When the day to leave Ancon finally came, Leon wasn’t too upset. He’d found little in the city save for frustration, humiliation, and anger—or rather, those things that frustrated, humiliated, and angered him so outweighed the good parts that he was just glad to see the city slowly disappearing into the distance behind the Heaven’s Eye convoy.

Much like the trek from Akhmim to Attica, this leg of their journey would be overland, and undergone in the lap of such luxury that Leon could hardly fathom it. Hundreds of wheelless, horseless carriages, each one large enough to be a small house, would transport their convoy northeast to Ilion, the capital of the Ilian Empire. While they weren’t to travel through the richest land in the Empire, the natural wealth of this place, to Leon’s understanding, still put nearly everywhere on Aeterna to shame.

So, with little regret, Leon turned his eyes from Ancon as it faded away into the haze of distance to what was now appearing before them.

The central regions of Aeterna were quite flat—it had its mountains and hills, especially in the Sunlit Empire and the lands of the Sentinels, but fertile plains, long rivers, and shallow, mineral-rich hills were the name of the game here. The air was fairly humid and warm, but not so much as to be uncomfortable for even second or third-tier mages, and it led to fantastic agricultural yields, as Leon was able to see—the multi-lane highway they took toward Ilion was wide enough to allow at least six carriages to comfortably fit side-by-side, but on either side of it were tall trees with branches heavy with colorful fruit. None were quite so close for people to pick the fruit as they traveled, but they were still close enough to be readily available for anyone to take if they found a hunger during their journey—Elise informed Leon that the highway-side orchards were managed by the Empire for the express purpose of feeding travelers for free, and thus encouraging commerce.

Beyond the orchards were large private farms, immaculately tailored and, being perfectly square, were shaped differently than the farms he was used to seeing. In most places he’d been to, farms were generally long and narrow, allowing for beasts of burden to not have to turn that often when yoked to a plow—a fairly arduous thing to do that wasted time, to his understanding. These farms, however, being square, implied that the Empire didn’t have to rely on such methods to plow their fields.

It wasn’t long before Leon saw that method for himself, with several large vehicles visible to his magic senses out in the fields doing work. They were large, sleek, carriage-like things made of gleaming gray metal, with long, thin bodies, but still able to turn on a silver coin. They hovered off the ground on a cushion of air, while having a series of revolving blades on the front that magically swiped and turned fast enough to effectively harvest whatever grains were growing in the field. Once the carriage hovered over the now-cut grain, air enchantments would suck it up into the back, quickly filling the carriage. Meanwhile, a plow was lowered in the back of the machine, allowing it to till the land at the same time that it harvested.

It was almost mesmerizing watching such magical machines work. Leon had never really seen anything like them—they were extremely well-engineered and designed for something that he didn’t think he ever would’ve thought of on his own. His own musings on enchantments weren’t devoted to something so mundane as farming equipment, and yet here were machines more magically advanced than anything he’d ever designed, and seemingly their only purpose was to tend to fields.

Leon sat by the window of his family’s carriage for hours, just watching what few of these vehicles he could see with his magic senses working, sometimes analyzing what little he could sense of their enchantments based on the magic they emanated, but otherwise just observing. He noted that they weren’t autonomous, but they had enclosed cabins for their crews of three to handle.

It was a long time before he realized that they’d traveled for more than a hundred miles and yet hadn’t seen an end to the farms and orchards. He could see two hundred miles ahead of him, and even though he could see a few good-sized towns and cities along their route, it still struck him that many of these farms would have to transport their produce a long way to reach a settlement of significant size. He knew that the price of food could skyrocket for every day that it spent in overland transport, so he wondered just how the Ilian Empire managed to keep the prices reasonable in this part of the world. He supposed, though, that if the carriages like the one he was riding in were plentiful enough—and by all evidence he’d seen, they seemed to be—then his usual standard for logistics would have to be seriously revised. He was in a completely different world than the one he was used to.

By the time they stopped for the day in a city of about fifty thousand, his head was buzzing with thoughts of the kind of logistical nightmare it must be to manage such a system, accounting for hundreds of millions of people at least, and a sense of dread settled into his stomach knowing that it was in his future to manage something even grander: a system where entire planes were specialized for farming, or production of certain materials—a multiplanar Kingdom.

Suddenly, he realized that he’d been far too single-minded and conservative in his recruitment of retainers. He’d been focusing on combat potential, and while those who could fight would be indispensable, he realized that the largest army he’d need to build would be one of bureaucrats.

He didn’t get much rest that night, and spent most of his time fitfully training. On the second day of the journey to Ilion, he kept his mind diligently shuttered in the carriage, choosing not to think about the challenge he was staring down, at least for the time being.

Instead, he focused on training and studying, and supervising the training of his retinue. Now that he had Helen and Anna, he could justify getting the ladies of his retinue their own carriage, which served to greatly reduce some tensions in his retinue, as well, since Anshu wasn’t being required to share living spaces with unmarried women. He, Gaius, Marcus, and Alcander got their own carriage, while Alix, Helen, and Anna got one to themselves.

After several days of spending his days training, he noticed that the farms that had flanked the highway orchards were thinning out, and the cities they were passing were growing more and more frequent, and much larger, to boot. There were still plenty of rural and agricultural zones within range of his magic senses, but for the most part, land that was truly wild had disappeared, leaving in their wake the golden towers of the Ilian Empire’s urban centers, the villas of their perfectly manicured country estates, and the abundant fields that were needed to sustain the Empire’s massive population.

The more Leon saw, the less he felt welcome. It was all quite beautiful, with the aesthetics of the Ilian Empire undeniable, but Leon felt wrong being so far away from true wilds. Even in the most heavily urbanized areas of the Bull Kingdom, he always knew that he was, at most, a few dozen miles from the edge of human territory, and that there was a forest, or wild hills, or inhospitable mountains nearby that he could vanish into if the need ever struck him. Knowing how far he’d have to travel to have the same kind of solitude here was more distressing than he’d realized it would be, but he did his best not to let it get to him and instead admire what the Ilian Empire had built.

And it was worth admiring, in his mind. Their cities sprawled across the land, showing the sheer dominance they had over their environment. Every building positively radiated magic power, showing that even their most run-down homes were as heavily enchanted as a country villa back in the Bull Kingdom, to the point that every home, and nearly every building otherwise, had been warded against magic senses, giving the people of the Ilian Empire the kind of privacy that the people of the Bull Kingdom would probably never have. The air itself was so inundated with magic power spilling out of the buildings that Leon could feel energized with every breath, which went a long way to helping him to stifle his desire to see the wilds. What helped even more was the fact that they didn’t have to rest in the convoy at night since the highway was so urbanized; they could stay at luxurious guest houses run by local branches of Heaven’s Eye every night of their journey.

And then, a week after leaving Ancon, the heartlands of the Ilian Empire appeared in the distance, completely blowing away everything else he’d seen in the Empire up to that point with their grandeur and sheer size.

The core of the Ilian Empire lay between a pair of massive rivers that flowed eastward from a small mountain range on the edge of the Ilumerian Wetlands: the River of Serenity in the north, and the Scamander River in the south, both connected by a massive canal further west. As they rode further in, Elise spoke to Leon about this region, giving him a short crash course on local politics.

The Ilian Empire was mostly situated around the Scamander River in the south. Most of the River of Serenity in the north was theirs, as well, but everything north of it belonged to the Sacred Golden Empire. About a hundred miles from the titanic inland sea at the center of the plane, though, the Sacred Golden Empire took possession of the River of Serenity and a few strips of land on the southern bank.

These rivers were massive, more than a mile across and deep enough that a dreadnought could sink within and not obstruct riverine traffic. They ensured that the floodplains that lay between them were incredibly rich and fertile, and was what allowed the Ilian Empire to build what was essentially one long continuous city along the entire length of the Scamander River without needing to worry about feeding such a massive population. This enormous city was separated into distinct cities of their own for administrative purposes, each ruled by a mayor who answered directly to the Emperor just as the governors in the provinces did. But even with these divisions, once they reached the Scamander River, they’d be able to walk along its banks from its headwaters to the inland sea without ever leaving ‘the city’.

Leon’s brain hurt just thinking about what a pain in the ass that administering that kind of urban sprawl had to be, but what hurt his brain even more was contemplating just what had to happen for the River of Serenity to have been split like it had been.

Elise explained that during the two Empires’ early years, they fought extensively over the river. The Ilian Empire wanted it as a strong northern border, but Evergold, the capital city of the Sacred Golden Empire, had been built upon it, and they weren’t willing to share that space. After several thousand years of destructive war, however, the two Empires managed to hammer out a peace deal that had been in place for more than forty thousand years—a peace deal that had given the River of Serenity its current name.

These days, the River of Serenity now facilitated a tremendous amount of trade between the two Empires, generating more wealth in a month than all of the Bull Kingdom’s silver mines could in a year.

Elise was only partway through her explanation of the local politics when Leon abruptly stopped paying attention, his eyes going wide and his jaw going slack as he saw something he’d been longing to see for a long time, but never had with his own eyes: an ark.

It looked almost like like an arrowhead flying through the sky, long and sleek, with sharp edges to pierce through the air. It was made of shining silver metal, flew through the air about five hundred feet off the ground, and was large enough that a quarter of the Heaven’s Eye convoy could probably comfortably fit inside. It was decorated with flowing golden lines forming stylized glyphs, and on both ‘wings’ that jutted out from the slightly thicker main body, were emblazoned the sigil of the Ilian Empire: an upright spear wreathed in grass laurels, grasped in a faintly feminine hand. The backside of the ark was hollow and open to the air, and from it poured fire and smoke—Leon assumed that that was what was propelling it through the air at speeds great enough to get from one side of the Empire to the other in no more than a day.

“Holy **…” Leon had muttered in amazement, drawing everyone else’s attention. After explaining what it was that he was seeing, Elise explained that such an ark was probably meant for transporting people from place to place with extreme speed—though who or what they were transporting she couldn’t say.

What she could say, however, was that all the arks based within the Ilian Empire were owned by the Emperor personally—save for a few small arks owned and operated by Heaven’s Eye, of course—meaning that whoever was in that ark was extremely highly ranked.

“I want one,” Leon had said wistfully as the ark passed close by the highway.

As they drew nearer to Ilion, however, Leon’s attention was taken from the multiple arks he could now see patrolling the skies by the capital city. Even by the standards of the magnificent structures built along the Scamander River, Ilion stood out. Fantastic forums filled with merchants plying their trade, luxurious and exotic goods of all sorts on display. Monolithic monuments abounded, sports arenas and outdoor amphitheaters could be seen everywhere, and the interior of the city was practically a forest of golden towers, each one reaching even further into the sky than Leon had ever seen a man-made structure—he saw golden towers forty, fifty, and sixty stories tall, and some even taller than that, and each one was unique in its own, with slightly different architecture and visual aesthetics.

But all of it paled in comparison to what could only be the Emperor’s Palace.

It was on what at first looked like a massive plateau that the enormous Scamander River parted around and encircled, flowing back into a singular river on the eastern side, but it soon became clear that if it was a natural formation, then it had been so heavily transformed by human hands that it would’ve been unrecognizable.

There was a large hollow at the base of the plateau, one so large that the ‘plateau’ almost seemed to be a gigantic slab of gray rock held aloft by eleven titanic pillars—more a raised island in the sky than anything. Each of these pillars had been carved into the colossal likeness of who Leon could only assume were the eleven heroes who’d driven the remnants of his Clan upon this plane out of these lands and laid the foundations for the four Empires. Each of these colossi were massive, nearly a thousand feet tall without exception. They were all carved in various heroic poses—one in the act of drawing a bow, another with a sword raised to the heavens, a third standing aloof with a scroll in his hand, a fourth leaning against the massive rock platform with an almost comical grin on his face. Every pose was different, and every colossus rendered in fantastic detail.

The surface of the massive raised island was remarkable in its own right, with extensive gardens filled with exotic trees and flowers of all colors, shapes, and sizes—including, Leon noted, a few Heartwood trees. Those gardens well-complemented the massive palace built upon this raised island. The palace itself seemed primarily built of rose quartz and white marble, accented with gold sparkling red and orange stone. It was bigger than Argent Palace, bigger than the Bull Kingdom’s entire capitol island. The main palace building alone was ten stories tall, and contained more than sixty courtyards. More than two hundred other buildings constituted the rest of the palace complex, allowing tens of thousands of people to work within by Leon’s estimation.

Leon noted a few other buildings, including what he thought to be a temple given the robed people milling about its central courtyard. This place had more huge statues outside of its front gates, though none even half as large as the colossi holding up the raised island.

Other buildings that caught Leon’s attention were massive fortresses on the north, south, east, and west sides, each once with dozens of eye-catching weapon emplacements that looked reminiscent of Bull Kingdom Flame Lances, though much bigger and sleeker. The entire raised island was ringed by a huge wall that seemed to almost grow right out of the island’s stony edge. The wall connected each of the fortresses and was interrupted on every side by dozens of tall, strong-looking towers. At the top of each tower was another of the large, seemingly more advanced Imperial Lances. The entire palace was so aglow with magic power that it almost hurt for Leon to look at it with his magic senses, but the fortresses were something else entirely, with Leon able to sense so much magic power flowing through the walls, towers, and fortresses that he could well believe them to be indestructible by anything that Aeternans would consider to be conventional means.

After a few seconds of silent gawking, Leon noticed that there didn’t seem to be any way to reach the top of the island by foot, though the entire area underneath the island was shrouded by magic senses-scattering wards, so he wasn’t able to see for certain. Regardless, he was impressed by the sheer scale and artistry of the palace that had been constructed, it serving as a sign greater than just about any other of the power of the Ilian Empire.

The Heaven’s Eye enclave wasn’t located too far from the palace complex, though it wasn’t on the raised island. Instead, it was located in a massive, if only slightly less opulent, palace complex of its own just off of one of the branches of the Scamander River that encircled the palace sky island. If the convoy stayed the course on their highway, they would be taken right to the front door of the enclave’s tower—itself massive in comparison to just about all of its like that Leon had seen on his journey, being more than eighty-stories tall by his reckoning, nearly tall enough to be in line with the foot of the palace’s defensive wall. Out front was a gargantuan courtyard filled with covered walkways and leisure gardens that allowed the surely massive Heaven’s Eye staff located here to relax and move around with ease.

Leon had to force himself to get back into business mode, however, when he saw that out in front of the tower were no less than three eighth-tier mages standing at the head of a crowd of other powerful mages at least five hundred strong.

‘A welcoming party,’ Leon realized. ‘Looks like they’re really pulling out all the stops for Emilie…’

Unlike when they arrived in Ancon, however, there wasn’t a single person dressed in anything akin to the uniforms that Apollodorus had been wearing, leading Leon to think that the Ilian Empire didn’t have any representatives in this crowd. But if anything, Leon was thankful for that, for a crowd that included several dozen seventh-tier mages and three eighth-tier mages was already intimidating enough for him to try and focus on preparing himself to meet them.

And by his estimation, they’d arrive in only a few more hours.