After returning to Ariminium, Leon and his people rested for the remainder of the day.  When the morning came, the Bull King formally invited him to return to the capital, which Leon, just as formally, accepted.

Not even an hour later, Leon, Julius, and their families were at the head of a grand procession practically crawling their way back to the capital over land.  Normally, Leon might’ve balked at moving at the plodding pace of a horse, but in this case, he relaxed and simply enjoyed the journey.  It was comfortable enough, and the feeling of nostalgia never left him. 

They kept moving, stopping only to rest at night, for more than two weeks.  Only when they reached Calabria did they stop for any extended length of time.  The city was not only close to Gaius’ home, but it was also the city that Justin had governed after moving to the Bull Kingdom.  As a result, Valeria had grown up in the city, and just as Leon wanted to use this tour as a way to say goodbye to the plane, Valeria also wanted some time spent in the city.  Leon was only too happy to give her all the time she wanted.

Over the course of a two-day stay, Valeria took Leon, Elise, Asiya, Cristina, Cassandra, Maia, and Anzu on an exhaustive tour of all her favorite places in the city.  Leon wasn’t surprised that most of those favorite places were fighting rings and race courses, and he found some entertainment in watching a few gladiator fights and chariot races.

Valeria was far more eager to show Leon around the Exarch’s palace than her favorite haunts in the city, however.  She showed him everything, from the apartments she’d lived in to the courtyard where Justin and those who’d followed him from the Nexus had trained her.  She’d become somewhat choked up at that point, and Leon could understand.  He didn’t share her grief as most of those she grieved for had been involved in the murder of his father or the subsequent violent actions taken against him and his family, but he could at least understand her pain.

Soon enough, though, the procession continued northward, reaching the capital after only another week.  It was a slow pace for Leon, but by the standards of the Bull Kingdom, they’d made excellent time.

As with the arrival at Ariminium, Julius arranged to have Leon’s party welcomed with a city-wide festival.  Leon, however, was in a less than celebratory mood.  Though he’d only just arrived and planned on staying for a week at least, he sent his family and friends ahead to get settled back into the villa that he and Elise had owned when they still lived in the city.  It was a bit small for the entire party, but between Julius, Heaven’s Eye, and the contacts that his former-noble former-retainers still had in the Kingdom, there were no issues with getting roofs over everyone’s head.

While all that was being worked out, Leon and Julius went on ahead to the capitol island.  Leon’s destination was Trajan’s mausoleum.

---

“All I know I learned from my brother,” Julius wistfully reminisced as he and Leon stood before Trajan’s memorial statue.  “All that’s worth knowing, anyway.”

“He was a great teacher,” Leon whispered.  “I just wish that I took his lessons closer to heart.”

“I think he would be proud of the man you’ve become, Leon,” Julius responded.

Leon opened his mouth to say… something, but no words came.  After several long seconds, he at least managed to croak, “Thank you.”

With a quick expression of earth magic and origin power, Leon put something he’d been practicing to use, and conjured from nothing but his own power a perfect replica of Trajan’s memorial statue, though small enough to fit in his hand.  However, in the style of the Bull Kingdom—aside from the Great Plateau—Trajan’s statue was unpainted white marble.  Leon decided on a whim that that wasn’t enough, and with another expression of power, the marble copy in his hand shifted color until the copy almost perfectly resembled Trajan.

“Is that what he looked like?” Julius asked a little absent-mindedly.  Regret seeped into every detail of the old King, weighing him down until he looked like a man with a foot in a mausoleum of his own.  “It’s been so long since I last saw him… I can hardly remember his face.  Or his voice.  My own brother…”  The King’s eyes fell to the ground at the base of Trajan’s statue for a moment before shooting back up to the Prince’s face.  Then, he turned his head to scan other mausoleums around them, all with statues of their own showing who was interred within.

“The graver did his job well,” Leon whispered.  “He captured Trajan’s likeness almost perfectly.  At least, how he was in public.”

A soft snort of amusement was Julius’ initial response.  A moment later, he added, “My brother always was a stickler for appearing dignified when not in private, wasn’t he?”

Leon shrugged but offered the Bull King a shallow smile.

Julius then sighed.  “Hold those you love close, Leon.  You never know what might happen.  I secluded myself for a short while to train.  My own mistake stretched that ‘short while’ to decades, and when I awoke, my world had changed.  We never know when we might lose those we care about.  So make sure they know you care about them.  Hold them close, and never let them go.”

As the Bull King spoke, his eyes flickered between several other statues around Trajan’s—other members of the Royal Family, and likely his and Trajan’s parents or relatively close family, if Leon had to guess.  As he made his final statement, however, Julius’ eyes landed on Leon, impressing upon him the gravity of his words.

But Leon didn’t need that reminder.  “I will,” he said, his mind filling first with memories of Trajan, and then of his childhood in the Northern Vales with Artorias.  He didn’t need to be reminded that his life could be turned upside down in only a moment.

Another sigh from Julius was the last noise either of them made until they left the Royal mausoleums.

---

The night of their arrival in the city, Julius held a magnificent ball in the palace.  Leon and his family were, of course, the focus of attention, and while Leon almost suffocated from the sheer number of people who approached him wanting to share a few complimentary—and oftentimes sycophantic—words, he was still able to carve off some time to dance with his ladies.  Even Maia participated, showing more skill in dancing than Leon had been expecting.

[Elise taught me,] she’d explained.  [Told me I had to be ready, just in case.]

Leon chuckled.  [You’re damn good at it.  Better than me, I think.]

Whereas she’d been slightly frowning from making a spectacle of her skills, Leon’s words brought out a proud smile that only grew the longer they danced.

Leon’s dance with Maia was the longest, but he made sure to dance with all of his ladies.  And then Cristina and Asiya each asked for a dance.  That opened the floodgates, and where before Leon had been inundated by the elite asking to share a few words, he suddenly found himself almost drowned by the sheer number of ladies who wanted to share a dance with him.

Unfortunately for most of them, he declined almost everyone else save for Stephania, Julius’ older daughter; Aelia, August’s daughter; and Alix, who managed to tear herself away from Gaius just long enough to share one dance with Leon.

When he left the dance floor, though, Leon was somewhat amused to see those of the next generation enjoying their time in their parents’ homeland—Alcander’s sons and Gaius and Alix’s son and daughters took to the attention they were attracting quite well.  Even Nidar and Astar were mingling quite well, Anna having done much to ensure that they were well-adjusted to human society after seeing how Red treated most human norms.  Thankfully, both wyverns remained in human form throughout the entire ball.

When the ball finally ended, Leon and his people returned to the villa that he and Elise had once called home, the villa where they had been married.  It was a bittersweet moment when Leon walked in, knowing that this might very well be the last time he spent any time at all in the villa.  Throughout the night, he wandered through its rooms, remembering the get-togethers that he and Elise—mostly Elise—held within.  He especially remembered the welcoming party celebrating his and Elise’s moving-in, which ended when a small group of vampires attacked.

He was rather amused to see that his first workshop was still there, though it was rather depressingly empty.  Just for the memories, Leon conjured several tables and stacks of spell paper, arranging them all in the way that he remembered until the workshop looked just as it had when he’d lived in the villa.  He whiled away the night occasionally inscribing some of the spells he’d made for arrows in the workshop—which he was now able to do with spectacular ease given their relative simplicity compared to the enchantments he was now more used to working with.  However, for the most part, he simply leaned back in a chair and absorbed the atmosphere, carving it into his memory.  He only left the workshop to join his ladies who wanted to explore the bedroom in greater detail.

Two more weeks they stayed in the capital before heading north.  Again, Julius, the Royal Family, and the Paladins escorted Leon’s party, though the Bull King’s entourage shrank considerably for the next leg of the journey.

They reached Teira not much more than a week later.  While Leon didn’t have much emotional connection to the city, he still wanted to stop there for a few days.

Julius, in the decades since Leon’s departure from his Kingdom, had kept the ruins of Argent Palace as a black site.  He told Leon that a few people had been caught rummaging around in the palace, but only one—seen in the ruins only a matter of months beforehand—had escaped capture.  All the others, having been caught looting whatever they could get their hands on, were subsequently executed.

Leon was mildly curious about the one who escaped, but Julius wasn’t able to give him any real details, apologizing profusely to Leon for allowing it to happen.  Leon, however, just waved off his concerns.  While he was offended at the looting in principle, there wasn’t anything in Argent Palace that he wanted since he’d cleaned out his family’s archives.  He was content with the ruins being a monument to House Raime, a branch family started by Prince Demetrios after the fall of the Thunderbird Clan.

Still, he spent a couple days wandering the ruins alone and visited the family tomb that had been rather mercifully untouched by the ruin of the rest of the palace.  He ventured below the surface, looking upon the faces of his Ancestors carved in stone in front of their sarcophagi.  He made copies of every one of them, marking down on the base of their statues the epitaphs inscribed upon the adjacent sarcophagi.  The process would’ve taken a significant amount of time, but when he realized the enormity of the tomb, he used his magic senses to explore ahead of him.

He was easily able to trace the line of Raime Archdukes in a direct line for more than three thousand years, from Kyros to his father Sakellarios, then to Sakellarios’ mother Corina.  On the chain went, from Corina to Adrian, Hector, Andromeda, and another Leon, which he was most amused by.  Several dozen Archdukes he traced that way, finding a break in the direct line at that point where an Archduke had been unable to have any kids at all, leading to a cousin succeeding him.  From there, it took him another twenty-five Archdukes to reach Artemios, the last Thunder King and first Raime Archduke.  Leon then counted another hundred and forty-seven Thunder Kings, preceding Artemios, as well as nearly five times as many other family members interred in the tomb.

Thousands of years of history he explored, hundreds of his Ancestors he learned about.  When he reached the end of the tomb, however, he had only one thought.

‘Not enough.’

The tomb only held his Ancestors going back about twenty-thousand years.  All before them, including Demetrios himself, were missing.

Unfortunately, when Leon returned to the surface and asked the Bull King about any other tombs House Raime may have had, the King wasn’t able to answer.  They took Leon’s question to the city’s Exarch and highest-ranked blood priest but soon learned that there were no other tombs used by House Raime on record.  There were a few castles granted to branch families of House Raime, but a quick scan with Leon’s magic senses revealed no obvious tombs on any of those properties.  Hells, two of the castles had been granted so long ago that they no longer existed, and those that were still around had outlived all of those branch families.

Disappointed, Leon forced himself to be content with the statues he’d seen and the histories he’d learned in Argent Palace’s tomb.  He told himself repeatedly that he wasn’t so sentimental that he had to personally witness all of his House members’ resting places, but now that he’d seen some of them, he simply wanted to see more.  That he couldn’t just enflamed his desire.  To mollify that need, Leon vowed to more thoroughly research his lineage once he returned to Kataigida.  The Librarian golem of the archives he’d taken from Argent Palace, he was sure, could point him to his family’s personal records.

After a few days, Leon was satisfied with his experience in the city.  Teira, despite being the city of his Ancestors, held no more sentimental value to him aside from its status as the resting place of so many of his Ancestors.  When he decided to leave, he did it with a light heart, and an even lighter party as King Julius and the rest of his entourage were going to stay in the city.  Leon’s next destination was the Northern Vales, culminating in his final visit to the Forest of Black and White for a while.  Then he’d turn around and trace his steps back to Ariminium.

His only question at that point was how to get to the Northern Vales as he had multiple options—the Frozen Mountains were formidable, and even for stronger mages it could be uncomfortable to cross them.  His party was strong enough that they wouldn’t be too affected, but he would still prefer the most convenient journey.  He was tempted to head below the mountains through Xaphan’s old prison, but the demon put the kibosh on that idea.

In the end, he decided that the simplest option was the best, and led his family and friends in flying over the mountains.

As they passed over the mountains, he savored the sights, sounds, and smells.  The chill in the air welcomed him like an old friend, and the sight of his childhood home getting closer brought a rare serenity that he couldn’t describe.

So captivated was Leon by the journey that it took almost a full day before he and his party touched down on the north side of the Frozen Mountains.  They could’ve flown the whole way to Vale Town, but Leon decided that he wanted to move over land for this part.

The vale ruled by the Brown Bear Tribe was just as he’d remembered: quite heavily forested, but with relatively extensive farms growing wheat and hardy vegetables in the central plains, and many rolling fields of brilliant green silkgrass tended to by small Tribal communities.  And in the center of it all stood Vale Town.  It had grown a bit in the time since Leon had last seen it, but the true growth he could see was in more distant settlements.  If he had to guess as to why, it was most likely because Vale Town had reached the maximum size that its hinterland could sustain.  It simply couldn’t grow any more and still have enough food to feed everyone.  Thus, other communities grew in its place to fill the growing demand for food and silkgrass.

Still, despite Vale Town having grown considerably since his childhood, it was the same familiar town he and Artorias would frequent to sell the hides they accumulated in the Forest of Black and White.

Leon confidently led his party toward it.  So much in the world had changed, but he couldn’t help but feel giddy to see those he knew from his childhood again, Torfinn both chief and Chief among them.

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