“So, how’s it going in here?” Leon asked as he reached the bottom of the pit where the Thunderbird had inscribed the transformation enchantment within his soul realm.

“Much progress has been made,” she replied as she transformed into her human body and touched down on the stone floor. “I’ve excised numerous redundancies, and managed to remove the biggest hurdle in the entire enchantment: the part that caused your soul realm to grow unsustainably. The power requirements are still a problem, but I think if given a few more weeks, I should be able to reduce that even further.”

Leon stared at his Ancestor in amazement, then his eyes began to wander the pit. Indeed, though his eyes weren’t quite up to the task of analyzing the enchantment in its entirety, he could see that it had already been radically simplified. And in just a few more weeks, he might be able to transform again…

“I had a question about that,” he said. “You said after that fight with Jormun and his Primal God patron that the Great Black Dragons power had likely been awakened within me… But I don’t feel any different, and my fire is still just normal.”

“Are you asking if I was wrong?” the Thunderbird sweetly inquired, though her smile promised only death if Leon answered positively.

So, Leon took a moment to temper his response.

“… No,” he hesitantly replied. “But I can’t help but wonder…”

“That elitist jackass has gone back to suppressing your bloodline,” the Thunderbird nonchalantly explained. “It looks like he’s being more efficient about it than I thought he would be, but not nearly as much as I feared he could be. Tell me, have you been feeling territorial? Greedy? Do you crave solitude more than anything? Does the sight of other human males conjure competitiveness within you? Do you act any more belligerently than you did before all of that happened?”

“Uh, no to most of that, I think…” Leon replied as he awkwardly rubbed the back of his neck and stared at anything that wasn’t the Thunderbird. “Though, I suppose money’s been on my mind a little more than usual.”

“Would you say it’s an unusual fixation, to the point that the acquisition of more money is taking priority over everything?” his Ancestor asked.

“No,” Leon quickly replied.

“Then, at the very least, it’s easy to see that your draconic instincts have been suppressed. I suppose that might mean that your power is being suppressed, as well. But as I said back when I made that first claim—your blood, once awakened, isn’t so easily forced into dormancy. Besides, the inheritance has been settled—that scaly bastard can’t completely subvert the power that is in your blood. Maybe your fire isn’t black, and maybe your eyes can’t annihilate everything you see, but I’d warrant that your fire magic is stronger than usual. Have you tested it out much?”

“No, no I haven’t,” Leon replied.

“Then, how about instead of training with me today, you go and do that?” the Thunderbird suggested in a way that made it clear it wasn’t a suggestion. “I have divine works to study, and I was in the zone when you arrived. I’d like to get more work done today, if you please…”

Recognizing that he was being dismissed, Leon narrowed his eyes in irritation, but accepted it, nonetheless. The Thunderbird was working on something for him, after all, and while he didn’t like the idea of being kicked out of his own soul realm, he couldn’t deny that some practice and testing of his power was needed. For the most part, his personal training had been restricted to lightning and some instruction of his retinue.

With a sigh and bitten tongue preventing him from making any further remarks, Leon returned to his Mind Palace. On his way back to the physical world, he stopped by Nestor’s table, where the imprisoned man was busy studying the sealed tome that Leon had taken from the transformation site that he presumed Jormun had stolen from somewhere far to the southeast.

“Making any progress?” he asked Nestor.

“Some,” Nestor replied in a manner quite similar to the Thunderbird. “I made these locking enchantments to be unbreakable, even by me. But I was younger and less experienced back then, and even though I have no arms with which to take notes, I think I can get this open.”

Leon frowned and nodded. “This is all modern runework, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Yes, as you can plainly see if you use your own damn eyes,” Nestor snipped back.

Leon rolled his eyes and smacked the ruby off the table, with a cry of pain and shock from Nestor. He could take disrespect from the Thunderbird—she was his Ancestor and the progenitor of his line and his power—but he wasn’t going to take it from the man who’d invaded his soul realm and tried to steal his body.

“Might want to watch your tongue,” Leon warned as he picked up Nestor’s ruby and placed it back on the table.

Nestor’s ruby glowed as if representing his impotent anger, and as if his teeth were gritted in humiliation and displeasure, Nestor replied, “Noted.”

Leon then took a seat next to the table, closed his eyes for a moment to suppress his irritation, and then said, “How about we start again, with both of us being a little less **ty?”

A long silence followed, and Nestor eventually replied with, “Yes… yes, this is all modern runework. Why do you want to know?”

“Ancient runes are more powerful, aren’t they? Couldn’t a simple ‘unlocking’ rune or something be drawn and have the journal open?”

“That’s always a possibility,” Nestor replied. “But, as it’s always a possibility, I’d made some contingencies for such a thing. A brute force attack like that won’t work. You have to either have the key, or—”

“… Or what?”

“Or you’re out of luck,” Nestor finished, his tone strained and filled with frustration.

Leon grunted in acknowledgment, then genuinely thanked the dead man, who seemed unsure of if Leon were joking around or not. Leon didn’t stick around to explain himself and returned to his physical body to start working on feeling out the limits of his power.

He made his way outside, and then doused the backyard with water—he was about to be playing with fire—and then went and stood on the stone patio just outside of his backdoor.

He stood there for several long minutes, letting his fire magic surge through and fill his body. He paid as much attention to its flow as he could, and he noted that it did seem to come to him faster than before, but he couldn’t say definitively that it was due to his bloodline or just a mistake on his part from not using fire as much as he could.

Next, he summoned fire outside of his body by raising his hand and filling his palm with flame. Then he raised his other hand and filled it with the traditional bright, crackling pride of dragons, too.

There were a few things he noticed as he held the fire in his hands, and he began to run through other things that occurred to him to test. He spent hours outside exercising his control of fire magic, only having to stop twice to put out secondary fires that started in his backyard.

By the end of his tests, he was left with the conclusion that his control of fire magic was different. The fire was simultaneously fiercer and tamer. It responded more readily to his will, which he tested with forming shapes out of the flames. He was a long way from the way that Xaphan used his fire to create facsimiles of living creatures, but it was a good first step, and one that seemed to come almost naturally. However, for as pliable as his fire was, now, he could also tell that he needed much less power for his fire to have the same destructive capabilities as before. It wasn’t quite enough for it to compete with his lightning for the right to be his primary combat power, but it was still incredible.

He was also largely able to rule out his ascension as the reason for his changed fire, for the power requirements for his other magic hadn’t changed—the only thing had really changed with his ascension was that the amount of power he could store within his soul realm was astronomically greater. Merely ascending to the eighth-tier couldn’t explain why his fire was so much more responsive to his intent.

But having caused his draconic blood to awaken, at least partially, would. With a little more testing, he felt more confident that his fire magic was more powerful and more responsive, but it would still take him far more practice to get the most out of it that he could. When he finished with his testing, he also thought he could almost feel the Great Black Dragon’s suppression. He didn’t think he could ever describe it in words, but he it was kind of like he felt his blood was being constricted somehow, like there was some magical pressure there that he was becoming more and more aware of.

If he could somehow push back against that pressure…

Leon wasn’t sure how to do that, but he tried anyway, just following his instincts. He summoned his power and tried to resist the vague, almost ephemeral suppression he felt, but much like a baby trying to walk, he failed, and he realized that it would take quite a bit of power, grit, and practice to properly fight back against it, let alone remove it completely.

And that wasn’t even speaking to what the Great Black Dragon himself might do in response. The suppression itself already proved that the Divine Beast had a significant degree of control over Leon’s body, so it wasn’t inconceivable to Leon that if he managed to resist the suppression, the dragon might do something more drastic.

However, a counter argument that occurred to him was that he’d apparently used that power before once or twice before during moments of extreme emotional volatility, and he couldn’t remember the suppression increasing at all immediately following those moments, or any other side-effects that he could ascribe to the Great Black Dragon punishing him for using that power…

He’d have to test that out in the coming weeks and months, but he felt like the dragon’s threat to keep him from invoking the power he’d inherited was fairly toothless. Now that he could perceive it, he intended to work at undoing that suppression, and the Great Black Dragon could eat ** as far as he was concerned. If the power was in his blood—if it was as much a part of him as the Thunderbird’s power—then he was going to use it, the dragon be damned.

Once he was done running his fire magic through every test that he could think of, he decided to move onto something that was a little more personally enticing. For a long time, he’d been stricken by the idea of flight. Maybe it was his Thunderbird and dragon blood giving him some of his Ancestor’s instincts, or maybe it was just childlike wonder, he couldn’t say, but flight was a power that he craved more than just about anything else that his magic could do for him.

Anzu could carry him into the air, but that wasn’t enough. He needed to do it himself, to know that the only reason that he soared through the firmament was because of his power, and not because he was directing something else to keep him aloft. Even his flight suit, while delightful and had sated him in some ways, still left him wanting.

What little he could remember of his time in his avian form definitely scratched that itch, though, and now that he was eighth-tier, he thought he’d give something he tried earlier in the transformation cave a few more tries.

Until this point, he’d needed the aid of his flight suit to fly under his own power. He just wasn’t proficient enough with wind magic or powerful enough to lift himself off the ground reliably, but now that he was an eighth-tier mage, he thought he might as well give it another shot. Or two.

Or maybe a hundred.

He’d only intended it to be something to cap off his magical training, a couple of jumps to try and at least glide back to the ground after leaping as high as he could, but the first time he tried, he found that he couldn’t stop.

He’d leaped into the air with a fairly conservative amount of strength. He was an eighth-tier mage, and so could leap hundreds of feet if he so chose, but he only went for a few dozen—though that still gave him more than enough time to try and keep himself in the air.

He summoned his wind magic just before he jumped, letting it flow through his body, and then around his body. He formed an intense cyclone around his legs, hips, and waist, delighting in the way that he could feel his body grow lighter and start to lift up off the ground.

And then he jumped.

Though he’d only made it a little over three stories into the air, with his wind magic grasped tightly around his lower half and midsection, he not only took ten seconds to fall back to the ground, but he remained quite stably balanced the entire time. He kept the lift directly under him and didn’t flail around, using his experience from his first couple of attempts right before his transformation and from using his flight suit to keep himself upright in the air, and thus, not crashing to the ground.

And when he touched down on the ground, he found that he hadn’t used that much magic power in his attempt, either.

His next few attempts went both much better, and much worse at the same time. He leaped higher and higher each time, and each time, he used more and more magic power and less and less physical strength. He would then start to float to the ground with increasing slowness, but with more time in the air, he’d eventually lose his balance and inevitably hit the ground face-first.

And yet, without fail, he’d leap back to his feet and try again.

It was growing easier for him to remain in the air, and he was slowly puzzling out the best way to keep ahold of himself in the air so that he would remain upright, but he was also burning through his magic power at an alarming rate—each individual attempt wasn’t that draining, but he was making so many. He supposed it was also easy for him to see why wind mages didn’t fly everywhere—flight wasn’t quite so easy, but he wasn’t going to give up until he’d achieved it.

At least, he wasn’t intending to until, after another in a long series of crash landings, he realized that Elise was sitting in a chair outside, quietly watching him.

He pushed himself to his feet and dusted off as much of the dirt as he could, then walked on over.

“Oh! No!” Elise sarcastically called out as he approached, a wide, amused smile on her lips. “Please don’t stop on my account! You look like you’re having so much fun destroying our lawn again!”

Leon just shrugged, then dragged another chair over to sit next to her. The entire time, her eyes followed him, practically devouring every detail.

She said with only a hint of temptation in her voice, “You’re looking good, love—grass stains aside, of course. How are you doing?”

“Pretty damn good,” Leon said as he collapsed into the chair and held out his hand for hers. A moment later, the two were happily entwining their fingers with the other. “It’s nice not having responsibilities to anyone other than those I’ve chosen to be around. Nice knowing that I can stay around here for as long as I like with you.”

“Nice having the free time to dig holes in the lawn?” she playfully asked as she glanced at him, nothing but love in her eyes.

“Free time is a wonderful thing to have,” Leon said with the utmost seriousness. “Good for the soul. Good for clearing the head and getting to the bottom of certain issues.”

“What issues were you working on just now?”

“Flight, mostly,” Leon replied, and he quickly shared with her what little he’d learned about both flight and his bloodline from his afternoon spent training and testing his magic.

Elise stretched and sighed once he’d finished. “I suppose I’ll have to start taking my own training more seriously from now on, won’t I?” she said. “I’ve been slacking a bit since making it to the fourth-tier, but if you’re aiming for the Nexus, then I can’t fall behind!”

“Fourth-tier is still pretty uncommon in the Nexus, as far as I’m aware,” Leon pointed out.

“I don’t want to be just uncommon,” Elise shot back with a cheeky grin. “I want to be completely unique.”

“In that, I think you’ve already achieved your goal,” Leon softly replied. The sun was shining as it slowly descended in the west, the Naga River glittered in its light, and through Elise and the gardeners she’d contracted, their yard and accompanying flower gardens radiated health and beauty. But Leon only had eyes for Elise—they were locked on her, and his lips were turned up in the silliest, and yet most loving smile he was capable of expressing.

She laughed, then pulled his head into her voluptuous chest.

“If I’m so unique, then when are you going to lock me down, hm?” she playfully asked. “We’ve been engaged for months, now, and we’ve yet to even talk about our wedding!”

Leon, not fighting at all to extricate his face from her grasp, thought for a moment, then replied as best as he could with his face pressed into her breasts, “My instinct is to say that we ought to wait until we reach Occulara, but after some thought, I think we should get married before we leave. That doesn’t mean right this very moment or anything, but I assume you don’t want to leave behind everyone that you know without sharing this with them.”

“No, no I don’t,” Elise firmly said. “There are some people among my mother’s staff that I would like to invite, and I don’t know if they will be leaving the Kingdom when we do. I also want Princess Cristina and Asiya there, and some other people…”

The two sat there making some rough plans for their wedding, mostly going over the guest list for another hour before heading inside. There would be quite a few more conversations they’d need to have, and a lot more planning, but at least they were finally getting the ball rolling.

For Leon, though, the need to head east and return to the stone giants started to take more and more priority in his mind as he and Elise talked. They were planning their future, but the obligation of returning the giant’s corpses to their people weighed on him to the point that the next day he made the snap decision to get it done. If he wanted to face the future, then he needed to fulfill this obligation to the past.