It was with a bit of a spring in his step that Leon left his bedroom, leaving Maia tangled in sheets behind him and barely conscious. She was such a vision that he’d only managed to pry himself away because there were things he had to get done before the day was done.
However, as he made his way through the halls, he found Elise in one of the ‘ballrooms’ in their private wing—few balls were held there, and it served mostly as a large place to gather with the few friends they allowed so high on Westmount. Statues were being installed by her attendants in the room’s gleaming marble alcoves, and he found her closely scrutinizing each one.
As he walked over, he not only noticed how her dress clung to her form in ways that, had he not just lavished Maia with his attentions for the past couple hours, would’ve had him carrying Elise off to ravish, but he also saw the way that her radiant lips had contorted into a thoughtful frown. She didn’t turn as he slid his arms around her waist from behind and held her close, the attendants working on installing the statues remaining quiet and pretending like neither of them was there—just as Leon preferred.
“Thoughts?” he asked.
“Many,” she replied, some measure of depressed curiosity tinging her tone.
For the first time since entering the hall, Leon gave the statue that had so captivated Elise a closer look, letting not only his eyes but also his magic senses wash over it until he was aware of every detail.
The statues being installed were of him and his wives, with himself in the center, armor-clad and with sword raised. Maia and Cassandra were on his left, while Elise and Valeria were on his right. Maia’s statue had her standing nobly, an enchanted stream of water coiling around her outstretched arm like a brandished water dragon. Cassandra’s displayed her standing heroically, with one hand resting on the pommel of her sword and the other holding her helmet under an arm. Valeria’s statue captured her aloofness well, as she stood in a more guarded pose, her glaive in one hand with the butt resting on the ground.
It was Elise’s statue that had drawn the woman’s attention. Her statue stood with a luminous smile and a mildly seductive pose—toeing the line of what Leon would’ve allowed a sculptor to depict. The sculpted dress was low-cut and form-fitting, and though the statue was made of marble, the skill of the sculptor was evident in that the dress seemed almost real, rippling slightly against her body. It was a work of art, and not just because it captured Elise’s beauty as well as anything could.
All of the statues were made of white marble, and there had been some suggestions about painting or otherwise coloring them so that they could more truthfully capture reality. In the end, all five were left unpainted, leaving the marble clean, if somewhat sterile.
“It’s too big,” Elise said.
Leon examined the statue again, noting that it was perfectly sized for the alcove it was to be placed in. However, he knew Elise, and he knew that its overall size wasn’t what she was talking about. Instead, he turned his gaze down the statue’s hourglass figure to the real pain point.
“Is it?” he asked playfully. “Your figure is too radiant to be captured in mere stone, but Master Denonn did well, did he not?”
Elise quietly scoffed. “Master Denonn always does well. But… Do I really look like that?”
Smiling widely, Leon again gave the statue a scan. He then loosened his hold on her and backed away slightly so that he could properly compare his wife’s callipygian magnificence to what was reflected in cold marble.
“You look infinitely better in real life,” he said. “Is it a bad thing if it’s accurate, though?”
“It makes me look fat from behind,” she complained.
“One,” Leon said as he raised a finger, “no it doesn’t. It’s displaying your beauty as well as it can.” He raised another finger. “Two; it’s going to be facing outward. The alcove walls won’t judge you.”
“Bah!” Elise exclaimed. “If you say it’s fine, then it’s fine. But I don’t think I’m going to be buying anything more from ‘Master’ Denonn.”
“If it’ll help,” Leon said, “I’ll be sure to show you how much I appreciate your figure…” He tightened his hold again, keeping her tightly held against him. However, she twisted until she was facing him and consequently loosened his hold until his hands were merely lightly holding her waist rather than having his arms around her.
“You still have to speak with Nestor today, don’t you?” She punctuated her statement with a slightly chiding look that couldn’t mar her beauty despite how cold it could, at times, be.
“He can wait,” he responded.
“Not long,” she returned. He felt her magic senses pulse. “I’ll finish up here, then wait with our fair Naiad. And then you are going to pay for this.”
“Me?” he protested as she pulled away from him. “What did I do?”
“What, indeed?” she answered, smiling over her shoulder at him as she went for a closer inspection of the other statues.
He sighed in dejection that he had to leave such a goddess of beauty in favor of a dead man, but he still turned and left the hall in Elise’s capable hands.
It took several minutes, and he picked up Zhang, Daryun, and a squad of Tempest Knights along the way, but Leon soon found himself in front of Nestor’s lab down in Artorion. He might’ve set a more sedate pace if he didn’t know what would be awaiting him when he returned to Westmount, but as it was, he wanted to finish his work as quickly as he could.
The Tempest Knights securing the building allowed him through without a word, while his Paladins and the other knights escorting him waited outside. Alone, Leon entered the large lab.
The building had seen no small amount of expansion in the past century, more than doubling in size so that Nestor could have more space to work. As Leon entered, he saw Nestor in the back working on one of his many projects. He started making his way over, passing a pile of partially assembled star condensers on a table—Nestor had been working on making them more efficient, but so far, the only major upgrade they’d seen in the past century came when Leon and Mari’Kha managed to reduce their size by about twenty percent so that they could better interface with the newest generation of Ulta suits.
On another table, Leon spied reams of paper inscribed with thousands of runes. He recognized the spatial enchantments he’d come back to Kataigida from Arkhnavi with, as well as multiple attempts on Nestor’s part to expand upon them. While his work was invaluable, it had been Leon and a team of Raven researchers who had made the more recent refinements to the Nestorian Drives being installed in his newest arks.
However, a half-assembled small-scale jump drive was scattered over five more tables, one small enough to fit in some of the smallest transport arks that Leon’s arkyards produced for his civilian fleet. Leon’s advances were mostly focused on increasing the capabilities of his war arks, but it seemed to him that Nestor was going for more universal applications. He doubted that he’d have to wait long before Nestor finished that new drive and would present him with something that should make his logistics arks better in some way—more range, less power; he’d wait until Nestor thought it was ready before making assumptions.
He passed another project as he picked his way through the lab, crowded as it was with raw materials and pieces of unfinished projects. Nestor always worked on what he wanted to in the moment, but Leon sometimes had trouble distinguishing one project from another given the organized chaos of the long hall.
On several other tables, he saw mostly disassembled golem frames, sleek and shining in the lab’s light. These were no heavy labor golems that Leon used in his mines and some other low-skill but laborious roles; rather, they looked beautiful enough that he guessed they might have some kind of public-facing utility.
There were far more projects in the room, ranging from speculation regarding growing him a human body that he could use instead of a golem, to research on the Iron Needle, potential refinements for transformation enchantments, and studies conducted on the Ancestor Gem, and dozens of other things that had, at one point or another, drawn Nestor’s attention.
When he reached Nestor, he found the man poring over what, to him, looked like two different things worthy of study: the first was all the notes that he and Nestor had compiled over the past century regarding the power of death, while the second was an even larger pile of notes dedicated to the anti-bloodline runes used by Kamran’s ilk.
It was the latter that Nestor was focusing on, though the former’s notes were still close by.
“Nestor,” Leon said.
“Leon,” Nestor responded.
“I built you extensive storage areas,” Leon said. “Why aren’t you using them?”
“I filled them,” Nestor replied without even looking up.
“You filled them,” Leon repeated flatly.
“Yes,” Nestor confirmed without a moment’s hesitation.
“With what?”
“Records. Experiments. Are you here to criticize my organizational skills?”
Leon seriously considered making a bigger deal out of this, mostly because he wanted to mess with Nestor a bit, but instead, he decided to launch into his primary reasons for coming to speak with his dead kinsman.
“I spoke with the Great Black Dragon recently,” he said as he started slowly circling the table Nestor was bent over, his eyes scanning the seemingly haphazard piles of paper scattered across the surface.
“I’m sure he had much of value to contribute,” Nestor responded, sarcasm dripping from his tone.
Leon resisted the urge to laugh, but his lips still parted in a thin grimace. “No,” he said through almost clenched teeth. “He did not. He only brought me an ultimatum.”
Nestor paused, then straightened up to regard Leon fully for the first time since he’d entered the lab. “An ultimatum of what sort?”
Pausing for a moment his circling of the table, Leon sighed and said, “He claims to have found—or rather, to be close to finding a way to help me with transforming into a dragon. Some new thing with the transformation enchantments.”
Leon paused, waiting for any questions. Nestor, however, remained quiet and waited for Leon to drop the other shoe.
“He demanded I get rid of the power of death.”
It almost didn’t feel right simply telling that to Nestor; Leon thought he needed dramatic music or something of the sort to undersell the magnitude of the Great Black Dragon’s demand. Still, the way Nestor hummed in thought and started to pace, Leon could see that he was taking the ultimatum seriously.
“No enchantment if you refuse to relinquish your power over death?” Nestor asked, seeking confirmation.
Leon nodded. “You should’ve seen him. This has him spooked, yet he refuses to say why. I mean, he says that I risk destroying the entire universe by using it, but he refuses to elaborate any further.” He took a moment, and despite his centuries of life and certainty in himself and his powers, his voice trembled slightly as he asked Nestor, “I… won’t, right? Endanger the universe using it?”
“You left the map I am familiar with a long time ago,” Nestor stated. “Your feet land upon untrodden ground. Who can say where they take you?”
“Hardly comforting, dead man.”
“You are not a child to be coddled. I present the truth as I see it. And the truth is… that I don’t know how dangerous that power is. It certainly is very dangerous to anyone you deign to use it upon, and until you started getting a better handle on it, it was fairly dangerous to you, as well. But I find it hard to imagine that you place the entire universe in danger from conjuring a little black lightning.”
Leon nodded, liking what he heard, at least to a point. However, he couldn’t help but remember how much—or rather, how little—Veles had spoken about his mistake. The man hadn’t been around recently, so Leon couldn’t ask him about any of this, but he recalled Veles saying that he’d performed some ritual that left him trapped between life and death, and which was so costly to undo for his academy that they weren’t able to adequately resist the Primal Gods, Devils, and Great Dragons that declared war upon them. He wondered how serious Veles’ mistake could’ve been for his academy to have spent so much of itself in resolving it.
Nestor continued, “He asks you to give up this power—a power that, as far as I’m aware, is unique entirely to you in the entire universe—just for the hope of gaining a new transformation out of it?” Derision could be felt in Nestor’s tone, not just heard.
“If he says he’s close,” Leon said, “I don’t see any reason to doubt him. He gave my mother her transformation enchantment, and the Thunderbird herself told me that he helped at least a little bit in making the very first one. Well, the first one that worked reasonably well for me.”
“Then let me say this, Leon: your power, and the transformation enchantment. Which one is more unique in the universe?”
“The power of death,” Leon replied. Then, to hedge his bets a bit, added, “As far as I know, anyway.”
“Indeed. There are transformation enchantments that work that you know of. We can figure out a way even if it takes us ten thousand years. You won’t be receiving another chance at the power of death; that much, I guarantee.”
Leon nodded. Golden Heartwood seeds were rare, but black seeds were nigh unheard of. He wasn’t getting another one.
‘Though, it was the Iron Needle that gave me black lightning…’
He shook his head. The Iron Needle was unlikely to help in this matter, either. It had given him one kind of lightning, as it had given his Ancestor one kind of lightning. He doubted it was going to give him another, nor would it give him any power unrelated to lightning in the first place.
“It is a power that cost you the fourteenth-tier,” Nestor added. “Giving it up won’t guarantee that you’ll advance again. What if you get the worst of both worlds? No unique power, and no ability to ascend to the fourteenth-tier?”
“As I understand it,” Leon said, “it’s the power of death itself that prevents me from ascending. Removing it should… in theory… restore my ability to ascend. And gain me a new transformation enchantment, strengthening that side of me.”
“Wait,” Nestor warned. “Wait and see. The dragon would be a fool to give up on you, and he knows it. So wait.”
Leon hummed in thought, but he then threw himself back in the nearest chair and stared at the ceiling. “I suppose I will. Wait. Honestly, it’s what I prefer. I… admit that I kind of like the power of death. It makes certain things… convenient…”
“I’m sure it does,” Nestor replied. “Stepping into another world sounds… fascinating. If I thought it wouldn’t injure me severely, I’d insist that you try and take me there.”
Leon laughed, remembering the first time he’d tried to walk through the world that Veles had brought him to after killing Triton. Nestor had been present, and Leon was convinced the reason why the attempt failed was that he’d been distracted and concerned by how quickly Nestor had run away from his power, causing him to cut it off before success.
“On another note…” Leon pressed on. “Kamran. I’m going to be infiltrating his palace soon. Got any tips?”
“For him?” Nestor asked. “Some, for sure. Though I never met the man in life, I was familiar with his work. He could’ve been a great enchanter if that was what he devoted himself to. You’ll have your work cut out for you in breaking through or tricking your way past his defenses…”
Nestor paused, and Leon jumped in. “I was hoping to get your help on that end. Anything you can do to help would be greatly appreciated. Shoring me up with some runes to get me past general defenses, helping me with some projects I was working on to disguise myself and my aura, that sort of thing.”
“I’ll do more than that,” Nestor said as he turned to face Leon, fixing him in his glowing artificial eyes set into his otherwise featureless faceplate. “I will accompany you to the east. I want to see Kamran’s work myself, and show the whole universe that I am the greater enchanter…”
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