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Something in the man’s tone stuck out to Leon, some barely concealed relief that engendered quite a bit of suspicion within him, and it seemed like he wasn’t the only one to pick up on it. Marcus pointed out, “You don’t sound like you want to discuss peace…”

“That’s because I don’t,” the visitor freely admitted with a wide smile. “I want to get out and away from the Sunlit Empire as quickly as I can. Place is a damned madhouse. Makes the Sky Devils look inviting, you know?”

Leon’s eyes widened and he had to force himself not to stare with his mouth agape at what he’d just heard.

Gaius shared his confusion and asked, “Could you… clarify your position?”

“Yeah, yeah,” the sixth-tier Sunlit envoy said with a wave of his hand. “Apologies for the lack of decorum on my part, I’m just… well, ecstatic to get out of the Empire for a moment, you know? So, anyway, things have deteriorated in the Empire. Lots of officers getting purged, things like that. I’m not well-liked by my regional Commander, so when we were ordered to send someone to pretend to discuss peace with you, they sent me.”

“Pretend?” growled an eighth-tier Tiger elder as many others in the room began whispering amongst themselves.

“You have no intention of negotiating in good faith?” an Eagle elder asked.

“Those were not my orders, no,” the Sunlit officer said in a tone that was almost chipper and upbeat, even though he was essentially committing treason. His attitude almost as much as the words he spoke set off another round of whispering among Leon’s retainers, Chiefs, and elders.

However, with a single rapping of his knuckles on his chair, Leon brought silence to the room. He then fixed the Sunlit envoy in his golden gaze, the intensity of the stare finally breaking through some of the man’s strangely joyous exterior to the terrified man beneath.

“You have… left me with many questions,” Leon gravely intoned. “You are going to answer them.”

His voice faltering slightly, the envoy replied, “Y-Yes. Ah, Your Majesty. Yes, Your Majesty.”

Leon’s lips twitched upward in amusement for a moment, and then he launched right in. “Let’s trace the order of events, then. You were ordered to, I suppose, buy time for your Empire to dig in by feigning peace negotiations?”

“Yes,” the envoy replied. “If they were serious about any kind of negotiations, my superiors would’ve sent an entire team of diplomats, not just me.”

Leon nodded in understanding. He remembered his short time in the Bull Kingdom’s Diplomatic Corps well enough to have known that already. He supposed that would’ve been enough not to take the envoy’s words at face value even if they’d started negotiations, but he hadn’t expected the envoy to freely admit that his mission was duplicitous…

“Those orders came from above your regional leaders?” Leon asked.

Again, the envoy replied, “Yes. They came all the way from the Imperial Palace, though… I’m not sure they came from the Emperor.”

Leon cocked his head slightly in interest. “Who did they come from, then?”

The envoy hesitated a moment before answering. “An old friend of the Sunlit Emperor’s named Metellus recently replaced Deucalion as His Imperial Majesty’s chief military advisor. This man is as corrupt as they come, if the rumors are to be believed. He’s also allied himself politically with my regional Commander. I heard from my Commander’s secretaries that he received a letter from Metellus shortly before sending me on this mission.”

“So you claim this order came from Metellus?” Leon asked.

“I’d stake my life on it,” the envoy replied. “I mean… I kind of have staked my life on it, haven’t I?”

Leon softly chuckled in amusement. “You kind of have, yes. Are there any others who might’ve sent that message?”

“None that I can think of,” the envoy admitted. Leon couldn’t detect any deception in his words, but he still made a mental note to consult with Arcaion, Apollonios, and Heaven’s Eye later.

Leon turned what the envoy had shared so far over in his head a few times, contemplating what it all meant for the rest of the punitive expedition. Argos had been seized quite easily without bloodshed thanks to the Sunlit Emperor’s insistence on sowing division within his own Empire, and this was the first true sign that that feat had a chance of being replicated.

Of course, the very fact that the envoy was sent also meant that those west of Argos were planning on fighting, they just needed more time to prepare.

‘Not enough time to send a whole team to drag out the negotiations,’ Leon quietly mused. He felt almost insulted at this token gesture, even if it was given in bad faith.

“So, then,” Leon continued, “you jumped at the chance to get away from your Empire and delivered yourself to the arms of your Empire’s sworn enemies. Yet you seem so happy about these circumstances that I almost want to tie your feet to the floor to keep you from bouncing around the room.”

It was the envoy’s turn to laugh. “That’s true, that’s true,” he said. “As I said before, since the retreat from the Sword and Metellus’ rise as the man in charge of the Sunlit Empire’s armed forces, he’s been engaged in a campaign of his own purging his political enemies and those he perceives as disloyal. He hardly even tries to hide his intentions, though he at least forces most of his political enemies into ‘retirement’, which is honestly more akin to house arrest than anything. But there have been enough targeted executions to make a lot of my peers… nervous. That anxiety has given me and my fellow officers quite a few sleepless nights, so to speak. Hard to do our jobs when just about all of us personally know someone who was purged, and a not insignificant number personally know someone who was executed on trumped up treason or corruption charges.”

Leon gave the envoy a thin-lipped grin. “That makes sense. But why come here? If you were so intent on deserting your Empire, why are you so enthused about coming to your enemy?”

The envoy almost jumped at the chance to answer before faltering almost immediately. “I… Well, I…” He paused and glanced around the room, sucking his lips in a bit in a show of nervous reluctance. “A few things, really. I knew that I’d be safe. It’s well known that you took prisoners on the Sword, so that in itself was enough to convince me to follow through on coming to Argos. But on the way… uh… well…” The envoy paused again and anxiously rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s a little embarrassing, but I also had a dream about this.” A few chuckles went around the room, but it wasn’t even close to a majority of those listening to him. Most people in the room were simply watching and listening.

“Tell me about this dream,” Leon said with some amusement. He was no stranger to strange magics coming to him in dreams. He’d even gotten his first glimpse of the Great Black Dragon in an injury-induced coma, after all.

“It was… lifelike,” the envoy recounted in a dreamy tone. “It was short, and I remember it perfectly, like it was stamped into my head. I had decided to camp in a fortified position that had been abandoned when you lot took Argos, and I hadn’t even realized that I’d fallen asleep because I was pacing around that small fortress in my dream. I don’t know for how long, but eventually I realized that someone else was there. I couldn’t discern his features, but he assured me that I would be safe coming here. That you, King Leon, ‘were a man of honorable, if…’ please forgive me for saying this, these aren’t my words, ‘… a man of honorable, if limited, virtue.’”

The hall was filled with the sound of angry muttering and Leon even saw a few Chiefs and elders stepping forward to castigate the envoy on his behalf. However, another rapping of his knuckles on the arm of his chair once more silenced the room.

When he turned back to the envoy, he asked, “You don’t think this was just your mind playing a trick on you?”

“No, Your Majesty,” the envoy quickly replied. “I remembered everything far too clearly.” He paused once more and slowly made a show of raising his hand in a non-threatening way before calling upon his magic. Many in the room still tensed, but the envoy only retrieved a feather from his soul realm. “The dream was so real that when I awoke I simply couldn’t believe that I’d been dreaming. But this feather was left behind, still pulsing with enough magic that I knew it to not be a trick.”

Leon’s eyes narrowed as he curiously regarded the feather. It was purest white and looked as soft as it possibly could be, putting even most of Leon’s feathers to shame. It even seemed rather familiar to him…

“Might I… have a closer look?” Leon asked as he waved the envoy forward. However, the envoy only made it a few steps before Marcus and a couple Tempest Knights intercepted the envoy. Marcus nodded apologetically to Leon as he took the feather from the envoy and brought it to Leon himself instead of letting the envoy do so.

Leon just chuckled and accepted the feather. But when the feather touched his fingers, all traces of levity vanished.

The feather hadn’t felt like a particularly powerful thing. The feather of the Eskellion Dove he’d used for a healing potion for Xaphan back in the Knight Academy had felt stronger than this, so he hadn’t thought much of it. However, as the feather made contact with his skin, it sent a powerful pulse of magic reeling through Leon’s body, his internal defenses seemingly evaporating in front of it.

Fortunately, this power didn’t seem at all malevolent, and in fact, vanished entirely when another pulse of magic emanated from Leon’s soul realm, a pulse of magic that originated from his armor.

Or more accurately, the tau pearl within it.

Leon’s fingers closed around the feather, a sense of calm falling upon him as the feather’s magic dissipated. Then, he smiled. “Very well,” he said. “Let’s assume your dream was real… You want to be here. You don’t want to be in the Sunlit Empire right now.” The envoy nodded along as Leon spoke. “We’ll take you in as an official prisoner of war, and as such, protected. You won’t be tortured or mistreated, and you’ll be housed alongside your countrymen. In the meantime, I hope you’ll cooperate with my people and tell them all they want to know about what we might be facing ahead…”

“Of course,” the envoy replied. “I… don’t particularly want violence visited upon my people, but I also believe that for my Empire to survive, we must have a new Emperor.”

Leon nodded again, though his mind was already growing more distant, focusing more on the feather in his hand than on the envoy in front of him. He waved and allowed his advisors to take over the questioning of the envoy from there on, with their questions turning to more tactical and operational details of the Sunlit Empire’s defenses that the envoy would know. This questioning went on for an hour before growing so granular that Leon called the impromptu interrogation to an end. The envoy would continue to be questioned, but Leon and the rest of the leadership had other business to handle.

In Leon’s case, he decided to take an hour or two to retire to his family’s quarters to contemplate what the envoy had told him.

“You doing all right, Leon?” Marcus asked as Leon led him, Gaius, and his complement of Tempest Knights out of the citadel’s main hall.

“I’m fine,” Leon replied a little curtly. “Why?”

“You went quiet after receiving that feather,” Marcus said. “It was obvious that it meant something. I think everyone in that room was curious as to what it meant. You basically offered Sebas as much hospitality as you could after he gave you that thing. If I didn’t know any better, I’d almost assume some kind of mental enchantment.”

Leon scoffed. “My lightning would’ve torn anything like that to pieces. Also, who’s ‘Sebas’?”

“I’m sure it would’ve,” Marcus murmured. “Also, ‘Sebas’ is the envoy. We asked his name after you got lost in your own world, which proves my point, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” Gaius softly added, “And yet, the main part of the question remains unanswered.”

Leon gave his secretary a bitter and somewhat reproachful smile.

“I’m calling it as I see it,” Gaius responded with a grin of his own.

“The tau that we went after way back when we were trying to get into Heaven’s Eye. This is his feather.”

Marcus and Gaius’ expressions immediately to intrigue and curiosity.

“Any particular reason why?” Marcus asked.

“I have no idea why he’s reaching out,” Leon replied. “Or if it’s even doing that. Could just be telling me that he’s watching, I guess. But I’m thinking he’s going to reach out soon, now that I’ve received the feather.”

“I’ll make sure to tell everyone that it’s coming, then,” Marcus said. “Unless you want the guards to try and catch him?”

“No,” Leon replied as he felt the faint magic in the feather pulse again. “That won’t be necessary.”

Once they reached the doors to Leon’s chambers, Leon bid the two farewell for the day. They left to see to their other duties while the escort of Tempest Knights remained in the antechamber, ensuring that no one disturbed Leon’s rest—at least, from any conventional direction.

With his ladies and Anzu being absent either training or seeing to their own duties or wants, Leon just fell onto the nearest sofa to contemplate the tau feather. However, his head had barely hit the couch pillow before his eyes closed and he passed right out.

He found himself in a great white void so quickly that he felt like he blinked. He detected no time between the moment his head hit the pillow and his eyes opened in this void—it was like he’d just blinked and been transported somewhere else entirely, somewhere decidedly different from where he’d just been.

But he barely even had time to process this change in scenery before a shape began to appear in front of him, resolving from a white mist not unlike the Mists of Chaos, though much brighter. In a moment, the tau stood before him in human form—tall, handsome, appearing rather old, and with red eyes so dark that they could be mistaken for black.

“Leon Raime,” the tau said, sounding normal and even grandfatherly despite the obvious magical nature of their meeting. “It’s good to see you again.”

“… Same to you,” Leon replied as he got his bearings. “Honestly wasn’t expecting to ever see you again…”

“You bear one of my pearls,” the tau easily replied. “I keep an eye on all those I’ve invested in.”

Leon suddenly began to feel rather regretful about leaving the tau pearl in his armor despite the use it had had so far. Were it not for it proving so powerful as to keep him alive when fighting both Sunlit and the Keeper, he’d even consider removing it as soon as he could.

“That’s… discomforting,” Leon admitted.

The tau smiled and shrugged. “That’s why I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want my gift to be discarded.”

Leon sighed and straightened up. “All right, fine. You clearly felt some reason to come here now of all times. What’s going on?”

“A question for you, first, if you don’t mind?”

After a moment of thought, Leon nodded in acquiescence.

“Your intention remains to reach for the Nexus? To try and reestablish your Clan amongst the greatest powers in the universe?”

Again, Leon nodded.

“I would like to join you,” the tau finished. “As I said the last time we met, you are a man of virtue; it just needs to be properly nurtured.”

“And you think you’re the one to do so?” One of Leon’s eyes rose skeptically, already quietly judging the tau a little bit for his presumptuousness.

That judgment immediately vanished when the tau loudly laughed and replied, “No! No, no, no! As far as I’ve been able to tell, you’ve been operating admirably! Not perfectly, mind you, but much better than I feared! I’m almost embarrassed to admit that you’ve quite exceeded my expectations!”

“I’m going to consider being offended by that,” Leon drily stated.

“Let me know what you decide,” the tau quipped back. “In the meantime, please consider the following request: I would like to join you when you depart from this plane.”

Leon’s eyebrows fully shot up in surprise. “I… didn’t know that you wanted to leave this plane.”

“This plane is my home,” the tau said. “It’s been my home for a very long time. But it’s time for a change, but I don’t want to just… leave. I want to be doing something meaningful. And lending a young King any meager wisdom I might possess sounds like a good use of my time if I do say so myself.”

Leon stared at the man for a long moment, then sighed. “I’ll run this by the rest of my people. We’ll see.”

The tau smiled. “I didn’t expect any other answer. Until then, know that there are… other powers at play here.”

Leon’s expression turned suspicious again. “What ‘powers’?”

The tau’s dark red eyes narrowed substantially. “That’s… not yet for me to say. But I’ve been asked to facilitate your business. My… friend would like for you to be done and to have nothing more of importance on your schedule for a while. And when I say ‘importance’, the normal duties of a King are unimportant in this context.”

Leon’s mouth slowly turned to a frown. He felt like he could hazard a guess as to who might’ve made that request, but he decided to keep that suspicion unspoken, at least for the moment.

“Fine,” he said. “What are you doing to ‘facilitate’ my business?”

“The Sentinels will back off,” the tau claimed, nearly knocking Leon flat with the power of that surprise. “I’ll also clear a way to the Sunlit Emperor, that he may be dealt with in a timely manner. A long and sustained war is not what this plane needs. It’s not what anyone needs, and if this whole matter can be resolved with something as simple as single combat, then let it be so.”

“You say it like it’ll just be that easy.”

“It won’t be,” the tau admitted. “For now, know that I’ll be working to make it that easy. If you have any trust in me, wait in Argos for just one month. When I return, you’ll see that I have been nothing but truthful. One month, and the path to the Sunlit Emperor will be open to you. You needn’t suffer any more death, nor dispense it on your road to Thunderhaven. Just one month.”

Leon grimaced. “That’s a lot to ask. I’ll think about it.”

The tau’s smile tightened but he bowed slightly and said, “That’s the best I’ll get, won’t it? Very well, I’ll take it. Goodbye for now, Leon Raime! When I return, I shall bring good news!”

With that, Leon immediately awoke on the sofa in his chambers, feeling not groggy or tired at all. Instead, he shot back to his feet and left his chambers. It seemed he had some new information to share with his advisors…