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Nine Tails landed.
Her nine tails folded behind her slowly, one by one, like flags being lowered after a long battle. The hellfire was gone. The combat energy that had been radiating off her in waves since the moment she stepped through the gate quietly withdrew, pulling back into her the way a tide pulls back from a shore.
She looked at Leon across the devastated crater floor.
Really looked at him.
Not as a threat to be assessed. Not as an anomaly to be eliminated. She looked at him the way she had not looked at anything in a very long time, with the full weight of four hundred and seventy three years of accumulated wisdom brought to bear on a single subject.
A child who had walked through her barrier without effort.
A child who had frozen her hellfire mid air.
A child who had unleashed a chilling wave that had carved a frozen wasteland out of the eastern interior of Beastglade, one of the most ancient and formidable stretches of wilderness on the continent, as casually as breathing out.
And throughout all of it, his expression had not changed once.
She had tested him enough.
She knew what she was looking at now, or at least she knew enough to know that she did not know, and that was itself a kind of answer. In centuries she had never encountered anything she could not eventually measure. This child had no visible ceiling. None. And the truly alarming part was that she was not convinced he was even trying.
Her tails stilled completely.
She made her decision.
It was not a difficult one, which surprised her slightly. She had expected more internal resistance. There was none. Some truths, when they arrive clearly enough, simply do not require argument.
She straightened to her full height, silver hair resettling around her shoulders, golden eyes calm and certain.
And then she bowed.
Not deeply. Not the bow of a subordinate performing an obligation. The deliberate, chosen bow of someone who has decided, after a very long time of bowing to nothing, that this particular thing has earned it.
"I have lived for centuries." She said, her voice carrying its full weight. "In that time I have served no one and answered to nothing. I have protected my people by my own power and my own judgment and I have never once found anything that made me reconsider that arrangement."
She raised her head and met his sapphire eyes.
"Until tonight."
A pause.
"I propose that you become my master."
...
The silence that followed was so complete that Lark could hear his own heartbeat.
He and Hugo had not moved from their positions against the gate since approximately the moment the frozen hellfire had shattered across the crater floor. They had watched the entire exchange with the expressions of two people whose understanding of the world had been quietly and thoroughly dismantled over the course of one evening and had not yet been replaced with anything.
Lark's mouth was open.
He became aware of this and closed it.
Hugo was not moving at all. The hand still braced against the gate was white at the knuckles. His golden eyes were fixed on Lord Nine Tails with an expression that cycled rapidly through disbelief, confusion, and something that was working very hard to not be awe.
Lord Nine Tails. Who had rescued their tribe. Who had built the barrier that kept them hidden and safe. who had never in all the years any of them had known her bowed to anything.
Was bowing.
To a human child.
Lark looked at Hugo.
Hugo looked at Lark.
Neither of them said anything because there was genuinely nothing to say. She had made her decision. They both knew her well enough to know that when she made a decision it was already final before she announced it. Arguing with Lord Nine Tails about a choice she had already made was not something either of them had any interest in doing under any circumstances and especially not after watching what the child across from her had just done to the eastern forest.
They exchanged one more look.
Then, without a word, they both bowed their heads.
If Lord Nine Tails had decided, then they would respect it.
That was simply how it was.
...
Leon looked at her.
Then he looked at the two guards, both of whom had their heads bowed with the practiced deference of people who had decided very firmly not to have opinions about this.
Then he looked back at her.
The frost was still curling lazily from his fingertips. Behind him, the frozen ruins of Beastglade's eastern interior stretched out under the moonlight in perfect crystallized silence. Ahead of him, a four hundred year old divine beast was proposing to follow him.
He thought about this for a moment.
Here he was trying to explore the forest in the dead if the night yet these people attacked him, for no reason, accused him and tried to get rid of him, now they want to be his servant ? Hell no.
"No." He said.
Nine Tails blinked. It was a very small blink but it was genuine.
"No." Leon repeated, his voice flat and unhurried. "You spent this entire time attacking me without listening to a single word I said. I told you repeatedly I wasn't a spy. I told you I had no hostile intentions. And instead of listening you unleashed attacks on me and destroyed half the forest." He paused. "And now you think I'm just going to accept you ?"
He turned around.
And began walking away.
His footsteps were quiet on the frost covered ground, crunching softly through the layer of ice that had settled over everything in the wake of his chilling wave. The moonlight caught his white hair as he moved, and the gate behind Nine Tails and her two guards grew smaller with each step.
The Nine Tails with her ears down remained exactly where she was.
She said nothing.
She waited.
...
Leon walked.
The frozen ground passed under his feet. The ruined forest extended around him, silent and vast and glittering faintly in the moonlight. He should go back. Sleep. He had training tomorrow and his father would notice if he looked worse for wear and then there would be questions and questions were the last thing he needed.
He walked.
And then, somewhere between one step and the next, a thought arrived.
Arlott's voice. Calm and matter of fact, from the breakfast table, only a day ago.
'You will each be assigned personal maids tomorrow.'
Leon's footsteps slowed.
He thought about that.
Each sibling. Lena would get one. Julian would insist his be a girl and spend two weeks being insufferable about it. Lily would accept hers quietly. Rosa already had attendants. Cain had his.
And he.
He would not be getting one.
He had refused his father's assigned attendant before the quest because he couldn't afford to have a stranger close enough to witness his abilities. That was a reasonable decision. He stood by it. But the alternative was that he continued to operate completely alone, with no one around him who knew what he was capable of, while the world continued to produce situations like tonight's, where things found him and needed to be handled quietly and without witnesses.
He thought about the fact that this woman, this ancient creature with hellfire that unmade things, had just proposed to serve him. Had proposed it willingly.
He thought about keeping a being like that close versus leaving her out here, unaffiliated, in a weakened barrier, in a forest that was now significantly less intact than it had been an hour ago, with questions about him that she would eventually find answers to one way or another.
He stopped walking.
Stood still for a moment in the frozen silence of the ruined forest.
Then he sighed.
It was a long sigh. The sigh of someone accepting an outcome they had already calculated and simply didn't want to admit yet.
He turned around.
Nine Tails was still standing exactly where he had left her, her nine tails settled, her golden eyes on him across the stretch of frozen ground between them. She had not moved. She had not called after him. She had simply waited, with the patience of something that had been waiting for four centuries and had learned that it was the most reliable tool available.
Leon walked back.
He stopped in front of her.
"If you ever attack me without listening first," he said. "We're done."
Nine Tails held his gaze, her ears perked up
"Understood." She said. Simply. No qualification.
Leon was quiet for another moment.
"Fine."