[Now, then, I assume you have questions?]

Once those words were spoken, Leon had to fight to not start salivating. This was it, the moment he’d been waiting for, the moment when he would finally get all the answers he wanted. And yet, for all that time he had spent waiting, Leon had no idea where to start. He stood there for several long seconds, staring at the Thunderbird while paralyzed with indecision.

‘Should I start with magic? Or my family?’ Leon wondered.

Seeing this, the Thunderbird, showing for the first time a human expression, rolled its eyes and growled in a most un-avian like way, [Since you seem to be having so much trouble, why don’t I start things off?]

Leon raised an eyebrow in curiosity and nodded.

[What do you intend to do? What is your end goal?] the Thunderbird asked.

Leon answered immediately. “To kill my family’s enemies and to find my mother.”

The Thunderbird waited a moment for Leon to continue, but when he didn’t, it asked, [… Is that it?]

“What do you expect of me?” Leon inquired.

[I expect you to fulfill your promise, to become the King of the Heavens!] the Thunderbird roared with such force that the island shook in response. Down below the two, even Xaphan’s flames flickered and momentarily died down.

The demon had no intention of speaking, he just waited and patiently listened. This wasn’t a conversation that he had any part of, and Leon would doubtlessly leave this conversation greater than he was before, so Xaphan held his tongue; they were partners, and Leon gaining strength would also indirectly strengthen Xaphan, just as the demon recovering his power would bring Leon greater power.

At the mention of the ‘King of the Heavens’, Leon’s face instantly turned beet red, and he said, “Sooo… you know about that…”

[I know everything,] the Thunderbird responded, its tone giving Leon an impression of amusement.

In Leon’s Mana Glyph, the collection of runes that could connect an outside object with his soul realm and give it unfettered access to his magic power, he had claimed that he was the future King of the Heavens. At the time, it had been nothing more than a statement of the heights that he intended to reach, of the heights he felt he would have to in order to find and kill his enemies and had meant nothing particularly specific. Now that he was being called out for it, Leon instantly felt mortified that his mortifyingly arrogant claim had been witnessed.

[Don’t be so embarrassed,] the Thunderbird said, [it was quite comforting to see one of my descendants finally find some ambition. For too long the remnants of my family have languished in relative obscurity. For too long have they been content to rule a petty Kingdom and Archduchy in one of the most remote parts of the universe. Finally, after eighty thousand years, after my clan has fallen from the greatest of heights, has one who carries my blood both aspired to climb back to the peak from where we once stood, and shown enough potential that I can place some modicum of hope that it could be achieved.]

The Thunderbird had turned its eyes toward the distance as it spoke, but as it paused, it turned its gaze back to Leon, causing the young man’s heart to start beating like it was trying to break free from his ribcage.

[Has that determination wavered?] the Thunderbird asked as it made eye contact with Leon, its aura sending a bolt of momentary fear running through his body.

It took Leon a moment to compose himself and respond. “It hasn’t,” he answered. “However, I don’t know how to get there… or even where ‘there’ is…”

[I will help you, I will show you what you must do,] the Thunderbird said.

Leon stared at his ancestor in abject shock, his eyes wide and his jaw slack. The Thunderbird had essentially invited him to speak with it the last time they had seen each other, but for it to actually offer to help him wasn’t something he had ever thought it would do.

“Ok, all right, I’m game,” Leon said, his heart racing a mile a minute in excitement. This was an opportunity he could never pass up.

[Have you no questions for me before we begin?] the Thunderbird asked.

“Right, yes, that’s something… there’s some things I wanted to ask…” Leon sputtered, a bit embarrassed that he almost let his enthusiasm get the better of him. He took another couple of seconds to think, and then finally settled on what he wanted to know first. “Have you been able to see everything that I’ve been doing?” he asked.

[If I so choose, I can see your surroundings,] the Thunderbird stated. [However, I have little interest in your daily life, and as such I rarely, if ever, watch what you do.]

“Makes sense, I guess,” Leon said. “There’s a family that rules the Bull Kingdom that’s descended from an eighth-tier Ascended Beast, a bull… which I suppose is rather obvious given the name of their Kingdom. Anyway, I have been told that they are able to take on—or at least, some of them are able to take on the aspects of a bull, such as a vast increase in muscular strength and even sprouting horns. So, what I’m asking is can my blood, the blood that gives me the same power you once carried, do something similar?”

[An interesting question…] the Thunderbird muttered. [Are you intending to transform into a bird?]

“It is an intriguing possibility,” Leon confessed. “I don’t know about making it permanent, but maybe sprouting wings or otherwise being able to fly would be pretty fantastic…”

The Thunderbird suddenly began to brightly glow, quickly blinding both Leon and Xaphan with silver light. The light died as quickly as it came, but rather than the Thunderbird appearing from the light, a young buxom woman about as tall as Leon stood in its place.

She had long brown hair, the same color as the Thunderbird’s feathers, that hung all the way down to the back of her knees. Her skin was smooth and tan, not quite as dark as the desert-dwelling people of the Samar Kingdom, but certainly enough to be obviously foreign compared to the pale inhabitants of the Bull Kingdom. Her face was gorgeous, perfectly symmetrical with an aquiline nose and full lips turned upward into a proud smile. She seemed completely human, save for her yellow avian eyes that were locked on Leon’s surprised face.

“It’s not impossible, I remember some members of a few powerful clans taking on certain traits of their Ancestors, the Phoenix and Great Dragons most notably. I’ve never seen any of my clan members pull off such a feat, though,” the woman said, confirming what both Leon and Xaphan knew: she was the Thunderbird and this was her human form. “To put it simply, it’s not impossible, and I’m sure I could come up with a way for it to happen if I were to focus all of my attention upon the problem. However, to do so would be a huge time investment, and I would require some assurances that you would be worthy of such a thing…”

Leon gulped and looked her in the eye as he wiped his confused expression off his face. “Anything,” he said.

She smiled, understanding his mild confusion at her form yet offering no explanation. “I was going to impose these conditions upon you later, but now’s as good a time as any. Every day, you will come here, to me, and I will train you. If you are to truly become the King of the Heavens and my truest successor, then I must make you more than you are now.”

“Does that mean training me in water and wind magic as well?” Leon asked, remembering his father mentioning that their bloodline gave them some affinity for those elements in addition to lightning, despite him not seeing anything that would exploit that in his family’s magical records. Granted, he didn’t have much time to really poke around in his family’s archives, but he figured that there would’ve been some mention of those affinities in the basic educational tomes he did possess, yet there were none.

“It does,” the Thunderbird admitted, her smile growing wider in her appreciation of him bringing this topic up. “Ever since the fall of the Storm King, your ancestor that brought my clan to this plane, the clan has slowly lost much of what made it great. At this point, you are only marginally more powerful than an average lightning mage, and that will not do.”

“So your power is more than just lightning?” Leon guessed.

“My power commands the sky and controls the weather!” the Thunderbird boastfully roared as she opened her arms in pride, and dozens of bolts of lightning thundered through the mist around the island in response. “No other power can compare!”

Xaphan’s flames died down a bit in the light of this silver-blue lightning, and the demon himself seemed to shrink down a bit. As for Leon, his face split into a wide smile and he felt his blood begin to boil. To command the sky and control the weather was exactly the degree of power that he wanted.

“How do I get to that point?” Leon asked with shining eyes and a wild expression.

“You follow my instructions,” the Thunderbird said, reveling in Leon’s obvious enthusiasm. It had truly been a long time since she had last seen someone as full of potential as he was, though she also had to admit that it wasn’t necessarily all her that gave Leon that potential. For a moment, her eyes turned out toward the mist, toward the being that she knew was out there, pretending that Leon didn’t exist. She had once taunted it for its dismissal of its own descendant while Leon was dealing with Artorias’ death, yet it still remained distant, far outside of Leon’s reach and knowledge.

It didn’t want to acknowledge Leon at all, and yet, she could feel its attention. No matter what it thought about Leon and the union of their bloodlines, it couldn’t completely ignore what they were doing without making its own clan vulnerable—not that the Thunderbird actually thought that it would tell its clan about Leon, given what she knew about its aloof and distant personality.

The Thunderbird flashed a proud smile that being’s way, then turned her attention back to Leon before the young man could suspect that she was doing anything more than letting her eyes wander while she paused to think.

“Before we begin, there are a few other things that you must be made aware of…”

“Such as?” Leon asked.

“How much do you know of this universe? If you want to achieve Apotheosis and ascend to the highest peak possible, then you must know where you have to go.”

“I assume the ‘Nexus’?” Leon asked. Xaphan had told him of that distant place beyond this plane, located not only in the center of the sky but also of the entire universe. Leon had only vague ideas of what the Nexus actually was, though.

“Yes, the Nexus,” the Thunderbird confirmed. With a wave of her hand, she conjured a projection of light that showed all of Aeterna, from the Northern Vales to the most distant southern shores. “This plane, and the continent upon it, is part of a cluster of planes called the Divine Graveyard…”

As the Thunderbird spoke, the projection seemed to zoom out, showing the entirety of the plane. The continent of Aeterna was in the center, and it was completely surrounded by the Endless Ocean, which wasn’t as infinite as its name claimed; surrounding the ocean was a familiar cloud of mist, and after that mist came the empty dark Void that existed between planes.

The scene kept zooming out until Aeterna was little more than a single dot joined by eleven other dots to its right from Leon’s perspective, forming a small cluster of stars, moons, and planes. All of them ‘faced’ the same direction.

“In the center of every sky of every plane, the Nexus can be found,” the Thunderbird explained, the light projection suddenly zooming out even further at blinding speed until the ‘Divine Graveyard’ had vanished into the distance, replacing it with a spherical object that Leon couldn’t identify. Its surface shone with bright white light, and that was about all Leon could tell from the image, though he could see countless planes around it, slowly orbiting the Nexus while their stars orbited them. “The Nexus is where all who achieve Apotheosis go if they wish for greater power.”

Leon’s head started to spin. ‘Divine Graveyard? Apotheosis? What even are all these things?’ he wondered. Still, he wanted the Thunderbird to finish before he started asking more questions.

The scene then zoomed in, going right past the blinding white light and sinking below the surface of the Nexus. The sphere was hollow, though, and a moment later after they passed through the relatively thin shell, Leon saw what was within: an entire world existed on the inner surface of the sphere, and in the center of the place, what Leon might’ve called the ‘core’ if he had to give it a name, was a multicolored sphere of light, one side lit up like a star and the other much darker like a brightly lit moon. The light from the bright side shifted colors the farther away from the core the light traveled, which at the scale the Thunderbird had chosen to depict it, made it fairly obvious. The ‘moon’ side of the Nexus was blocked by a great curtain of black… something that Leon couldn’t identify, but no light passed it. Within that curtain Leon could see millions of tiny pin pricks of light, glittering like stars.

It was like this brilliant core created an illusion of the sky around a plane, even though there wasn’t really a sky within the hollow spherical Nexus.

“Every one hundred thousand years, the Nexus will destroy itself,” the Thunderbird continued, and the projection showed the ‘shell’ of the Nexus shattering into innumerable fragments and exploding outward into the Void, leaving only the shining core behind. “During the following three hundred years, the Nexus will rebuild itself from scratch, with nothing more than the power given off by the Origin Spark in a process called Reconstitution. Once this process is complete, all the powers that evacuated when the Nexus shattered return to claim new land and resources.”

Leon took a deep breath, and then stared at the Thunderbird.

“I hope you know that none of this is making much sense…” he said.

“I understand,” the Thunderbird replied. “I’ll be here as long as you need me. Besides, we have a lot of ground to cover, so settle in for a while.”

Leon decided to do just that and sat down on the top step of the marble platform. He then turned his eyes back to the light projection and waited for the Thunderbird to finish her explanation.