Anshu sighed in relief as he and the group he’d been running with reached the relative safety of their underground base, buried deep in a forest within one of the coastal Pegasi States. Though they’d nearly had a run-in with an Imperial patrol, they’d managed to escape before any Imperials were able to get in range.

The Indradian was still worried that they were being tracked however—Leon, his patron, had arranged for the Imperials to have ready access to easy flight, and while his magic senses weren’t picking up on any followers, he still couldn’t shake the feeling that they were being watched.

The feeling likely had something to do with who they were escorting: a group of Sky Devils, one of them particularly powerful. From what he’d heard of Leon’s brief encounter in Argos, he guessed that this man they’d found was at least related to the Jaguar, if not the man himself.

This pleased Anshu. He’d known that the Jaguar had been sighted on the Sword, and had been working hard at getting into contact with those smugglers who were working with the Sky Devils. It seemed that if his invitation hadn’t been accepted, then this was at least a lucky coincidence.

Now, all he had to do was somehow get close enough to the Jaguar and extend Leon’s invitation to talk. How that was going to go, he wasn’t sure, but just in case, he was ready to run away as fast as he possibly could…

—

Leon couldn’t keep the smile off his face as he read through the various reports of the research teams working in his branch. Not all of the many, many projects he had his people working on were bearing fruit, but the ones he’d at least personally started and had actively provided some assistance on were showing great promise. The MALLs, in particular, were being worked on and a new design was being developed that promised to increase its movement speed without noticeably impacting its power requirements.

In addition, some refinements to Tikos’ comm lotuses certainly added to his smile, and a possible breakthrough in an enchantment that could project a powerful light shield from something as small as a ring was more than good news.

However, when he got a certain report, he froze in shock. This report wasn’t for one of his personal projects, but rather for something that he was only begrudgingly carrying on from Rufus’, his predecessor’s, time.

It was blood magic, originally meant to assist the Director in cracking the security on his family’s arks. In fact, Rufus had devoted quite a large amount of resources to the study and application of blood magic, some of which Leon had released to Narses to upgrade Heaven’s Eye’s security. Most of those projects, however, Leon had stopped, except one.

The Director himself had asked Leon to continue that line of research, even when Leon had felt that the resources allocated for it would’ve been better spent on golem research. In these past few years, the team still working on blood magic had been studying, to no avail, how the security enchantments on his Clan’s arks interacted with his blood. He’d even given them a few drops of his blood to help them study it—it wasn’t like he hadn’t given Heaven’s Eye his blood before, though he made sure these new drops were heavily secured anyway.

And now, the report he was given of their work had arrived. The blood mages weren’t yet able to crack his Clan’s defenses, but they’d at least isolated and thoroughly explored the section of the security enchantments that were directly responsible for reading Leon’s power.

Looking this bit of blood magic over had Leon feeling no small amount of familiarity with it, despite his otherwise negligible understanding of blood magic. There was plenty of lightning magic in the enchantment, to be sure, and he could read through those runes and glyphs perfectly fine, but it was the enchantment as a whole that was giving him the feeling of great familiarity.

After a few moments of thought, the realization of where he’d seen something at least similar to this magic hit him like a bolt from the blue. He stood up from behind his desk in his Tower next to the Hexagon, told his secretaries that he was not to be disturbed, and dove into his soul realm, the report clutched firmly in his hand.

Upon his arrival back in his Mind Palace, was greeted with none but the silence of a meditating Xaphan, the Thunderbird being out in the Mists of Chaos somewhere and Nestor being back at his home, working on rebuilding his upgraded golem body after Leon got him mobile and relatively functional again.

But Leon appreciated the silence, not wanting to explain exactly what he’d seen in the report just yet. Instead, he took to the skies over his soul realm and flew to the huge cylindrical pit within which lay the enchantment that he used to transform into his Thunderbird form.

He dove into the pit, observing the floating runes of light that spiraled through the air throughout the pit, and the runes that lined the walls. The runes numbered easily in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, but it didn’t take him long to find the section that he was looking for.

The section of the enchantment that targeted his bloodline, stimulating it enough that his body changed shape and began a near-identical copy of the Thunderbird’s form, though of much smaller stature and majesty. It was hardly even close to being identical to the reports in his hand, but as he inspected them both, he saw similarities all over. Similar applications of the same principles, despite the differing objectives of each of the enchantments.

After a long period spent studying, Leon’s smile grew even wider. He retrieved a veritable mountain of paper and ink and began to write.

—

A knock came on his door, and when Leon called for it to open, one of his secretaries stuck his head into his office.

“She’s here, Chief.”

“Send her in,” Leon replied, his back otherwise to the door as he stared out of his window at the square around the Hexagon.

A moment later, in walked Valentina, looking a little confused and a lot suspicious. A frown had etched itself deep into her angular features, and she only took a few steps into Leon’s office before coming to a halt, her arms crossed and her jaw set with displeasure.

“Leon,” she whispered.

“Valentina,” Leon answered. He turned to face her, though he didn’t move out from behind his desk. “I take it you already know why I called you here?”

“I had to pass the best blood mages in all of Heaven’s Eye outside of your office,” she replied. “I can make a guess.”

Leon slowly nodded and took a few steps closer until he stood directly behind his desk, his smile fading slightly into something more quietly excited rather than loudly pleased.

“I… understand the thoughts that must place in your head,” he said deliberately, choosing his words as carefully as he could. “I’m not here to demand anything of you.”

“It’s looking like you want me to work on blood magic again.”

Leon softly chuckled. “What I want is your expertise. You worked on blood magic for sixty years.”

“Against my will. My vampirism is gone, I no longer want anything to do with that.”

“And you’ve done spectacularly well working on anti-magic.”

That finally broke Valentina’s frown just a little as a look of pride entered her eyes for just a moment before she snuffed it out in favor of something stern and resolute.

“I couldn’t ask for a better researcher,” Leon continued. “You’re truly one of my best. And I’ve looked over much of the work of the ‘best blood mages in Heaven’s Eye’, directly comparing it to the work you did under Rufus. They’re talented, knowledgeable, and even sometimes brilliant. But you always got results no matter the task given to you.”

“Almost always…” she muttered.

Leon’s smile thinned a bit as he nodded in sympathy. She’d never managed to fully break the security on his Clan’s arks, though he hardly held that against her.

“What I’m offering you is a choice,” he said. “You’ve done good work where you are now, pursuing your passions. And I’m more than happy to leave you where you are. But what I’m offering is magic the likes of which you’ve never seen before. Blood magic, yes, but also something more. I’m offering to make you the leader of a new project. If you agree, then great! If not, then you’ll stay where you are. The choice is yours.”

Valentina gave him a long, hard look, but curiosity seemed to win out over her reluctance, at least for the moment.

“What kind of team?” she asked.

Leon bluntly pulled a few runic sketches out from his soul realm and laid them on his desk, motioning her to come closer at the same time. The sketches were of some of the larger glyphs in his transformation enchantment—not enough to completely recreate the thing, it was much too large and three-dimensional to commit to paper, but certainly enough to understand just how much more advanced and complex anything that Heaven’s Eye might be working on at that moment.

“It will be small,” he said as Valentina walked over and began examining his sketches, “but this team will have unlimited resources—or as close to it as I can give. There’s more to this enchantment—” Valentina, despite only having a few seconds to examine what he was showing her, glanced at him in shock, her frown already vanished in favor of a look of utter astonishment. “—and they will be given greater access to it later. But for now, I want to know exactly how this enchantment interacts with someone’s body, how it stimulates Inherited Bloodlines… whether or not it can be reproduced or adapted to other bloodlines.”

Valentina’s eyes were now locked on the sketches. Leon had retrieved only three of them from his soul realm, each one intricate and exceedingly complex, having necessitated hours to copy entirely even with his skill in enchanting. As she rifled around these three sketches, Leon retrieved three more and dropped them on the table, which she practically tore into like a ravenous beast into a freshly-killed carcass.

“Should I take your interest as an encouraging sign?” he asked amusedly.

Valentina froze and looked back at him. “What is all this?” she asked.

“If you accept the position, you’ll be able to figure it out for yourself,” Leon responded.

Her frown returned, though it was shallower than before. She glanced several times between Leon and the sketches, but eventually, she turned back to him and said, “Fine. I’m in.”

—

“You just gave away such secrets?” Nestor shouted in abject horror. “What kind of fool are you?”

“One who understands his limits,” Leon coolly answered. “It would take me years to fully understand that enchantment, I simply don’t have the necessary background to peel it apart on my own. So I had to get help.”

“From a bunch of savages?” Nestor raged. Were he not in a fragile and rather cumbersome golem, Leon thought he might’ve even trashed the workshop just a little bit to make his feelings better felt.

“Our plates are full,” Leon shot back, nodding both to the golden tube containing the Iron Needle, which was now surrounded by several more intricate enchantment consoles, and to the back of his workshop, where his work designing his new sword continued. “Any bit of analysis is valuable, even if done by comparative amateurs. Unless you’re saying you had someone better in mind for such work?”

“Of course I don’t, everyone who I would’ve tasked with such a project is dead!”

“And neither of us were paying the enchantment much mind, were we?” Leon pointedly asked, to which Nestor had at least the self-awareness to relax a bit, what little body language Leon could read from the featureless golem looking somewhat like guilt. “You have your golems. I have my weapons. We both have the Iron Needle. What’s the point if I’m the Chief of Research and Development if I can’t use my resources to look into things we don’t have the time, skills, or inclination to research ourselves? Aren’t you one of the people always telling me to delegate?”

“I believe others have been constantly telling you that, not me,” Nestor grumbled.

“Whatever. It’s done. But cheer up, dead man, it’s not like I gave them the whole damned enchantment! Even with the team I assembled, it will take them months to analyze just the small fragment I’ve given them. It would take centuries to analyze the whole thing!”

“If it would take that long, why give it away at all? Why not just keep it to yourself until you could brush up your own skills to study it yourself?”

“Is that what you would’ve done? Not given it to trusted researchers? Not even those researchers you just mentioned?”

Nestor sighed—a strange sound coming from a golem. “For something like this, I would’ve trusted none but family. In fact, if we’d had something like that transformation enchantment in my day, I would’ve studied it myself, even over the moon stone.”

“Something touched and infused with the power of a Primal God, and you would’ve devoted yourself to this transformation enchantment instead?” Leon’s voice was thick with disbelief, Nestor having not paid much attention to the transformation enchantment before.

“Creation power is something that came naturally to the Primal beings, but which all post-Apotheosis mages can wield. The transformation enchantment is something unique to us, boy, and exploration of our Clan’s power would be far more beneficial than researching something that I, my father, and nearly all of my siblings once wielded, save only for Demetrios, my youngest brother and the sire of your House.” Nestor practically spat his closing statement, taking Leon somewhat by surprise.

“You sound as if you hated Demetrios.”

“I loved him the most out of my brothers,” Nestor countered. “That’s not to say I loved him at all, though. My sister was the only one of them whom I had any attachment to beyond familial bonds. I loved my family, Leon, but no more than I had to.”

“And I suppose my Ancestor surviving when all the others didn’t has nothing at all to do with that attitude, hmm?”

“Careful, boy, you’re treading on thin ground.”

Leon’s smile died just a little. Nestor wasn’t joking, so he dropped that specific topic.

“Nestor,” he began, “we can’t do everything ourselves. And we’re on a time crunch.”

“I see no clocks counting down.”

“So long as I continue to gain power despite remaining relatively under the thumb of the Empires, we’ll be on a time crunch. I need to reach Apotheosis and take all of you away from Aeterna, to where we can grow in peace. I need to take control of the Sky Devils and reassert our Clan’s authority over the Nexus. I’d rather not wait ten million years to do so. And that means we need help.”

“And you went with savages…”

“Who else is there? Speak their name and I’ll seek them out! Who is available that we can call upon to study this transformation enchantment?”

Nestor went quiet for a long moment before theatrically throwing his hands up in frustration. “Do as you will, boy. Our Clan is in your hands, to do with as you please. As are its secrets.”

“You say that as if you’ve brought me in on all of our Clan’s old secrets.” It was Leon’s tone that was a little bitter, now. Nestor, however, just stared at him, not responding. “Nestor,” Leon continued, his tone a little more conciliatory, “this was necessary. Especially with the possibility of interacting with the Sky Devils coming up, if Anshu is to be believed.”

“Going to bargain with those who should be falling to their knees in worship of our Ancestor’s power?”

“Did they fall to their knees when they were first made vassals? Or were they conquered?”

Nestor’s silence was all the answer Leon needed.

Continuing, he said, “Most of the vassal Clans were bearers of Inherited Bloodlines of their own, were they not?” Nestor nodded in confirmation. “Then it only makes sense that we put some resources into better understanding the power that we bear. And the more knowledge we have, the better our bargaining position. If we learn secrets from this, then we can bargain those secrets to loyal vassals. We can use those secrets to gain loyal vassals.”

Nestor clicked his nonexistent tongue in displeasure.

“I’d rather not give up our ‘secrets’ like this, too, you know,” Leon continued. “but I judged it to be the best course of action. I think you’ll come around to seeing the same.”

Without another word, Leon turned away from Nestor and walked over to the consoles around the Iron Needle. He didn’t do much, simply monitored some of the scans that the enchantments were making of the Needle, his head lost in thoughts about the possibilities that unlocking the secrets of Krith’is’ transformation enchantment might bring. It wasn’t like Valentina or any of the other enchanters and blood mages Leon had put on the team would be able to do much without bloodlines of their own, so he felt comfortable enough with what he’d given them. What little disquiet he did feel was easily minimized by the thought of possibly improving upon the Primal God’s design, or at least unlocking some greater efficiency with greater knowledge of its workings.

He’d certainly have to bring the Thunderbird herself in on the research, too, or at least its results. The enchantment was a result of her labors to adapt the original enchantment, and if she hadn’t been absent from his soul realm for a while, he would’ve already consulted her on this move.

His thoughts were interrupted when Valeria came walking into his workshop, a grave look on her face.

“Leon,” she whispered, her tone as serious as her expression, “we have… guests…”