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Chapter 524: The Future I

“What in the name of the Ancestors is this place?” the Heaven’s Eye diplomat asked in wonder as Leon led them through the halls of Xaphan’s prison. He was asking the question on everyone’s mind, as Elise and the rest of the Heaven’s Eye escort stared at everything around them.

It had been surprisingly easy for Leon to convince all of them to take a different way home than the route they’d taken north, though he supposed that the discomfort of the Frozen Mountains had been enough to make them ready to take any other way back to the Bull Kingdom. They’d had to haul Justin up cliffs and follow Leon into a strange dark cave, but they’d have had to do that anyway on the journey back south.

When convincing them to follow him this way, Leon hadn’t told them much about the place, merely that there were some ruins they could move through to have a much more comfortable journey south if they so wished—assuming that the place still existed, of course. But Leon had confidence that the prison was still reasonably intact; it had survived for tens of thousands of years without maintenance, he didn’t think the intervening four years since he’d last passed through would’ve been enough to fell the place.

He was gratified to see that he was proven right. Even in the dark of the caves—Justin, in an ironic twist from what Leon would’ve expected a month ago, was the only person too weak to see in the dark—it was obvious that the place was still just as intact as it had been four years ago.

“Some old place built by a long-forgotten civilization to contain dangerous monsters,” Leon said, giving the Heaven’s Eye representative the same story he had a couple times, by now. The Heaven’s Eye escort aside, the entire rest of his party knew that this facility was connected to the Thunderbird Clan, but the exact extent of what Leon knew about it he kept to himself. He had no issues with telling Elise, Maia, Valeria, and Justin that this place was built by his Clan before its fall, but he wasn’t going to tell them about the demons they’d kept here.

For his part, Xaphan was incredibly quiet. Leon had teased the demon a little bit about returning, but the fire demon had only responded by repeating, “No!” Leon honestly couldn’t blame him, so he didn’t press the demon too much in that vein. In fact, from what he’d seen in Nestor’s lab, his opinion of his Clan was falling practically every second, and what the prison represented was the clearest indication why: it was a place designed to imprison and torture creatures into slavery. The more Leon thought about it, the more he was repulsed by what happened in the prison, but at least for the time being, he put it out of his mind to focus on their immediate goals.

Fortunately for all of them, Leon remembered the general layout of the labyrinthine prison. Xaphan had given him most of the map last time, but the spatial enchantments that wound through the place made getting an exact idea of its layout difficult without spending some significant time exploring the place. But Leon could remember where the Prison Lord’s chambers were, and he planned on leading his group directly there so that they could rest and drop Justin off with the Heavens Eye escort. It didn’t matter that they’d made peace, Leon wasn’t too keen on hauling Justin through the halls of this place, and he was just as reluctant to leave Valeria or either of his lovers behind. But if anyone in their party could identify any residual demonic energies in the prison, Leon guessed that it would be Justin, even in his horrifically weakened state.

And, of course, he just wanted to get some alone time with the other three without Justin present. Justin’s attempt to get him to leave Valeria alone still rang through Leon’s mind and raised his heart rate in anger every time he thought about it. Fortunately for Leon’s blood pressure, he and Justin basically hadn’t interacted at all since then, barring a few polite statements to each other during their departure from Vale Town, but that was hardly the only thing on his mind. His thoughts were filled with complicated things about Nestor and the Thunderbird Clan, things that he had yet to work through, things that were getting harder to ignore with every step he took in the prison.

“What sort of creatures were kept here?” the diplomat asked as they came to mangled inner door. Just as it had been when Leon had first passed through, the inner door had been rent and torn as if something had forced its way out through brute force. Knowing what he did now, Leon knew that it was undoubtedly some kind of massive, powerful demon that had done so. It might’ve even been the ice demon that Nestor had captured, though given the door on the other side of the mountains had been similarly breached, it wasn’t guaranteed.

But as they approached it, Leon realized that there could very well be another demon lurking on Aeterna somewhere. The ice demon had escaped the prison but had stuck around on the plane, so Leon figured it wasn’t outside of the realm of possibility that the third demon had done likewise. His more cynical side told him that he wouldn’t find it imprisoned in the bowels of some long-lost Thunderbird Clan facility, but probably ruling a tremendously powerful Kingdom that was hostile to him, or something of the sort, assuming he ever found it at all.

“I have no clue,” Leon answered the diplomat, his voice steady and giving away no sign that he was lying. “The last time I came through here, I couldn’t find a single living thing, though I wasn’t exactly thorough in my explorations…”

The diplomat paled a little and replied in a voice that shook far too much for his sixth-tier power, “I’ll… keep my eyes open…”

Leon nodded sagely. “You do that,” he said.

They made their way past the inner doors and into the facility proper, where Leon began to lead the group on toward the Prison Lord’s chambers. As far as he could tell, there was still a significant amount of magic left in the structure, quieting a few small fears he had that this was going to be a waste of time.

“This place is amazing…” he heard Elise murmur as she walked at his side. “I had no idea that there was something like this hidden in the mountains! We should send an expedition out here to examine this place further!”

“That… might not be that great of an idea…” Leon replied as he entangled his fingers with hers. “We’re going to be taking the crystal that holds all of this place’s magic power, leaving it dead and possibly even structurally unstable. We don’t know how well this place’ll hold up without powered enchantments. Even just the one night we’re planning on staying might be pushing it…”

None of that was true, exactly. Leon had made sure to exchange a few terse words with Nestor—about as long as he was able to stand being in the presence of someone who had so wronged him without the incentive of learning the runic arts—about the building practices of the ancient Thunderbird Clan, and about the design of the prison, in particular. He’d focused much of his questioning on the spatial enchantments that had the hallways bending and twisting back on each other since he’d never seen anything like that ever since, but he’d extracted enough information from his dead kinsman to understand that there was little to no danger of staying in the prison for a while after the power crystal had been taken. The place had been built to confine some of the most powerful demons in the universe, and as such had been reinforced with more than just magic. Even without the power to maintain its enchantments, the prison would likely stay intact for centuries, possibly even millennia more.

“There might still be some merit in sending someone to check this place out…” Elise protested, and she gave Leon a heart-rending look that he found he couldn’t resist. It was like her slight pouting frown and sparkling green eyes pierced right through him, and he immediately began to question the merits of not letting Heaven’s Eye check the place out. After all, he understood that as much as he enjoyed his freedoms, he’d probably end up associated with them at some point.

He was just leery of letting them examine this place and figure out that it once housed demons, though the more he thought about it, the less he thought it likely that they would take that to mean he had a demon in his soul realm. Hells, he didn’t even know what the attitude of those in the Central Empires was in regard to using demonic powers, though given that it was quite hostile here in the north, he still decided that assuming it would be very hostile was for the best. He began to swiftly think over ways to destroy those particular enchantments before he left; even if the place was going to be depowered, those imprisonment enchantments that had maimed Xaphan and Justin were not things that Leon wanted falling into anyone else’s hands. As far as he was concerned, their very existence was a black mark on the Thunderbird Clan’s record, and he wanted them gone.

In response to Elise, Leon shrugged and smiled. “I’ve said what I’m going to say on the matter, given my warnings and all that, so whatever happens next will be none of my responsibility.”

As they pushed deeper into the prison, some of the others made admiring noises at the sheer scale of the structure, which only grew more intense when they took five right turns and didn’t wind up where they’d begun—they’d passed some kind of spatial gate without even realizing. Even Leon, who knew it was there, hadn’t been able to perceive where the exact spatial distortion was.

Such enchantments were one of the reasons why he’d returned. Nestor had told him that such things were rare outside of heavily fortified locations in the Thunderbird Clan. They were difficult to set up, but useful for confusing any attackers—or demons trying to break out of a prison—and preventing anyone from learning the layout of the facility, but generally used too much magic power to justify setting up in less important locations. As a result, while this kind of spatial distortion might’ve otherwise rendered them moot, magic lifts and even mundane stairs were still the main method of traversing between floors in most Thunderbird Clan facilities, despite the Clan’s power at its peak.

Unfortunately, without being able to sense the enchantment itself and with his eyes failing to notice anything as well, Leon didn’t have much of a way to study those enchantments. He could only suppress a scowl and lead everyone on.

The Prison Lord’s chambers were just as opulent as they were when he’d last visited. The same light-projections on the walls, thick carpets, and rich furniture. Everything was right where Leon had left it, including the Prison Lord’s skeletal corpse, which had his companions scrunching up their faces in distaste.

But beyond that, everyone got situated well enough, and Leon soon led Elise, Maia, and Valeria back out into the prison heading directly for the old control room that Xaphan had once pointed Leon toward before Leon had freed him.

No one spoke much as they walked through the halls. Without the Heaven’s Eye escort bolstering their numbers, the empty and somber atmosphere of the otherwise fairly dimly lit prison more apparent and harder to break. The enchantments that dampened the sound of their footsteps on the metallic floors wasn’t helping, either.

Soon enough, however, Leon led the other three into the control room, and all four of them had to stop and admire the immense scale of what was in front of them. Even Leon, who’d been there before, halted so that he could admire the place.

The control platform hadn’t changed, with it thrust out into the center of a massive spherical chamber that seemed far too large to be structurally sound. In the center of that platform, surrounded by consoles covered in runic glyphs, was the huge power crystal that provided the myriad enchantments throughout the prison with magic power. It was still glowing the same dull orange color, meaning that while it wasn’t chock-full of power, it still hadn’t lost a meaningful amount since Leon had last passed through.

Much like Nestor’s lab that housed the moon stone, the walls of the spherical chamber were covered in glowing white runes that flowed across the nearly pitch-black surface like stars in the sky, constantly forming new enchantments and breaking them as the prison needed. Here was the most notable change from what Leon remembered: the runes were moving with much less alacrity than he remembered, though he wasn’t sure if that was because the faster-moving runes in Nestor’s lab were coloring his memory. Regardless, after a moment of thought, he guessed that that made a degree of sense since the prison no longer had a any demons to keep imprisoned, so the enchantments keeping the place up and running didn’t necessarily have to work as hard as they used to.

“… Wow…” he heard Valeria whisper in wonder from just behind him. “I… don’t even know what to look at, or where to begin!”

Leon could sympathize. There were millions of runes running along the surface of the curved walls, and it was impossible to know where they might begin and end. There were precious few enchantments that he saw that lasted longer than a few minutes.

He stared long and hard at those particular enchantments. If they were static on that dynamic surface, then he felt like there was a good chance they might be related to the spatial enchantments in the rest of the facility.

“How much power did it take to build this place…?” Elise wondered aloud. “I mean, I know you said that your Clan built this thing and that they were powerful enough to conquer this plane, but I guess… I never really understood just how powerful that was until now…”

Leon couldn’t but smile even though he had nothing to do with the power of his Clan. If anything, he was their greatest indicator of just how far they’d fallen. Staring up at that dome that sparkled with the light of countless enchantments, he couldn’t but feel inadequate, with many uncomfortable questions that had been bouncing around in his head ever since Nestor’s brief possession rearing their ugly heads. He felt inadequate because he was inadequate.

“It’s not just a sign of how powerful they were,” he whispered, his voice tinged with both excitement and depressed realization at who and what he was, how far he had yet to go, and how insignificant his accomplishments were compared to his ancient Clan. “It’s a goal that I want to achieve. My Ancestors built this place with ease and left a great many other tremendous works around this plane. They likely left even greater works in places that they ruled for millennia. What I want to build, the family that I want to create with all of you, will not only match those accomplishments, but surpass them. What I want is for our sons and daughters to look back upon places like what we see now and find them wanting. I want us to build a family so powerful that a place like this is nothing.”

As he spoke, Leon took one of Elise’s hands and one of Maia’s. He then made eye contact with Valeria, ensuring that she wasn’t left out. All of them needed to talk about what their future was going to look like, and this was as good a time as any.

“Valeria,” Leon whispered, Valeria’s sapphire-blue eyes finding his. She looked a little lost and left out, and had seemingly unconsciously put a few feet of distance between herself and the other three. Maia and Elise were both leaning into him, and as he said her name, they both looked to her without any traces of rejection.

Leon was a little surprised. He knew that Elise and Maia were both accepting of Valeria, but to see it in such a spur-of-the-moment situation was greatly relieving.

“Valeria,” Leon repeated, “if possible, I want you to be a part of that future.”