Leon led his wives, mother, grandfather, and Ryker into Storm Herald’s largest training room, having sent Alix ahead to make sure it was clear ahead of time. Whatever happened in this duel, he wasn’t keen on any of his people seeing it, let alone being dragged into it. As a result, his family was the room’s sole occupants.
“An adequate space,” Fargrim said approvingly, his glimmering golden eyes scanning the room top to bottom, clearly sensing the wards that ensured mages could use a considerable portion of their magic without endangering the ark. Moving further in, Fargrim turned to Leon and raised his arms challengingly. “Come, my grandson, and show me what strength you have managed to accrue without the support of your Clan. Show me what a descendant of the Great Black Dragon can accomplish on his own!”
Leon stared at the large man, Fargrim’s aura rising in anticipation, and almost burst out laughing. He retrained himself, but his lips still twitched upward.
“No,” he said to Fargrim’s obvious shock. Instead, he turned to Ryker. “I’ll fight you first.”
Ryker closed his golden eyes for a long moment, and when he opened them, Leon saw not determination but resignation within.
“I have made my challenge,” Fargrim growled.
“I heard you,” Leon flippantly replied, barely sparing the old man a glance. “But you’re on my ark, so we’ll be going in an order of my choosing. And I choose Ryker first.”
Wordlessly, Ryker walked out into the training room while Leon’s wives huddled around Serana, all keen on watching what was about to happen.
For several long seconds, Leon thought that Fargrim might insist, at which point he would insist even harder. He never had to, however, as despite a twitch in Fargrim’s scaled temple, the Great Black Dragon’s Patriarch shallowly smiled and took a few steps back. He didn’t leave the center of the room, choosing instead to watch what was about to happen from particularly close.
Leon hadn’t expected his words to remain private, so this didn’t bother him. Instead, he grinned confidently as he stood across from his ‘uncle’.
“So willing to bully a weaker mage, are you?” Ryker asked.
“You were so proud of yourself for arranging all of this,” Leon responded as he folded his arms across his chest, not wanting to start the duel until he was satisfied he’d said his piece. “Given the power of the Great Black Dragon flowing through you, and the color of your eyes, you shouldn’t be intimidated by a mage newly ascended, would you? Surely you have the power to cross that small gap?”
“Twelfth to thirteenth is no small gap,” Ryker said. “And… what do you mean by my eye color?”
Leon stiffened, his eyes bouncing from Ryker to Fargrim and back again, confusion hewn deeply into their faces. “Do you… hang on. Fain’s bloodline was awakened, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was,” Fargrim said slowly, his tone indicating he was expecting an explanation for Leon’s words.
“His eyes are black,” Leon pointed out.
“Most of our Clan’s are when their bloodline is awakened,” Ryker said. “Gold comes out in a rare few. The four of us here and now are something of a rarity; no other member of our Clan has such hued eyes, as far as I’m aware.”
“They do not,” Fargrim said.
“How many people are in the Clan with awakened blood?” Leon inquired, wondering if he’d get an actual answer or if the other two would deflect or outright refuse.
He was pleasantly surprised when Fargrim immediately answered, “Three hundred and seventy-one. Including the four of us.”
“Three hundred and… That’s both fewer and more than I was expecting.”
Ryker grinned sarcastically. “You didn’t think we were the only ones who bore the Great Black Dragon’s power, did you? There are several dozen more of us on War Cry, and the rest are either in the Nexus or on our home plane.”
“Hmm. I said that because the impression I’ve gotten from the Great Black Dragon was that golden eyes are supposed to be related to his Eye of Calamity, though…”
He was about to continue when Fargrim suddenly lunged forward, forcing himself into Leon’s personal space so quickly that Leon instinctively took several steps back.
“Our Ancestor… spoke to you?” he asked, his voice beginning as a powerful shout, but ending as a confused whisper.
“Reluctantly, but yes,” Leon answered. “He was rather frustrating about it. He insisted that he wasn’t going to acknowledge me, but I’ve faced Primal Beings and survived. That seems to have caught his attention. He speaks little and visits infrequently, which suits me well enough; I can summon him if I have some need of him.”
Fargrim recoiled as if struck, his expression flashing through anger, denial, and disbelief with every passing second. Ryker’s reaction, however, seemed to freeze in disbelief.
Enjoying their shock, Leon decided to throw a little extra wood on that proverbial fire. “I once fought… or ‘fought’ a Primal Devil. I don’t remember anything past its power forcing its way into my skull, but I was told when I woke up that my eyes had been burned out of their sockets. It seems I used the Eye of Calamity, and that this power is related to me having golden eyes. ‘Twas a bit of a shock, truly.” He smirked provocatively, wondering who would call him a liar first. He had no intention of following up with any kind of proof; he was ready to fight, and the moment he thought he could begin without completely obliterating Ryker in the first second, he’d do so.
Ryker reeled backward, however, preventing Leon from moving without taking the man completely by surprise—and Leon wanted to be more sporting than that, at least so long as his patience held up.
Fargrim, meanwhile, finally seized control over his facial expression, turned to face him, and demanded, “Show me. If what you are saying is true, then show it to me. You claim to hold a power that none of your Clanmates have ever held before, the first of our Clan to match our brother Clans and hold all the power of our Ancestor… Show me!”
“No,” Leon immediately said. “I won’t because I can’t. The only time I’ve used it while conscious was when induced by the Great Black Dragon. I can’t just do it. Believe me or not, though; Ryker, I’ve given you plenty of time to choose your weapon…” Leon reached out with his elementless magic and grabbed a training sword. There was no realistic chance that Ryker was familiar with the Thunderbird’s fighting style, but he was about to gain some first-hand experience…
The moment the metal reached his fingers, Leon darted past Fargrim, silver-blue lightning dancing over his body. In a deadly lunge, the milky-white blade gleaming, Leon announced the beginning of the duel.
To his credit, Ryker stepped back quickly enough not to be skewered—or stunned as it were, given the weapon’s blunted edges and attached training enchantments—but Leon gave him no time to get his feet back under him. Leon hadn’t lunged uncontrollably, and so immediately followed up with another, advancing faster than Ryker could keep up with. Ryker slipped under the second lunge, but with a flourish, Leon smacked and disabled his left arm.
Ryker cried out more in surprise than pain, his left arm going limp, and Leon stepped forward, throwing his shoulder into the other man’s body. Ryker lost his balance, and with his body enhanced by lightning, Leon sliced his other three remaining limbs before he hit the ground. Finally, before Ryker had truly realized the magnitude of his loss, Leon strongly tapped his head with the blade, sending him into the land of dreams for the next few minutes.
In total, the exchange took less than five seconds.
“Huh,” Leon exclaimed. “I’d expected him to last longer. Surprise is a potent tool, but still…” He glanced at Fargrim, still standing where he’d been, though turned around now and gazing down at Ryker with some measure of disappointment coloring his expression. “For the record,” Leon said, briefly drawing the Patriarch’s attention, “I associate more with the Thunderbird Clan than the Great Black Dragon’s. You can thank our dour and unfriendly Ancestor for that.”
Leon walked away from Ryker, not bothering to do anything to help the man up. He’d thought Ryker a powerful warrior, but now he was wondering how much of that was true…
“I’m told that to a dragon,” he continued as Fargrim crouched to check on his nephew, “strength is everything. The Thunderbird has said similar things, that strength comes before everything else, that if I want anything at all in this world, be that love, power, position… that I must first be strong.” He stood opposite the Patriarch, his weapon gleaming as his power once again filled it. “I displayed my transformation power during my duel with Bennu. Were you there to see it? Or did you hear of it if you missed it?”
“In the outcome rested my daughter’s future,” Fargrim said. “I was more concerned with the outcome than the means used to seize it.”
“That seems… negligent,” Leon remarked. “Nor does it really answer my question. Care to try again?”
One of Fargrim’s eyes twitched, and he answered through clenched teeth. “I saw it, yes. You conjured some illusion to appear like a bird. An obvious way to ingratiate yourself with those who are and always have been beneath you.”
“No, it was no illusion. It was real. I encountered an enchantment made by Krith’is, known as ‘the Flesh Ripper’ in his time. It stimulates the bloodline in such a way that a bearer of an Inherited Bloodline can assume the form of his Ancestor.” Leon slid into the opening stance of House Raime’s fighting style—though derivative of the Thunderbird’s style, it was by no means weaker. “I’ll consider teaching it to you. But… you’ll have to beat me first…”
Waiting for a proper response didn’t seem like a winning strategy, so Leon moved. He wasn’t expecting to repeat his feat of immediately overwhelming Ryker, but his heart at least skipped a beat when steel clashed against steel, his blade meeting another; Fargrim had summoned a sword of his own, one that matched Leon’s, from the wall racks, and blocked Leon’s opening strike with almost contemptuous ease.
“The ini—” he began, but Leon was having none of that and kept up the pressure even though he lacked the strength to make Fargrim move from where he stood. Instead, with the Thunderbird’s magic flowing through him, he launched into a terrible barrage against Fargrim, applying as much pressure as he could feasibly output without overpowering the wards in the training room and doing damage to Storm Herald. Had they been outside or otherwise in some place where they didn’t have to worry about collateral damage, Leon thought he might’ve had a chance, but as it was, his every strike was blocked, his every lightning bolt was taken with hardly a twitch of pain from his opponent, and not once did he so much as nick a stray piece of thread on Fargrim’s clothing let alone bite flesh and draw blood.
Fargrim seemed willing to let this continue for several more exchanges until he forced Leon back by blocking one of Leon’s strikes and slashing forward. Fire as black as midnight shot from the blade, forming into a hundred tiny dragons, while another larger dragon head and serpentine body formed around Fargrim. He didn’t even have to wave for these black fire dragons to launch themselves at Leon.
With a slash of his blade, Leon ripped half of them to embers with a bolt of arcing silver-blue lightning, only to gasp in pain as a serpent made of black fire wrapped itself around his foot, having appeared there without him knowing. The rest of the horde bore down on him, but he summoned as much lightning as he could, speeding up his reflexes and movement to their very peak, and fell back on his knowledge of runes. Fargrim was a fifteenth-tier mage, while Leon was only thirteenth; there was no way he was going to overpower the older man now that he’d not only lost the initiative but also the element of surprise, too.
But in the runes, he might find some form of acceptable outcome in this duel.
Lightning flashed, forming a rune that had once led Leon to Xaphan: ‘prison’. All of Fargrim’s summoned fire creatures froze in place, and in a flash of lightning, Leon tore through them all. He then prepared to face Fargrim again, but the older man conjured a rune out of black fire in front of him with a flourish of his blade, and Leon suddenly felt woozy and disoriented. Simply putting one foot in front of the other felt impossible, let alone attacking Fargrim with blade in hand.
Desperately, Leon further called on his knowledge of enchantments since he realized that hitting that rune with a lightning bolt in this state was next to impossible, and going for a wider area attack was too dangerous to Storm Herald. As he tumbled, he envisioned what he wanted: ‘nothing’, or ‘zero’, a rune that represented a lack of value, or an absence of something. To this rune, he imbued the meaning of ‘erase’, and pushed its power at Fargrim.
The Patriarch’s rune sputtered, and Leon regained his sense of balance in time to get his legs underneath him. As he spun a bit to right himself, he conjured another rune in silver-blue lightning, one that directly meant something like ‘motionlessness’, a powerful variant of which was used in Storm Herald as an emergency brake. To that, he demanded that Fargrim halt in place.
However, Fargrim slowed, but didn’t stop, and his power formed a rune that Leon wasn’t familiar with that pulsed once, and Leon was hurled back into the far wall. Some force held him there, almost like gravity had shifted and amplified a thousandfold, all to hold him against the wall.
In a flash, Fargrim appeared in front of him. Even with his thirteenth-tier power, Leon nearly lost sight of him, so quickly did he move.
“I wanted to gauge your power with fire,” Fargrim said. “Yet you spurn this power of ours.”
“As… I said…” Leon sputtered as he fought against the force of Fargrim’s rune, which still shone behind the older man. “I… am… a Thunderbird!” He directed the blast as much as he could, but a wave of silver-blue lightning erupted from his body and washed over Fargrim, who stood right in front of him. This lightning surged through the room, burning the floors for a good distance before Leon halted and dissipated it.
For all the power he put into that attack, Fargrim stood like a mountain in a storm: buffeted, but unmoved.
‘Still singed his shirt,’ Leon noted, his golden eyes flitting over the burned edges of Fargrim’s already-black attire.
“Tenacious,” Fargrim said, a hint of approval infecting his tone. “Such a quality is to be expected in the heart of all dragons.” His rune immobilizing Leon only vanished when Fargrim glanced at it over his shoulder. “I’ll learn your enchantment,” he said as Leon caught himself from falling face-first to the floor, “but another time. For now, I have business with my brothers and sisters.” He stepped away from Leon and began walking in a manner most unhurried to the stirring Ryker.
Leon, at the same time, straightened himself out as he silently pondered the merits of hitting Fargrim in the back. The duel wasn’t over until both combatants agreed that it was, after all, and after being so roughly handled, he was feeling rather affronted that Fargrim just decided on his own that he’d won.
‘Can hardly blame him…’ Leon thought as he lowered his weapon, noting that all it would take would be for Fargrim to summon another of those runes to render him unable to act.
“Wake up, Nephew,” Fargrim said as he reached down and hauled Ryker to his feet.
“Hmm…?” Ryker murmured in surprise before Fargrim released him. He hobbled somewhat, but he didn’t quite fall back to the floor. “Where… am I?” he sputtered, still a bit lost.
“About to head back to War Cry,” Fargrim said definitively. “Leon. You will come either to War Cry soon or to Arushae at some point. The rest of the Clan will want to meet you, and you, I’m sure, will want to meet the rest of the Clan. But I understand if you wait.” His eyes turned in Serana’s direction. He opened his mouth, but no words spilled forth. Instead, he closed his eyes, sighed quietly, grabbed Ryker, and marched for the door like they were off to war.
With nary another word, Fargrim and Ryker left Leon and his wives and mother alone in the training room.
“That went… well,” Elise said as she hurried to Leon’s side. “Are you hurt?”
“Bruises,” Leon said. “Nothing more serious.”
“He was disappointed and impressed,” Serana said as she and the rest of Leon’s wives joined them. “Disappointed that you didn’t use our power, and impressed that you did as well as you did.” She smiled and gently hugged Leon. “I’m proud of you, my son.”
Leon couldn’t have wiped the stupid grin off his face even if he were inclined to try. Things were sure to get hectic again if his luck remained as it did, but for the moment, he was grateful just to revel in what he’d accomplished, even if it still came with the initial scalding of defeat. His family was here, and for the moment, that was all that he cared about.
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