The forges of Ironford were never cold. They turned out weapons, armor, and accessories of all kinds by the hundreds, making the city the single largest producer of war material in the entire Kingdom. A few of these forges were owned by Heaven’s Eye, but the vast majority were owned and operated by their only real local competition: the Blasted Furnace.

Leon, however, wasn’t interested in any of that. Instead, his focus was devoted to finding a good jeweler and goldsmith that wasn’t affiliated with Heaven’s Eye. Since the Blasted Furnace was almost exclusively devoted to the manufacture of arms and armor, he had some trouble finding an independent smith for his purposes. Fortunately, August heard about his search and asked Marquis Herrenia, who then pointed Leon in the right direction.

But that was about a week ago, and now Leon’s commission was about complete, so he made his way from his quarters in the palace accompanied only by Alix. The two spent some time catching up, but there honestly wasn’t much to talk about. Most of Alix’s work with Minerva had been bureaucratic in nature, and paperwork was hardly a riveting topic. Likewise, all Leon could think to talk about for a while was his enchantment work, and Alix didn’t have much interest in that.

After reaching the goldsmith, however, Leon managed to find something to talk about for a while.

“So…” he said with some awkwardness to Alix as the smith went to the back to fetch Leon’s order, “have you put any thought into a second name?”

Alix blinked in surprise at Leon’s question. “Not really,” she honestly answered. “I haven’t even looked too much into the rules. I’m not sure I even want a second name.”

“The rules are simple as far as I understand them,” Leon said. “Commoners are only allowed their given names, nobles and foreigners get a second name to set them apart. You’re a knight, and thus, noble. You can take a second name if you want to.”

“I don’t really want to, though,” Alix replied as she lightly frowned. “My name is simple and easy to remember. Why change that?”

“Some might think being knighted is a good enough reason to change,” Leon said. “They’d want the entire world to know of their higher standing.”

“Going from commoner to knight is hardly that great of a reach,” Alix protested. “If someone told me that there were more than a million knights in this Kingdom, I’d believe them.”

Leon nodded. The Bull Kingdom’s population was measured in the hundreds of millions, though he wasn’t sure what the exact numbers from the last census were. Regardless, while he knew that compared to the number of commoners in the Kingdom, knights were relatively rare, but that didn’t mean they were scarce. He and Alix rubbed shoulders with hundreds of knights every day, and they dealt with Princes, high Lords, and some of the most important and influential people in the entire Kingdom.

“I suppose that’s a fair enough viewpoint to have,” he said.

Alix was about to continue, but the goldsmith returned with a small package.

“Here you are, Good Sir,” the smith said. “It was a difficult piece, but I believe it turned out quite well.”

Leon barely heard him, and instead directed his attention to the package in front of him. It was a shiny box of lacquered wood, deep red in color with a pair of small brass hinges on the back. It was small enough for Leon to carry it in one hand, but still fairly large compared to most of what was on display in the shop.

“That doesn’t look like a ring box,” Alix said in mild disappointment, having assumed that when Leon said he was going to a goldsmith that he was going to propose to Elise. Most common marriages in the Bull Kingdom weren’t accompanied by gifts of expensive jewels, but the nobility liked to present their significant others with such things when proposing marriage if only to make a statement about their wealth. Rings were, of course, an ever-popular selection for such gifts, but bracelets, necklaces, and even diadems weren’t unheard of, either.

Leon simply replied, “It isn’t.”

He wasn’t thinking about proposing to Elise—at least, not yet. Especially not so soon after Naiad’s departure. But he still wanted to show her that he loved her and was thinking about her in a tangible way, and so he’d sprung for something shiny and expensive that he could enchant, though that wasn’t how he described it to the goldsmith he’d commissioned to make the piece and had gone into great detail about what he wanted.

With some apprehension, Leon carefully opened the box. It had a small latch, and Leon almost fumbled with it as his hands shook in nervousness and excitement. This goldsmith made all of Marquis Herrenia’s jewelry, so Leon knew he had to be good, but he was still anxious about taking this to somewhere other than Heaven’s Eye. If he took it to the Heaven’s Eye branch in the city, though, he couldn’t be sure that it wouldn’t get back to Elise somehow, and he wanted this to be a surprise.

He opened the lid, and instantly, all of his worries vanished. Even Alix beside him couldn’t stifle a gasp of amazement.

It was a work of art, a thick bracelet of gold shaped to look like roots and leaves, while the main centerpiece that would sit right over Elise’s wrist was a golden flower. And it wasn’t just any flower, it was a slender lotus, with each leaf studded with a small sapphire.

When he made his commission, Leon had been worried that the smith would make the lotus too big, making the bracelet gaudy and unwieldy, but this was perfect. The golden petals were large enough to be as eye-catching as jewelry ought to be, but not so much as to get in the way. In fact, the bracelet as a whole was about as large as some small—and undoubtedly extremely expensive—magical clocks that Leon had seen some nobles wearing on their wrists of late.

“Wow…” Alix whispered as the sapphires in the lotus leaves caught the light of the shop’s magic lanterns and glittered.

“It’s perfect,” Leon said, eliciting a smile of pride from the middle-aged goldsmith.

Leon quickly paid the man what he owed for the bracelet and then he and Alix left. The price tag had quickly diminished much of Alix’s wonder at it, but she was still quite curious as to what Leon now intended to do.

“I’m not proposing,” Leon said, quashing that particular thought of Alix’s. “I’m going to enchant this to help Elise with her nature magic.”

“Is that it?” Alix asked with some measure of disappointment.

“Yes…” Leon said as dread began to seep into his voice. “I just wanted to show her that I was thinking of her. Is it not enough?”

“Oh, no, I think that’s more than enough to get that across. I just thought that you were aiming for something more. Especially with how much it cost…” Alix grimaced as she thought back to how much money Leon had just spent. She didn’t think she made that much in a year.

“It’s worth it,” Leon said with a smile.

---

“I’d say it’s barely worthy of the time it takes to look upon it, but I suppose I just have high standards,” Xaphan said as he closely examined the bracelet.

Leon had returned to his room immediately after getting back to the palace and dove straight into his soul realm. If he was going to properly enchant the bracelet, he’d need both Xaphan’s and the Thunderbird’s help, since he was next to useless when it came to earth and light magic, two of the elements that were key to nature enchantments, and in the ways of water magic, the third and final element, he was barely an amateur.

“Well I then suppose that it’s good that I’m not trying to impress you with this gift,” Leon shot back. “Are you going to help or not?”

“I’ll help, I can’t have you embarrassing yourself by presenting a gift that is unworthy of you. You are carrying around a Lord of Flame, after all, and I’d hate to see anyone affiliated with me fizzle and die like a match thrown into a lake over something so small. We’ll squeeze every drop of majesty out of that little band of gold, of that I have no doubt.”

Leon nodded, but in truth, he wasn’t that confident in Xaphan’s ability to help in this matter. The demon was self-professed not interested in elements beyond fire, even though Leon was sure that Xaphan was still probably more knowledgeable about earth, light, and water than he was. Or maybe just earth and light, Leon wasn’t so sure about the water.

However, Xaphan surprised him when he immediately began to mutter to himself and project a board of white light behind him, upon which hundreds of tiny runes began to form.

“I didn’t know you knew enough about light to create such an illusion, demon,” Leon said.

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” Xaphan replied. “Light isn’t too far from fire, and so I have some small understanding of it. You will, too, even if you never use it for combat. No being would be worthy of the Nexus otherwise.”

Leon nodded and turned his attention back to Xaphan’s light board. He did his best to make sense of it all, but Xaphan might as well have been weaving his enchantment in a completely separate language for all that Leon was able to perceive. To an extent, Leon had gone through this period of confusion before during his experimentations with wind, water, fire, and lightning enchantments, but it had always been a slower process. He started with the basics, and in the case of the former two, had the Thunderbird there to guide him. Xaphan wasn’t trying to teach him now, the demon was just quietly doing his own thing, and from what Leon was able to tell, rather gleeful in Leon’s inability to read the enchantment he was writing.

‘The bastard is showing off!’ Leon bitterly thought as he shot a dirty look at the mass of orange flames that perpetually surrounded Xaphan’s body. Maybe it was his imagination—he was almost certain it wasn’t—but he could’ve sworn that Xaphan’s bright yellow eyes flashed in smugness as the demon worked.

After a few moments, the demon leaned back, apparently satisfied with his work.

“There, human, all that I know of light magic is up there.”

Leon studied the illusory board with great interest. His eyes darted from pattern to pattern, running along magic lines leading from one rune to the next, all flowing in and among themselves to create a gorgeous silver tapestry of swirling runes. Slowly, Leon’s eyes began to see the order to the seeming chaos, the light rune leading into a projection rune into an amplification rune, and so on.

“What can the whole thing do?” Leon asked.

“It can change colors,” Xaphan proudly boasted.

“… change colors…” Leon muttered to himself in confusion. And then it clicked. Xaphan was fucking with him. “Change colors?! Really? That’s it?!”

Xaphan roared with laughter, his deep resonant voice practically shaking his pavilion. “HAHAHA! You should see your face, human! Of course that’s all it does! Why would you ever come to a fire demon to learn enchantments that help plants grow?!”

Taking a deep breath, Leon did his absolute best not to lose his mind at his supposed partner. It was true that he’d learned a lot from Xaphan’s teaching on the subject of fire, and despite all evidence to the contrary, he’d hoped the demon could have some insights into this matter.

“It seems I was mistaken…” Leon quietly muttered to himself, resolving to never seek Xaphan’s assistance again for anything other than burning things. Fortunately, before Leon could start venting his frustrations, an arc of lightning thundered through the sky of his soul realm, and with it came the Thunderbird. She stood in the doorway of Xaphan’s pavilion, dressed in a simple red sleeveless tunic, loose pants, and a pair of sandals, and her yellow avian eyes were locked solely on Xaphan.

“What exactly are you teaching my descendant, demon?” she demanded without a single hint of warmth in her voice.

“See for yourself,” Xaphan said with a shrug as he moved a bit to reveal his light board to the Thunderbird.

The divine bird in human form clicked her tongue in disapproval and waved her hand, dismissing the board with ease. “Parlor tricks,” she spat. “You need more if you’re to make that thing something worth taking pride in.”

“Actually, now that I think about it, there are some applications of that magic that could make this look a little better,” Leon said, getting a bit defensive on Xaphan’s behalf despite himself, though he didn’t lie, either.

“We can think about form after we think about function,” the Thunderbird said. “Now, come with me and we can work in peace.” She then turned around and began walking down the mountain toward Leon’s personal palace.

“Mmm, don’t mind me, I’ll just sit up here. As I have been doing. For years…” Xaphan grumbled.

“We’ll talk later,” Leon said as he followed the Thunderbird away from Xaphan’s pavilion. “Think about something you might need to get stronger.”

“If I get much stronger, you’d probably explode if you tried to use my power,” Xaphan countered. “You’re stronger than you were the last time you called upon it, but you still can’t handle it. Don’t push yourself, boy, I’ve waited a long time, I can wait a little longer. Even if I bitch about it sometimes.”

Leon gave the demon an apologetic look as he left, while Xaphan went back to relaxing in the pavilion. As much as it bored the demon, he had to admit that it was rather relaxing there.

‘It’s going to be difficult to readjust to life in the Void when I return…’ Xaphan thought to himself. ‘Here, I can speak without much consideration. There… well, it’s nice to be able to vent to that boy.’

He’d have to return to the Void eventually if only to kill Amon. But for now, he was in the mood to relax and let his power slowly recover on its own. There wasn’t much else he could do, anyway, and that one fact cooled his zeal for recovery significantly. Besides, in the Void, there wasn’t an Ascended Beast teaching her descendant who Xaphan could surreptitiously learn from.