Leon had, for one crazy moment, thought of revisiting the dragon.
The thought had appeared suddenly, uninvited. It had been a dumb, spur-of-the-moment thought that he had happily squashed, burnt, and scattered the ashes of.
The meeting had ended.
Against all expectations, nobody had asked him a question he couldn't answer.
Leon considered that a victory. The officials dispersed. Generals marched off to issue orders. Mages returned to their studies.
And for the first time in what felt like weeks, nobody needed anything from him.
He stood facing the gate.
Not close. A respectful distance, the kind that felt instinctively correct when looking at something that was a reminder that reality was under no obligation to behave itself. The afternoon light caught the shimmer of it, the view beyond still showing the dragon's world in its perpetual midday brightness against his own world's shifting hours.
He wasn't thinking about anything in particular.
That was the point. Just standing. Just looking. Not leading, not deflecting, not calculating the angle of a question or the weight of a diplomatic implication.
Just existing quietly for a moment.
He became aware of a shadow beside him approximately one second after it appeared.
He turned.
The Sword Saint stood at his shoulder, looking at the gate.
Leon stared at her.
He did this for an unacceptably long time-long enough that he was aware of it being too long and continued anyway, because he still, after months of shared campaigns and council meetings and the particular intimacy of facing potential extinction together, could not work out how she did that. Appeared. Materialized. Arrived without any of the ambient signals that preceded a person's arrival-no footsteps, no shift of air, no peripheral movement.
She was simply not there, and then she was.
He turned back to the gate.
They stood in silence.
It was, he had to admit, a good silence. The comfortable kind. The kind that didn't require filling.
He had perhaps thirty more seconds of it.
"Will you practice with me?"
Leon turned.
"Have a magic spar," she added.
He sputtered.
The sputter became a cough. The cough became several coughs, each one stripping away another layer of whatever composure the moment had contained. He bent forward, hand on his chest, trying to get air in through the right pipes. His eyes watered. Something happened to his breathing that he would refuse to remember later.
He straightened, eventually. Wheezing slightly. What remained of his dignity had scattered to the four winds.
The Sword Saint stood exactly as she had before. Still. Unreadable behind the helmet. He wasn't entirely certain she was even looking at him. She might be looking at the gate. She might be looking at something three miles behind him. There was simply no way to know.
"What?" he managed.
The helmet shifted. A small movement. A slight tilt that might indicate attention or might indicate nothing at all.
"Will you practice with me," she said. "Have a-"
"I heard what you said." Leon cut in. He searched for the word he needed and found it after a moment. "Why. Why would we do that?"
He immediately questioned whether that had been the right word. It hadn't come out as the measured, considered response of the High Archmage.
Was she the type to ask for sparring partners? Had the duel with the Solmaran general lit something competitive in her? He genuinely had no information that would help him here.
The helmet inclined slightly.
"To get better," she said. "I believe you are the best person to practice against." A pause. "Don't you think I could help you improve?"
No.
Leon's mind was very clear on this point.
No, no, absolutely no, not now, not in a year, not in a lifetime, not in whatever came after lifetimes, not under any circumstances he could currently construct or foresee constructing. No.
She was the Sword Saint.
She had ended a duel before anyone, including him, had seen her move. She had fought things that came through gates with ease proving that fighting things was less of a skill and more of a state of being. She moved the way weather moved-not like something that had learned to move but like something that simply was movement.
She would destroy him.
Not intentionally. He believed that. But comprehensively, thoroughly, in ways that would raise questions that Leon was not equipped to answer about why the High Archmage appeared unable to generate a single spell under pressure.
He needed an excuse.
A good one. Reasonable. The kind that made sense for someone in his position. The High Archmage has pressing concerns. The High Archmage's time is limited. The High Archmage doesn't spar because-
Because-
He looked down.
The ring sat on his finger, catching the afternoon light in a rush of colors it had no business producing. Warm and ancient and unassuming.
There it was.
The culprit.
He stared at it.
The dragon had given him one shiny magical trinket and somehow it had convinced the army that Leon was a transcendent being who had been graciously restraining himself this entire time. Every meaningful look across the command tent. Every slight increase in personal space. Every soldier who saluted half a second faster than they used to.
All of it tracing back to a ring he couldn't feel, radiating power he couldn't sense, suggesting to everyone around him that the High Archmage's true capability was something too large for casual display.
And now the Sword Saint, who had presumably reassessed him along with everyone else, had decided that this made him the ideal sparring partner.
He thought several things about the dragon that he would not have said aloud in polite company.
An excuse. Something plausible. The kind of reason that a genuinely powerful archmage might offer for declining-
A bell rang.
Once. Urgent.
Then again.
Then every bell in the camp joined the first in a cascading wall of sound.
Leon turned.
Soldiers running. Voices overlapping, too many to parse into individual words. Beyond the gate, through the tear in reality that had sat peacefully open for weeks, something was happening to the quality of the light.
A shadow moved across clouds
Huge.
Far too huge.
The dragon was approaching the gate.
Leon was already moving.
The Sword Saint was ahead of him, faster at processing the situation and responding.
He ran.
Around him the camp was evacuating with the practiced efficiency of people who had done this before and retained the muscle memory of it. The direction of movement was unanimous and required no discussion.
Further away from the gate. Out of the swamp. To the forest if necessary.
Leon ran toward the gate.
He noticed, distantly, that this was the opposite direction to the others.
He kept running.
Of all the moments, he thought, breathless, the ring catching light with every stride of his arm. Of all the possible moments for the dragon to do this.
He wasn't sure whether he was grateful or furious.
Both, he decided.
Truly, really, thoroughly-
Damn that dragon.