered by his palace’s wards, though he could sense the wards struggling to keep up.  It seemed his ascension had not gone unnoticed.

“What happened out here?” he asked.  “I was a little busy, so I couldn’t see for myself.”

“Lots of lightning and clouds,” Elise explained, her composure rapidly returning now that Leon had revealed himself and his achievement.  “Lots of wind.  Power spiraled upward from your meditation room like a beacon.  I think everyone will know about your ascension before the day is done.”

Leon felt more magic senses from outside of Kataigida fall upon the palace.  Their origins were mostly from the Empires, but a couple weren’t…

“Those who matter most already know,” he stated.  “I’ll have to meet with them, I suppose.”

“I’ll handle the rest,” Elise said as she took Leon’s arm which didn’t have a tenth-tier river nymph clutching it.  She pressed her lips to Leon’s cheek, then whispered in a voice as warm and sweet as honey, “Congratulations, Leon.”

Leon grinned and put thoughts of all the meetings he’d have to have in the future aside.  For the moment, he only had to worry about how hard everyone was going to celebrate, and given his life so far and what he knew and suspected lay ahead of him, celebrations were hardly something he needed to worry about.

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