“This is **ing horse **,” Alix muttered, speaking the words that were on everyone’s mind.

Leon had returned to his family and retinue, who’d been shown to what would be their quarters until more permanent residences could be worked out. They were set up in apartments in one of the black towers surrounding the Hexagon, on one of the highest floors with entire walls given to windows that gave incredible views of the massive city. The apartments themselves were extremely luxurious, taking up nearly the entire floor. Smooth marble floors, spectacular furniture, large bedrooms, opulent bathrooms, a pool fit for a monarch, and even space for artisanal work, such as enchanting.

But all of that luxury might as well not have mattered, for the mood in the huge dining room was dour and depressed. None of them wanted to head back out on another journey when they’d just finished one that had been nearly half a year long. They all just wanted to relax for a while, get used to sedentary living again before heading back out. He could see it in the faces of his lovers and all of his retinue, who were gathered around the dining table.

Leon, however, seemed to be the only exception. He, too, wanted to get settled in, to let the knowledge that he had a place of his own for just himself and his family lift some of the pressure that weighed on his mind.

But…

“He’s testing me,” Leon said after Alix’s statement of incredibly profundity.

“That much is almost insultingly obvious,” Anshu stated, his tone even, though he spoke the words with intensity enough that his own anger was betrayed.

“I know that,” Leon replied. “It’s not even hidden. This is a test. That’s just what it is. But the thought of hunting this thing, this ‘tau’, is… well, it’s kind of got me chomping at the bit, so to speak. I understand it’s a legendary creature…” He looked to Anna for confirmation, and she gravely nodded.

“It’s more than that,” she explained, a dark look in her deep green eyes. “Tau don’t exist. Simple as that. They’re myths. We’ve been sent to hunt down a myth.”

“Oh, **ing great!” Alix cried as she threw her hands up in frustration.

Leon ignored the outburst, but he could feel some amount of anger in his heart, too. However, the emotion that dominated his mind wasn’t anger, but competitiveness. With an almost sinister smile, he said, “The Director claimed that most people think it’s mythical, but he seemed to think otherwise. Either that, or he’s just trying to not have me abandon the quest right away. Still, if this tau does turn out to be entirely mythical… I almost want to say that he gave me this test expecting me to fail, but that’s not quite right. I think it’s more that he’s not really expecting me to come back with the requested pearl, he’s testing to see if I give up or not.”

“How can you say for certain?” Marcus inquired. “It seems to me like sending someone after a myth would be a good way to get rid of them, at least for a little while. How can you say otherwise? Does he expect us to find something else of comparable value? How can we do that when he only told us to find a pearl? Is there some special property of these pearls that would make faking it impossible?”

“In a way, yes,” Helen answered. “The myths ascribe many aspects to tau pearls—and I mean many aspects. Think of anything you want, and there’s probably some myth somewhere that claims a tau pearl is capable of it. If all of these myths are to be believed, then a tau pearl can heal any injury, cure any disease, conjure gold from nothing, allow a mage to rise several tiers if they eat one, power an ark of any size with its stored magic power, return life to the dead, and so many other things that I can’t even list them all. But in short, no matter what pearl you bring to the Director, no matter how powerfully you enchant one, he’d always be able to say that it’s not enough, that the pearl you brought him isn’t ‘real’. Because what he’s asking you to find doesn’t exist, so you can’t complete this quest as it’s been given.”

Her words almost seemed to echo in the silence that followed. It was as if she told the entire room that Leon’s plan of joining Heaven’s Eye, and thus ensuring their immediate futures, wasn’t going to happen.

But Leon’s smile didn’t drop one bit. Instead, it only grew slightly wider.

“As the Director of Heaven’s Eye,” he said, “I think it’s reasonable for him to have access to information none of the rest of us have. And while I only broke words with him for a short time, I’ve also heard some things about him from Emilie. And the impression I have of the man is that he doesn’t play these kinds of games. He wouldn’t send me out on an impossible mission just to get rid of me. There’s something else he wants, even if it isn’t an actual tau pearl, I can feel that, I just can’t see what it is.”

Elise spoke up for the first time, offering her thoughts. “I don’t think we should give up so quickly. I agree with Leon, the Director doesn’t do these kinds of things. If he wanted Leon gone, he wouldn’t have to resort to methods like this.”

“He would if he just wanted to feel superior,” Anshu bitterly spat.

Elise, ignoring the Indradian, continued, “Let’s give it some time. Maybe look into these tau. See if there isn’t anything we can dig up that might explain the reason why the Director is sending us out like this. It’s not like we’ll lose much even if we spend a couple of days focusing on this, and who knows? Maybe we’ll find something. If we don’t, then we’ll know without a shadow of a doubt that the Director was just playing around. At the very least, it’ll free us up to do focus our efforts elsewhere without regrets.”

Leon gave his wife a glowing look. “I couldn’t have said it better myself.” Leon cast his gaze around the room, making eye contact with every person there. Elise, Valeria, Alcander, and Gaius met his gaze without hesitation. Maia was a little more thoughtful, but she made eye contact with him, too. Alix, Helen, Anna, Anshu, and Marcus seemed to need a little more thought than Maia, but they, too, soon turned their eyes to him. “Does anyone here want to just give up on Heaven’s Eye for sending us on this chase?” Leon asked. “I’ll not force anyone to participate if they don’t want to, but if we go on this quest, then I want us all on board with it.”

Slowly, Leon could see determination sinking into his retinue.

“I’m in,” Anshu declared, surprising Leon somewhat with his decisiveness. “I’ve never met him, but I already hate the Director. I want nothing more than to find this pearl and throw it in his smug face. In the likely event that it doesn’t exist, then I don’t want to give up without at least confirming that fact.”

“Same here,” Gaius added. “Nothing good can come from giving up before we’ve even tried. If this is our quest, then we should at least give it a try.”

Everyone else gave similar sentiments, leaving Leon grinning like an idiot. Seeing the Director’s face when Leon walked into his office and threw down a tau pearl would be beyond satisfying. At the very least, it would prove that Leon wasn’t going to ride into Heaven’s Eye on Emilie’s coattails, that he’d earned his place with his own skills. But that, of course, depended on the tau being real; and one of their pearls, recoverable.

“All right,” Leon said when they were all finished. “Let’s figure out a better game plan, then. Anna, Helen, you two have heard these myths about the tau, correct?”

Both ladies nodded.

“Share everything you know, no matter how seemingly pointless. If this thing exists, then we have to parse the truth from the fiction. Gaius, Anshu, I want you two to head down to the river and secure us a ship for a reasonable price. I don’t know how long we’ll need it, so make sure it’s a long rental. Tau supposedly live on the coast of the great sea, so we’ll need something robust enough to brave those waters.”

“We’ll get it done,” Gaius said as he made eye contact with Anshu, the two men sharing a brief nod.

“Elise. Emilie is now the Chief of Acquisitions. I don’t want to burden her with our stuff right now, especially since she’s probably going to need several months to settle into her new position, but if it’s not too much trouble…”

“You want me to see if there’s been any information that came through Acquisitions regarding tau?” Elise asked with a sly smile.

Acquisitions included the bounties that Heaven’s Eye ran. Leon was confident that if anyone had reports of tau sightings, it would be Heaven’s Eye, and borrowing Emilie’s authority could help them to narrow their search.

“Yes,” Leon responded. “Don’t press too hard, this is a quest we’ll undertake ourselves. But if there’re reports out there, I want to see them. Everyone else will be with me. I’d like to bury ourselves in whatever literature exists about tau, whether mythological or factual. If these things are as powerful as they’ve been implied to be, then we’ll have to prepare as best as we can to find one.

“Let’s get to it.”

—

Finding information on the tau turned out to be quite easy, to Leon’s general surprise. He’d thought they would’ve been a little more obscure, but it turned out that the creatures were something of folk icons for the people who lived around the central sea, and many stories had been written about them.

However, Leon could easily understand why Anna and Helen had been so dismissive of this quest after reading just a few of these stories: they were all generally inconsistent in regards to what the tau actually were. Most seemed to agree they were birds, but of what sort, Leon couldn’t find more than two or three stories that agreed with each other. Some claimed they were no larger than a pigeon, while others claimed that they could wrap their talons around adult wyverns with ease. Some claimed them to be of human-level sapience, if not higher, but most stories depicted the tau as either little more than animals, or of such alien minds that their thoughts and intentions weren’t understandable to mankind. Not even their plumage were things that the stories could agree one, with some stating that they were pure white, others that they were as red as the sky at dusk, while others claiming that their feathers changed with their mood. He even found one story that was inconsistent with itself, changing the bird’s plumage to fit with the trials and tribulations that the story’s protagonist underwent, and doing so without any narrative explanation.

Even worse, the stories of the tau’s powers were even less consistent. Some stories claimed them to be beings of almost godlike power, while others claimed that they were little more than average animals with access to wind and light magic. Those stories in the latter category Leon treated with a little less skepticism, given that they usually had other details in them that were more consistent with the Aeterna that Leon was familiar with—though none were outright believable, unfortunately. The one that claimed the tau was actually a race of mischievous shapeshifters Leon found particularly entertaining, though also particularly doubtful.

Everything that Helen and Anna wrote down was just as inconsistent with much of what Leon and the rest of the retinue had found. However, his interest was piqued slightly when he reached their ‘power list’, upon which Anna had written that tau were often ascribed the power to control the weather, summoning wind, rain, and lightning at their whim.

Leon suspected that some of these myths syncretized the mythical tau with the Thunderbird, but he didn’t exactly have proof. Regardless, he and his retinue soon burned through the mythical references they could find of the tau, coming up with precious few good references that Leon might be able to rely upon in this hunt.

But there were a few references that he thought might be more credible.

The biggest one was a scientific journal of an explorer who’d helped to map the rocky coastline of the central sea, charting out hundreds of caves and extensive underground and underwater tunnel systems that ran through the coastline’s many huge cliffs and broken, rocky shore. He claimed to have found the bones of a tau deep within caves near the Ilian Empire’s border with the Sacred Golden Empire, and Leon found various other references in many other stories to the tau making their homes within caves. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

The second reference that Leon found reliable was that the tau were vegetarians. If he wanted to lure one out—assuming that was even possible given the intelligence some stories attributed them with—he couldn’t use meat. It also meant that they were going to be more relegated to the northern coast of the central sea since his maps painted the southern and eastern coastlines to be more barren—though, he did note that the entire coastline seemed to be relatively barren, especially compared to the richer and more fertile interior of the Ilian and Sacred Golden Empires. Still, there would likely be more plentiful food north of the Scamander River delta, so that was where he’d concentrate his search.

Of course, there were other journals he and his retinue found that came to the same conclusion, and there was still no concrete evidence for tau presence, but he filed the information away, anyway. If the tau didn’t exist, then it wouldn’t matter, but if they did, then he had a place to start.

The final clue he found was more verifiable, but less immediately useful. The tau were so mythologized that there were multiple shrines dedicated to them in the eastern parts of the Ilian Empire. The Ilian Empire seemed to worship many gods, but they also venerated many local spirits. It seemed that the tau were counted among these spirits, for there were quite a few shrines located around the Empire’s eastern provinces. At the very least, even if the tau couldn’t be found around the coastlines, Leon figured that there would be more people who lived around these shrines who might take stories of the tau more seriously—though he also thought that that might mean a lot more false sightings, so it was a bit of a mixed bag.

Several hours after starting their research, Elise returned to them to pitch in. Her mother had, as Leon had suspected, been to busy to help Elise directly, but not so much that she couldn’t have one of her secretaries go digging for information. When Elise met up with them in the tower’s massive library, she brought with her several reports of dubious quality claiming to have eyewitness accounts of tau sightings.

Leon was gratified to see that all four of these reports were in the area he’d already resolved to start searching first: the border between the Ilian Empire and the Sacred Golden Empire that reached the coast. Most of the coast, in contrast to the urban build-up along the Scamander River, was devoid of human settlements; the weather was terrible and the terrain itself made large-scale settlement undesirable. But there were still a few fishing villages and quaint resort towns to be found, along with salty sailors selling spurious sea stories to sightseers, which is what Heaven’s Eye chalked most of these reports up to being.

Leon resolves to visit these towns and see what he could see.

By the time that night fell, everyone was exhausted, and not at all looking forward to what promised to be several more weeks of fruitless searching for a myth. Leon, however, slept quite soundly, and he figured he probably would’ve been able to do so even without the loving ministrations of his wife and lovers. They had a direction to go in, and that was enough to ease his mind for the night.

—

Leon stared down the docks at the ship that Gaius and Anshu had procured, his lips pursed in thought. He’d been surprised when they returned the previous day having secured a fairly cheap ship for the retinue to use, but pleasantly so. However, now, he was a little less sure.

The ship was a fairly small sloop, small enough that his family and retinue could crew it with ease. It was larger in the back, with only a single deck and a raised quarterdeck. The ship wasn’t particularly magically advanced—probably why it was so cheap—but it had a single magic engine powerful enough to move the ship at a good clip. Good enough, Anshu promised, to reach the coastline in just a few days.

The rest of the sloop’s enchantments ensured that it was robust enough to endure the fairly powerful weather events that constantly roiled across the central sea, and if the magic engine ever gave out—and given its age, Leon fully expected it to give out at some point—the ship was equipped with a backup mast which Anshu said he was familiar with.

Most surprisingly was that the ship was made entirely out of steel. Leon might’ve been impressed had the ship not been speckled with rust and various stains from the undoubtedly long life it had lived. Still, he found himself quietly marveling at the Ilian Empire’s power if this was such a cheap ship, so common that it was allowed to degenerate into such a condition. In the Bull Kingdom, ships made of steel were incredibly rare—so much so that the Legions still used wooden ships, though the wood they used was of the finest quality they could find.

This ship had no weapons to speak of, but Leon didn’t mind. After some time spent thinking it over, and with the added endorsement of Anshu, who’d already given the ship a cursory inspection the day before, Leon decided to take the ship. All he needed it to do was get them down the river, to the villages along the rocky coast, and then back to Occulara. To that end, he paid the promised price, and he, his retinue, and his family climbed aboard.

Most unusual about his group was that Elise was joining them. She was completely uninterested in remaining behind, especially since this didn’t seem to be a dangerous mission, and she claimed that she wasn’t about to look for a villa and accompanying property all on her own, so they had to ‘suffer her presence’ for a while.

Leon, not considering her presence to be at all insufferable, was grateful for the extra company. He had to admit that he hadn’t wanted to leave her behind, either.

So it was that the day after arriving in Occulara on a Heaven’s Eye yacht of nearly unparalleled luxury, Leon, his family, and his retinue departed Occulara in a ship whose better days were likely decades in the past, just to hunt down a myth.