The Storm King

Leon’s return to Artorion was marked by solemnity; the remains of those fallen in the first battle with the pirates had largely been collected, save for those too far buried beneath ark wrecks or whose bodies were too torn apart and scattered in other ways. The final count had come to five hundred and thirty-four dead, one thousand and twelve wounded, and two hundred and thirteen more missing. After about a week, the chances of the missing turning up again were low, though Leon refrained from declaring them dead just yet. Instead, the funeral procession for the confirmed dead proceeded without them.

It was a largely grim affair, yet also filled with some cheer. In Leon’s mind, death was solemn and painful, but for many others in his Kingdom, it was to be celebrated, especially if one fell in battle. The Lions in particular threw an enormous party for the dead and the wounded, contrasting with the particularly sober and serious way the Ancestral Harts handled their dead.

The procession brought each of the dead to the mausoleum that Leon had ordered constructed, though some like the Ancestral Harts took care of their own dead, leaving only symbolic caskets or urns to be interred within the mausoleum. The bodies of the giants who participated in the battle and fell were likewise given over to the giants, who would repair the frames and reuse them when the time came for them to reproduce again.

The engineers and earth mages had already broken ground on the mausoleum upon the nine-peaked mountain and had cleared and leveled a lot of land, allowing a significant portion of Artorion to assemble upon the mountain for the procession. Leon and his family, after leading the procession through the small city and up the mountain, took their places upon a large rostrum that had been built in front of the mausoleum, and which would become the centerpiece of a large courtyard in the future.

For the moment, the rostrum was bare and stood as little more than a raised platform from which eulogies could be given, but Leon had plans for it. Already, pieces of the wrecked pirate arks were being salvaged, and particularly eye-catching pieces would be taken to be displayed on the rostrum as trophies of victory. He also wanted statues of his father and Trajan to be placed outside, along with statues of particular heroes who had fallen in his service, including Exallos Aetos.

The mausoleum itself was barely more than foundations, but the catacombs had already been sufficiently built to put their dead to rest. And as the last of their dead was brought below the earth, Leon stepped forward to address the crowd of some two or three thousand assembled before the mausoleum.

No one was being particularly loud, but a hush still descended upon them as eyes turned in his direction. Leon even silenced the wind with a quick expression of his power, leaving nothing to interfere with his voice carrying over the crowd.

He assumed a strong, yet not aggressive posture to reflect his attitude toward this address. He couldn’t be too contrite, but neither could he be dismissive of the sacrifices made.

After a deep breath, he began in a somber tone.

“No Kingdom is built without bloodshed, nor sustained without bloodshed. The glory and survival of all Kingdoms, past, present, and future, is paid for in blood. Today, we lay five hundred and thirty-four heroes to rest. They have paid for our survival with their lives. All glories we achieve will be because of their sacrifice. They may now feast with the Ancestors, but we will always remember their names. They are the best of us. They are the blood of the Blood-Thunder Jaguar, the Heart-Stabbing Hawk, the Raven-of-Hail-Hall, the Ji Spider, the Star-Tearing Tiger, the Booming Brown Bear, the Rock-Mane Bison, the Screaming Eagle, the Ancestral Hart, and the Lion of the Plains. They are giants and Thundermen. They shall never be forgotten.”

Leon kept it short, already feeling the burning in his eyes and a hitch building in his throat. These people didn’t just die for the Kingdom, they also died for him. If he hadn’t begun this expedition, they might’ve lived full lives back on Aeterna, surrounded by those they loved and who loved them.

They joined his expedition of their own accord, of course, but he couldn’t allow himself to forget that he had a duty to protect and acknowledge those who followed him. His Kingdom wasn’t for him alone.

Following his short address, those listening responded in their own way. The giants turned their heads skyward and rumbled long, deep songs. The Lions, Tigers, Bears, and Jaguars roared and stomped their feet to varying degrees. The Eagles, Hawks, and Bison were more respectful, but words of mourning could be heard from their contingents. The Ravens, Spiders, and Harts were stone silent. Many of those without bloodlines and who didn’t identify with the Tribes openly wailed and wept, while others remained stoic and respectful.

And so was put to rest more than five hundred men, women, and giants, gone in protection of their new home in the Nexus. Their names would be carved into the walls of the mausoleum, so that all could one day know of them, and witness the glory they paid for with their lives.

---

In the two weeks that followed the funeral, things seemed to be settling back down around Artorion. The arks were brought back to the city, those that had been crippled and down were repaired enough for them to make the journey under their own power, and Leon was informed that sufficient accommodations had been built for his people. So, he ordered large arkyards to be built upon the slopes of the mountains that ringed the Artor Valley. They wouldn’t be able to fully repair their arks without the proper facilities, and since so many of their arks had already been lost or heavily damaged, Artorion was left vulnerable until those arks were brought back to full capacity.

If another similarly-sized fleet appeared, even with all his power, Leon wasn’t sure that it could be stopped without horrific casualties. So, while Artorion had many infrastructure needs, now that his people had basic shelter, he decided to prioritize the defense needs of the city over everything else. And that meant walls, fortresses, towers, and arkyards.

In these weeks, many of those wounded in the fighting thus far were healed and rehabilitated, though some six hundred required limb replacements which would take longer to fix. He was particularly pleased when twenty-nine of the two hundred and thirteen missing Thundermen were found alive, though the remaining one hundred and eighty-four were declared dead.

Fortunately, things seemed to calm down considerably. No new threats emerged, construction proceeded quickly, and even with the casualties taken thus far, he was generally optimistic that Artorion would be ready to receive reinforcements from Aeterna when they arrived in less than a year.

He just had to make sure that he, Clear Day, Anastasios, and Eva created enough wisps to compensate for the flaws with their Nestorian Drives. The last thing he wanted was to hear that his reinforcements lost additional arks in making the jump from Aeterna to the Nexus.

To that point, the salvage of the pirate arks went quickly. Unfortunately, few from their fight were recovered intact enough to study well, but there were still those arks in Alhamachim that Leon felt bold enough to ask for. Before he did, however, he sent a small consulate of Eagles to the city to maintain contact with Artorion. He’d wait another couple weeks before making his request since the city still needed to rebuild its government—he couldn’t ask for those arks if there was no one to ask, after all.

For his part, he toured the city daily, making his presence known. He made many inspections, ensuring that everything was proceeding according to his standards. Thankfully, he noticed no serious issues, and his advisors were competent enough that no problem lasted long enough to require his attention to fix.

So, he was left with some amount of free time, which he spent with his friends and family, training, or studying. He needed his body to adapt to origin power to reach the twelfth-tier, and he’d been presented with ample reason to not slack off from the issues he’d had to deal with so far.

If he was a twelfth-tier mage, he thought, then he could likely protect Artorion by himself from another comparable fleet of hostile arks.

He wasn’t expecting to reach that level soon, but he remained diligent with his training.

Fifteen days after he liberated Alhamachim, however, he received a message while he was training that had him immediately leaving his portable villa and journeying to Nestor’s temporary lab down in the city. It seemed the dead man had made some progress with the Wailing Dirge’s enchantment.

---

“So,” Leon exclaimed as he burst into Nestor’s lab, “What do you have for me?”

Nestor didn’t even look up from the section of the complex enchantment he was studying.

“A hypothesis that has, so far, borne out,” the metal man replied.

Leon practically skipped over, his eyes brimming with curiosity.

‘If only I wasn’t a King,’ he wistfully mused as he took in the complex weave of runes recorded on the papers before him, ‘I could study these myself…’

“What hypothesis did you come up with?” Leon asked as he leaned against the table next to Nestor.

The dead man sighed despite not possessing lungs. “I’ve said it before, but I have to tip my hat to whichever master created this enchantment. The artistry, the precision… even the flaws I’ve found have been illuminating.”

“How was this flawed?” Leon inquired.

Nestor shuffled a few of the papers until he presented Leon with one section of the complex enchantment that had a few familiar features about it.

“If I’m reading this right,” Leon stated, “this is a part that’s designed to interact with an Inherited Bloodline? It’s remarkably similar to what Krith’is made…”

“But not exact,” Nestor continued. “And it’s in those differences that we find many of the flaws of the enchantment. I believe that these parts were designed to contain the power within the bloodline, to control it and channel it into certain ends.”

Leon frowned but nodded intently. The enchantment he’d taken from Krith’is was designed to stimulate the bloodline while keeping it under a mage’s control, to make it stronger and bring out more of its features to the point of inducing a transformation of the mage’s physical body. This one…

“Appears… to stifle the bloodline?” Leon guessed as his eyes scanned the paper, running from rune to rune, glyph to glyph.

“That’s the intent, but not the effect, I believe,” Nestor said. “Tell me, Leon, what happens during the awakening ceremony?”

“Bloodline awakening? Foreign magic is introduced into the body of a mage with a dormant bloodline. The resulting backlash usually awakens the bloodline… or kills the mage.”

Nestor, sounding a little impatient, clarified, “Which means, boy, that when poked, the bloodline gets stronger in response.”

Leon blinked rapidly as what Nestor said wound through his mind. “Are you saying that this enchantment attempted to control a bloodline, but wound up strengthening it instead?”

“That’s what I believe, yes,” Nestor confirmed. “I believe that that creature was once a human, but this enchantment, meant to enslave him and keep him under control, instead rendered him insane and bestial, in possession of nothing but his base instincts.”

“And with the strengthened bloodline, he transformed,” Leon added.

“Indeed.”

Leon frowned, then held his chin in thought. “What makes you think someone was trying to control him? This wasn’t just about controlling his bloodline, was it?”

Again, Nestor shuffled some of the papers around until he pulled out a diagram of the creature’s skeleton with the locations of all of the most important runic glyphs marked. Most prominently marked was the ‘Lord’ rune on the creature’s forehead, which Nestor had not only circled several times but added paragraphs of annotations next to in increasingly small handwriting.

“This is the core of the enchantment,” Nestor said, tapping the Lord rune with his finger. “All of it, every rune and every line of power, leads back here.”

“What does the rune do?” Leon hesitantly asked despite knowing the futility of the question.

Though Nestor’s faceplate lacked most distinguishing features, Leon could still feel the dead man’s almost judgmental gaze. “What do you think?”

“That only the mage that inscribed the rune knows exactly what it does,” Leon stated. “That the rune was imbued with meaning and power. It’s too general otherwise for us to guess as its function.”

“Indeed,” Nestor repeated. “But… to my hypothesis… I believe that someone was attempting to control this person, whoever they were before, and that their attempt failed spectacularly.”

“Who?” Leon wondered aloud.

Nestor walked to another table and picked something up, tossing the metallic object down onto the table on top of the enchantment diagrams. The silver mask of a Khosrow cultist that Leon had discovered in the Dirge’s nest.

“It may be coincidence,” Nestor afforded, “but there may also be something to you discovering an artifact from a virulently anti-Inherited Bloodline philosophy in that cave.”

A deep scowl carved its way onto Leon’s face as his fingers brushed against the silver mask. He opened his mouth to speak again but was interrupted by a loud knock at the laboratory door.

He stared meaningfully at Nestor for a long moment, much to say running through his head—most of all, wondering if this faction with silver masks and Lord Kamran had any connections. He couldn’t imagine Nestor having much information on that front, especially since he hadn’t had much to add despite Kamran having been an Anax below Jason Keraunos at one point, but Leon almost asked anyway.

Another loud knock on the door interrupted him again, and his attention finally shifted.

“Enter!” he shouted, and the heavily warded door swung open, revealing Gaius flanked by the Tempest Knights and secretaries acting as Leon’s personal detail for the day.

“Your Majesty,” Gaius formally stated as he hurriedly bowed. “We’ve received word from Alhamachim,” he added as he straightened up. “There’s been… an incident…”

---

“What’s going on over there?” Leon demanded of the man whose image was projected in front of him.

The familiar figure cut by Tauri frowned and took a moment to consider his words. The pause, brief though it was, grated on Leon’s patience, for whatever happened was enough to spur the man to visit Leon’s consulate and request an emergency meeting with him, which Leon’s consulate was able to provide.

“King Leon…” Tauri hesitantly stated, his pleasant accent marred by suppressed desperation, “Speaker Asa Hamil-Untar is planning a coup against my city. I, on behalf of the newly-elected Assembly, am requesting your aid in this matter.”

Leon stared at Tauri’s projection for a long time, not entirely surprised yet also completely taken aback. Around his meeting chamber stood some of his advisors, including his wives, Clear Day, Anastasios, Eva, and the Jaguar, most of whom looked some combination of intrigued, worried, or in Maia’s case, utterly bored and indifferent.

“What… do you want me to do?” Leon slowly asked. “Actually, back up. Let’s take this thing from the top. What happened?”

Tauri took a long, deep breath, then explained, “Elections were held five days ago to establish an interim government that would only last one year, a fraction of the usual term for our elected officials. Speaker Asa, despite his power, lost his bid for Speaker, a post he’s held for more than a century. He left Alhamachim the following day, bound for Ishtorpor, a city some hundreds of miles away in which he has some family connections. Another man with similar connections in that city heard rumors that Asa has been attempting to garner support from within Ishtorpor to build an army and return to Alhamachim, with the express purpose of installing him as a tyrant.

“King Leon, after our recent troubles, it shouldn’t be hard to believe that my fair city can’t defend itself right now. Even if we hadn’t been attacked, we still would’ve lacked that ability for Ishtorpor is much richer and far more powerful than we were, a difference that has only grown starker after these recent weeks.”

“How much stronger is Ishtorpor than Alhamachim?” Leon neutrally inquired.

“The city has a Strategos, by the grace of Despot Archelaus,” Tauri explained.

Leon nodded in understanding. Political ranks didn’t necessarily map to magical tiers, but they were still heavily correlated; with this information, he could infer that Ishtorpor had at least one mage that was eleventh-tier, and that that mage had the political backing of a twelfth-tier mage. If he were to set himself against Ishtorpor, then that chain of relationships could draw the ire of a Despot…

“You ask much of me,” Leon stated.

“I know…” Tauri whispered. “But my people are desperate. Perhaps it’s wrong of me to admit that, but it’s the truth, and probably obvious anyway. King Leon, we’re begging for your aid. We do not wish for our way of life to be extinguished by a disgraced former Speaker like this. We’re willing to give much in return…”

Leon smiled a little bitterly. It didn’t feel that good for someone to so blatantly try to purchase his power. He almost denied Tauri his request then and there.

His better sense, however, prevailed, and he listened to what Tauri had to offer.

“We produce much in Alhamachim,” the desperate bureaucrat explained. “Fine foods and textiles. Some rare materials, including a local brand of ambrosia and an amount of Lumenite. We also harvest luxury construction materials, including high-quality granite, limestone, and travertine.”

Leon nodded along, liking what he was hearing, even if the way it was being offered left much to be desired. The ambrosia and Lumenite, in particular, tempted him to accept right away. However, when Tauri’s explanation came to an end, instead of agreeing or disagreeing, Leon took a moment to make eye contact with everyone in the room before turning back to Tauri’s projection.

“Give me some time, Tauri. I’ll get back to you within the day.”

“Please hurry,” Tauri implored. “Former Speaker Asa’s connections are deep, and I believe he will acquire the army he seeks.”

Leon repeated with a thin-lipped smile, “I’ll get back to you within the day.” With that, the projection turned off, leaving Leon alone with his family and advisors. “So,” he said to them, “what do you all think?”