Retrieving the crystal that stored all the power in the facility was fairly easy, at least compared to the moon stone. Leon’s only concern had been what might happen to the lift and the rest of the facility once it was no longer powered, but Nestor had been adamant that the enchantments running these things could still be powered individually.

It was still a little nerve-wracking for Leon when he found the storage crystal and began the process of disconnecting it and taking it for himself. It was a surprisingly small thing, a rough sphere with a diameter of about two feet, and it glowed bright yellow like a small star.

It was a short process to disconnect it, during which it gradually shut the facility down, ending with all the lights in the place going out. Fortunately, Leon and Maia were strong enough to be able to see without light, but it was still with some trepidation that Leon absorbed the massive crystal into his soul realm.

[Anything else I can do to shut this place down?] he asked Nestor, not quite trusting the man to tell him the truth, but at least trusting him not to want his property to be taken by any squatters that might happen upon it.

[No,] Nestor replied. [The moon stone has been buried, there is no reason to collapse these chambers. It’s all just empty space, now.]

[Not quite,] Leon said as he glanced back at Maia. She had told him that she and Valeria had found quite a bit of raw metals that he thought might be worth grabbing, so he and his river nymph lover made their way back to the lift.

To his immense relief, Leon found that the lift functioned without problems when he channeled his meager, still-recovering magic power into the emergency runic circle that he found in the lift itself, and it bore him and Maia back to the storage rooms where he grabbed practically everything that wasn’t nailed down. When he was finished, his entire haul totaled almost a hundred tons of both steel and bronze, along with a small smattering of other materials. Nothing, however, to get too excited about, for all the nice stuff that might’ve allowed him to start building his own golems had been taken by the rest of the facility staff when they evacuated thousands of years before.

He and Maia also made one last stop to the generator room where Leon had found Justin, and as he’d both hoped and suspected, without the power that both stabilized and drained it of its power, the ice demon had died. Its crystalline corpse now lay upon its platform, the vines around it limp and unable to drain what little magic remained in its body.

Leon was tempted to take the creature’s corpse, but he didn’t know what he’d do with it. Demonic cores could be valuable, but that wasn’t accounting for the demon in question being drained of its power. After a few minutes of thought, Leon decided to leave the demon there. It was dead, he’d let Nestor’s lab be its tomb.

With all that taken care of, Leon led Maia back to the area where they had left Valeria and Justin. However, just after stepping out of the lift and before returning to the room, Leon stopped.

“Hey,” he said out loud as he turned to face his river nymph lover, his face showing an uncharacteristic amount of worry and dread, “do you mind if we talk for a little while? I… don’t want to go back in there just yet, and I’d like to talk with you for a while.”

“What is it?” Maia asked, her voice sounding like honey to a man who had eaten nothing but dry bread his entire life even though her tone was tinged with worry. She slid into Leon’s arms with an almost liquid flexibility and captured his eyes with hers as she waited for his response.

Leon smiled and held her tighter, relishing having her in his arms. A moment later, he asked, “How are you doing after all of this? The Gorgon, the constant fighting since we entered the Vale, all of it. From my perspective, at least, it seems like you and Valeria were getting along a little better after we met back up.”

Maia snuggled into his embrace and said, “I want to go home. I want to work on having children.” Leon couldn’t help but chuckle as her hands briefly wandered his body, letting his hands do likewise. “But otherwise,” Maia continued as she paused in her teasing, “I’m doing all right. Valeria and I… don’t see eye-to-eye, and I don’t think we ever will. But I… respect her a little more now.”

Leon could hear the strain in her voice as she admitted it, but he was glad she was able to say it at all.

He asked her, “Would you object to having her stick around for a while longer?”

Maia laughed as she turned her head to look back to him. “How much longer? Sounds like you intend for it to be a while.”

“Maybe I do…” Leon replied as he glanced in the direction of the room where Valeria and Justin awaited their return. “Is there anything you want to do? Anything beyond making children, anyway?”

“Is that not enough?” Maia asked with a seductive, hungry look. “I would like to speak with the Gorgon before we leave, if possible. She and I are of the same blood, and I think it would benefit me to touch base with her before we leave her, possibly for good.”

Leon hesitated, but he had to admit he was curious as to what the Gorgon had been up to with his blood. “I have no arguments to make against that,” he said as something else occurred to him with the reminder of the Gorgon. “By the way, she did give this to me before we split up…”

Reaching into his soul realm, Leon retrieved the scroll that the Gorgon had given him that supposedly contained her ‘cure’ for the Gorgonism. He hadn’t even looked at it yet, though, so whether or not it could work he couldn’t say.

Maia took it and it vanished into her soul realm. “I can look at it later,” she said with a radiant smile.

Leon had to admit that he was a little surprised given how much she feared turning into a Gorgon, but he just smiled back and squeezed her against his body one last time before pulling away. He loved his river nymph and he longed to return to Elise, but right now, he couldn’t afford to have his mind filled with love. He and Justin had to speak, and he didn’t want his heart to be weak.

“Let’s go deal with this,” he said to Maia after a long minute of silence.

Maia gave him a supportive smile and slid out of his grasp, though she remained at his side.

Leon took a deep breath to steady himself and to get rid of any lingering joy in his demeanor that Maia gave him. He wanted to be stern and stoic for this.

A moment later, he pushed open the door and entered the dark room where Valeria and Justin had last been. His seventh-tier eyes easily pierced the near-total darkness and saw that both were still there, with Valeria sitting in a chair next to the sofa where Justin lay. Valeria’s eyes were a little red like she had been crying, while Justin looked weaker than when Leon had left, with his aura dwindling to barely first-tier. If his aura fell any further, Leon didn’t think that Justin would have any power left.

“We’re back,” Leon said, stating the obvious as he and Maia walked in. “Our business here is done, so I think we ought to have a bit of a chat and then we can get out of here.”

He walked over with Maia at his side, a smile on his face as he looked to Valeria. He wasn’t surprised to see her still there, but he was appreciative that she hadn’t run away, regardless. If he were in the same position, he couldn’t honestly say that he would’ve stuck around.

She smiled back at him, giving him a look that seemed to glow even in the near-total darkness of the powerless facility. Justin, however, was staring around blindly, clearly unable to see in this darkness after losing so much of his power.

Taking some pity on the man, Leon retrieved a small lantern from his soul realm and lit it, letting its dim light set a quiet and somber mood in the room. He then took a seat close to Justin, just across a small table and stared at the silent man in the eye. Justin was quite subdued, barely looking in all directions save for Leon’s, and didn’t say a word.

When it became apparent that Justin wasn’t going to speak first, Leon turned back to Valeria and asked, “Have you two discussed everything you needed to?”

“Yes,” Valeria replied in a deliberately formal tone. “My father’s desire to die has… lessened, and he’s willing to tell you whatever you wish to know. I hope, however, that you stick to the commitment you made to aid me in freeing my mother from the grasp of Lord Kamran.”

“I haven’t forgotten that, I fully intend to help you in any way I can,” Leon replied with an easy-going smile. His smile hardened as he turned back to Justin. “So, I suppose we ought to start with the most obvious. Who is Lord Kamran and why does he want me dead?”

“Kamran is a powerful warlord within the Nexus,” Justin answered in a flat tone, speaking like a man utterly defeated and to whom these secrets barely mattered enough to remember, let alone keep from Leon. “He is an Anax in the Stormlands, a man whose power is exceeded only by the Elemental Kings, and he has aspirations to succeed the Thunderbird Clan as the next Elemental King of Lightning, or ‘Storm King’, as they are more colloquially known.”

“And that’s why he wants me dead?” Leon asked as he cocked his eyebrow. Valeria had told him it was because of his blood and who he was descended from, and while this information didn’t necessarily conflict with that, it also wasn’t quite what Leon had been expecting to hear.

“It’s not the only reason, though I believe it may be the most powerful motivator for his hatred of your Clan,” Justin replied. “He doesn’t know you exist. If he did, he would’ve sent more than me to this plane. As it is, he is an enemy of your mother’s Clan, the Draconic Federation.”

Leon’s eyes went wide. “Draconic Federation? That needs some explanation…”

“I suspect you already know what it is,” Justin said, his tone not changing in the slightest. “There were seven Great Dragons in the Primal Age, and many more dragons besides. A great many other draconic beings who were not true dragons also existed. Nowadays, there are many dragon clans, but they are all a part of the Federation, the most powerful organized state outside of the Elemental Kingdoms. This Federation is ruled by a Senate, but the Draconic Senate is dominated by the descendants of the original seven Great Dragons.”

Leon nodded, absorbing all of this as well as he could. “Why is Kamran targeting them? I was told that my mother’s Clan was under attack not long after I was born.”

“And indeed, that was the case. Kamran is a part of a league of his own that was formed by ‘pure’ humans to combat the myriad Clans that have inherited powers from various Primal beings. They count all descendants of the Divine Beasts who were born at the creation of the universe and the Ascended Beasts who rose after that as their adversaries. They claim they advance the cause of humanity by reducing the power of these various Clans.

“About twenty years ago, they launched an attack on the Draconic Federation, doing quite a bit of damage before the dragons got their heaviest hitters, the Great Black Dragon Clan, to mobilize.”

“What was the situation like up there when you left?” Leon asked as a thoughtful expression crossed his face. “And how long ago was that?”

“I’ve been here eighteen years,” Justin replied. “When I left, the fighting had reached a stalemate, with Kamran’s league stalling out against the power of the Dragons. Kamran has many allies, some of them in lofty places, and the Dragons, while considerably more isolationist, have deep wells of power they can call upon. I once heard that due to their power, resources, experience, training, and all that they’ve hoarded over the aeons since the Primal Age, a single member of the Great Black Dragon Clan is worth at least ten mages of the same power level.”

“And he attacked these people?” Leon asked in bafflement. “He did that willingly?”

“It was supposed to be an important morale boost, to remove one of the most powerful states remaining that could trace its lineage back to the Primal Age. To show the rest of humanity that they were above these inhuman freaks. And I don’t think Kamran put much stock in those rumors; he considered them inflated draconic propaganda.”

One of Leon’s eyebrows almost shot up into his hairline, though he managed to keep himself from feeling too offended by Justin’s ‘inhuman freaks’ comment.

“Lord Kamran was also responsible for many of the purges that eliminated the Thunderbird Clan within the Nexus. When the last Storm King fell here, he left the vast majority of his Clan without leadership, and that made them easy pickings for Kamran and his league.”

“This Kamran must be quite old,” Leon observed.

“Older than I know, certainly old enough to have seen several Reconstitutions of the Nexus.”

“To summarize, then,” Leon said with a sigh, “Lord Kamran wants me and my family dead—and has succeeded in killing nearly all of them, at least on my father’s side—because he coveted their position of power and because he doesn’t like that we bear the power of ancient Divine and Ascended beasts?”

“That would be a simple way of putting it,” Justin said with the barest of nods in Leon’s direction, though he still hadn’t once looked at the younger man since he’d returned.

“What about you?” Leon asked with a dangerous look in his eye, though his aura remained free of killing intent. “Do you still want me dead? You told me that I deserve it if for no other reason than guilt for atrocities committed by my Ancestors.”

Finally, Justin turned to him, his once deep blue sapphire eyes now growing a little hazy and clouded, but still boring into Leon with an unblinking defiance that Leon recognized all too well.

“For the sake of my daughter, I would make my peace with you, Leon Raime,” Justin said, doing an admirable job of both deflecting and answering the question. “As I am now, I have no hope of returning to the Nexus and saving my wife from Kamran’s hands. You and my daughter are the only hope I have for her rescue.”

“And as I just told Valeria, I’ll be doing my best to do just that.”

Justin gave him a long, searching look as if he were looking for any sign of deceit in Leon.

After a few awkward seconds, he simply said, “I hope you are true to your word.”

“I always try to be, though I can’t say how successful I’ve been,” Leon replied. “But regardless, there are some other things that I would like to talk about…”