Chapter 15: Chapter Fifteen: In Which Leo Screws Up a Coronation

            Leo limped up to the smooth, black stone of the vault, his gait straightening as Lily’s regeneration took effect. His two companions followed until they reached the vault as well.

            Leo stared at the smooth black stone wall in front of him. “So, um, how do we get in?”

            Lily smiled at him. Her posture was slightly slumped from exhaustion, she wore a near-shredded dress, and every inch of her was covered in dust, even her metallic-silver hair faded with its coat of grime. But her blue eyes twinkled at him.

            She reached out, putting her hand on his shoulder—his undamaged right shoulder—and spoke to him formally in High Averian. “In the companionable tone, to one’s deepest friend: Thank you for your support: Without which I would fall. I can take it from here: Burden rightly passed. You have fulfilled your promise: Respect, Admiration.”

            “What did she say?” Hugh asked.

            “‘Thanks, I’ve got this now.’”

            Lily smiled a small smile and switched back to Middle Averian. “I suppose I did, but far more poetically.”

            “Oooh,” Hugh said sarcastically, but it wasn’t accompanied by his usual rambunctious gestures.

            They were all tired, drained of stamina and will by the hours’ long fight to get to this place.

            “I shouldn’t look like this.” Lily ran her hand across her front.

            As her hand passed over her body, everything changed. Her dress became untorn and clean, her hair formed into a beautiful get up, and her face was covered in make-up. No dirt, no smudge, could be seen anywhere.

            And she seemed even more beautiful than before.

            “What did you do?” Leo asked.

            “I took personal dweomer as my ability, an illusion-based Mind ability to change my own appearance and clothes at will. So that I may become queen in appropriate style—and not gross and near naked in this shredded dress.”

             Lily walked up to the wall, stared at it for a moment, and then pressed her palm against it.

            Leo could tell that the magic around them had twisted, although the sensation was so new, he wasn’t certain what had happened. But something had.

            Lily backed away from the wall, her new dress swishing around her ankles.

            After a moment, a gently glowing golden light appeared where she had been standing. The light twisted in the air until it took shape. It took a moment for Leo to really see, as the figure glowed, but he was looking at an elf. The elf was younger, appearing to be in his early thirties to Leo, although Leo didn’t know how much that was in elf years. He had long hair and a sad face, weathered in worry lines despite his young age.

            The ghost spoke in a voice that sounded soft and intelligent. Leo gave eighty percent of his attention to the ghostly elf and twenty percent to the fascinating question of how a light could make sound.

            “Who asks to claim the Vault of Kings for themselves?” the voice intoned.

            Rapidly heating the air as a laser, maybe? To expand it and create vibrations? Nah, you’re being an idiot, Leo.

            Lily stepped forward, once again speaking in High Averian. “In the noble tone, petitioning the highest: I, Lilianae Kuvella ap Willowynd, sole surviving daughter of Duke Iloran Willowynd: May his soul find peace. I ask, as the closest living blood relative of you, the old king: Sorrow at his passing: to be permitted entrance to this vault: My claim is rightful.”

            Leo laughed that High Averian didn’t have a natural way to tell a ghost, “sorrow at your passing,” and then wondered why he was so scattered all of a sudden. Maybe because it’s all over, and we’ve won?

            The ghost—if that was what it was—spoke in a ringing voice. “Denied! Your blood is impure. You are not a relative of the one who created me.”

            Okay, more like a recording, then, Leo observed, if it was created by the original, and not a ghost.

            The ‘ghost’ winked from existence, plunging them back into the dim light from Lily’s lantern.

            She collapsed to her knees on the broken stone floor. She hung her head and stared at the ground.

            “After all that, we failed,” Lily whispered. “Sis was right—my plan was stupid. I lost everyone, and at the end, I have nothing to show for it. The blood of Stardew is too watered down, and Averia is truly dead.”

            Stardew? What?

            “No!” Hugh said. “No, no, no! I need a hoard. Leo stuck my sword inside a golem that’s buried under tons of rubble. I have nothing again. Polly will laugh at me!”

            Leo pulled up his status sheet and stared at his perk: Line of Stardew. Stardew!

            Lily turned to Hugh and spat out, “Uh, have some perspective! My whole kingdom dies with my failure, and all those Imperium nobles that mocked me are right now. How does your stupid hoard even compare?!”

            “What did you say?” Leo asked, still dazed.

            The pieces cascaded into his mind in a fraction of a second. It all makes sense! An elf summoned me, two days before I found Lily! Who said her sister was following an alternative plan to save the Kingdom of Averia! The body I inherited was from the Stardew line!

            Leo winced as the pieces kept falling into place. And she said her sister died the same day I was summoned. Damn, Damn, Damn. That’s not going to go over well… I wonder if Audrey got the body or if that elf simply died to the orcs—or the explosion I kinda set off. Frick!

            “I told Hugh here that he shouldn’t compare his loss to the elves.” Lily sulked.

            “Not that part, before.”

            “I failed, and the kingdom is going to die?” Some of the loss was leaving Lily’s voice as her brow furrowed and she pursed her lips.

            “Because you don’t have enough Stardew blood?”

            “Of course. It’s the blood of the royal line.”

            Yup. I foresee just thousands of issues… but at least we might still succeed here.

            Leo coughed. “So, um, I think this body is of the Stardew line.”

            “What?” Lily asked, her voice low and tight. “What do you mean, ‘this body’?”

            “The body I inherited when I was summoned here, the one they stuffed me into. Some guy got on an altar, and then my soul was sucked from my old body and placed inside this one.”

            Lily’s eyes were so wide that Leo thought she might go full anime, her hands were hooked into claws and shaking, and her face was as white as a sheet. “Someone… Someone summoned you into a body? They didn’t bring your body through a gate?”

            “No, I was brought here against my will—well, kinda—and put into this body. My body died.”

            “What did that person look like?” Lily asked quietly as she stood, facing Leo.

            “Um, a woman a bit past adulthood, obviously an elf. Uh, slender even for an elf but slightly buxom, metallic bronze hair, pale skin, gray-brown eyes…”

            “Wylla,” Lily said, and a tear leaked from her own eye.

            “What?”

            “Leuwyllan ‘Wylla’ Ivothine ap Willowynd, my elder sister,” Lily said. “You just described her. She said she wanted to summon a champion to be the new king. You. She wanted to summon you to be the new king. How is it we met? How did she summon you?”

            “Wait, you’re the elves’ new champion?” Hugh asked, his tail swishing around again. “You’re the one who’s supposed to rebuild this kingdom?”

            Leo ignored Hugh and answered Lily. “It was some great temple inside a cave, with these statues of a six-armed human all about. This body lay down on an altar, and my soul was sucked out and into it. When I came to, we were in a fight with a bunch of orcs, including this huge, nine-foot orc with a crazy mouth—he had four pinchers surrounding it.”

            Lily interjected, her voice tight. “Kavahk Rockbreaker, son of Grakith Demonborn.”

            “Sure, great to put a name to an extremely ugly face. The upshot is, the elves were being slaughtered. I helped fight back, accomplishing almost nothing. But the big orc, while fighting me, knocked a crystal onto the ritual lines. The crystal that was supposedly powering the whole ritual. Your sister called it ‘Asnandi’s Key’—”

            Lily gasped.

            “—and when it hit, the ritual went crazy. The portal expanded, a lot more souls were pulled in from where they had summoned me, and then purple fire washed across everything. I appeared in the forest north of Calasti, east of the Blue River.”

            “You were summoned to Asnandi’s high temple on this continent, at the top of the Kivrelti Mountains, a thousand miles from here,” Lily said.

            “Alright?” Leo said, half a question, not sure what she was getting at.

            “Why didn’t you tell me?!” Lily cried out, slammed her fist onto his chest. “Why?”

            “I didn’t know! I had no idea what any of that meant. I come from a different dimension, a different body. I knew nothing of magic, or this world’s history. I didn’t know! I remind you we’ve known each other for thirty-six hours. It’s been an intense thirty-six hours, I concede, but still—thirty-six hours. We haven’t exactly had time to exchange stories.”

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            “Too busy murdering our way through levels,” Hugh interjected. “Besides, does it matter? I mean, he’s here now, and if he has the perk, surely that’ll count to open up the vault? Then we all get what we want.”

            Lily hugged herself. “Maybe. I have the feeling that Wylla’s plan is about to trump mine. She never confided to me what was in the vault, and she always advocated getting a champion. But she never explained how! She must have always had Asnandi’s Key. It makes so much sense now!”

            “What’s Asnandi’s Key?” Leo asked.

            “It’s the primary artifact of the god of portals. It lets her do things with summoning that are near-impossible otherwise. That’s certainly how she found your soul and fused it with some long-lost heir to the throne, one I didn’t even know about!” Lily’s whole body was shaking now. “I just don’t understand why she did that!”

            Leo frowned. “Hey, I’m sorry. But we can likely still win now, right? Like Hugh said? That’s a good thing…”

            Lily calmed a bit. “I feel betrayed. Betrayed a bit by you—if you’d even talked to me about your perks, we would have known this before. But betrayed more by my sister! Why didn’t she confide in me?! She was hiding an heir and an artifact. Maybe if she’d shared, I would have supported her plan, even though I thought one of us should be Queen instead of some summoned champion.”

            Leo wondered about that as well. What had possessed her to keep those secrets?

            “What else did you bring to the table, Leo?” Lily asked. “Why were you summoned? What did my sister think she was accomplishing? I want to know!”

            “Can we do this after the vault?” Hugh asked. He swished his tail. “Please? I want to know if this whole thing has been worth it.”

            Leo glanced over at Hugh and smiled, despite the tense situation. “You’re Level Four, Hugh. You’ve got three abilities to pick, as well as stats. Things that your peers don’t have. It was worth it for you even if we walk out with nothing.”

            “Still, c’mon, please?” Hugh whined, stretching his head out and batting his eyes at Leo. “You guys will have a long time to talk this stuff over. I mean, mortal long. You know what I’m saying.”

            “Might as well test it,” Lily said, waving her arm at the wall in irritation and then flicking her now impossibly clean silver hair from her equally spotless face.

            Leo approached the wall, spreading his fingers like he had seen Lily do, and placed his hand against it.

            He felt a hum of magic through the wall, a magic far more intense than anything he had experienced here, even the golem. He was almost shocked—through a sense he didn’t have words for yet—by the power he felt.

            He stepped back, thinking that he looked forward to learning the names for that new sense.

            The elven ghost formed, just as regal as before.

            “Who asks to claim the Vault of Kings for themselves?” the ghost asked.

            “Um, I, Leo—never Leonard, that’s my dad—Evans.”

            Leo heard the sound of flesh striking flesh and was pretty sure that Lily had just face-palmed, but he didn’t turn around.

            All right, I probably shouldn’t have included my disclaimer about my dad. And maybe I should have used my full name… Still, it’s a dead guy!

            The ghost, or magical recording or whatever, reached down and touched Leo. “See.”

            Leo saw.

***

            Leo saw Calasti as it had been before its ruin—somehow, he knew this was almost a thousand years ago. It was a bustling medieval city of millions, its metropolitan port filled with ships and trade. An empire that stretched across most of the inner sea and up the Blue River almost to the ten lakes. Wealth, prosperity, happiness, culture, and a sense of security—this kingdom had provided it all.

            It even managed to set up trade and alliances with kingdoms on other dimensions, but without a gate, these were barely more than mere formalities. But powerful beings from more magical dimensions looked on with favor at the empire.

            Then he saw the ruin, a slow, creeping thing. Decadence first, hollowing out the inventive and industrious culture. Then the goblin raids on allies, whose pleas for help went unanswered. Rich nobles complained as supplies of goods dried up—but never once for the loss of valued sister-states, fighting every effort to rally them to the cause of expelling the Blood Tribes.

            Then the first border cities were lost, and the rulers still fiddled. Only near the end, when the King Cailda Stardew had risen to the throne, did the elves begin to fight back in earnest. And even then, many refused or dithered. At that point, however, generations of orc and goblin warriors had grown strong on war, and their lairs were everywhere, like ticks embedded in the kingdom.

The king desperately searched for a way to save his kingdom. Calida and his greatest imbuers, along with powerful beings from deeper dimensions, worked feverishly to craft an item that would link Toth directly to other dimensions, where the only remaining allies the kingdom had left were.

Leo’s attention was drawn to a seemingly minor event. The king had a bastard child, the result of a single night when he’d been weak from stress and given in with a comely maid, just the one time. A child that was sent out of the city, to live in secret in the city of Lakusi, the Lakeside City, in the Havi Imperium, an indiscretion quickly forgotten in the press of greater matters.

            Then came Grakith Demonborn. He was an orc with the lineage of a being from the Blood Abyss, and he was both powerful and able to exist on Toth without suffering decay from the world’s weaker magic. He unified the tribes, turning a diffuse threat into a massive hoard, and invaded the kingdom proper.

            Through the use of Asnandi’s Key—the same one that had been used to bring Leo forth—and high-level magic, Grakith ripped open a portal to the Blood Abyss just north of the city and stabilized it with a gate. Beings of immense power—demons—joined the war.

            The king, Cailda, with his greatest champions and most of the armies, sallied forth to fight him. The king and his armies shattered the gate and took Asnandi’s Key, but it cost them almost their entire army—High elves, ghost wolves, sun eagles, dryads, and a few other mortals and magical beasts dying by the tens of thousands that day.

            The king, deeply wounded and infected with Abyssal corruption, retreated to the castle in Calasti. His greatest imbuers, including young Wylla Willowynd, presented him with an item—the seed of Yggdrasil, a living artifact for which there was no compare on this world of Toth. It would become not one gate, but tens and then hundreds of them, if bonded to the right person.

But the King was not the right person. The seed was not completed, not quite. It needed a soul, a soul that was a natural magic soul, to unify with it. And when the tree grew, the soul would need to grow as well, becoming arcane. And maybe beyond even that. With a heavy heart, Calida agreed that if they could find such a person, and that person was an ethicallty decent mortal, he would cede his thrown for the sake of his people.

Charts and concepts flooded Leo’s mind—how the seed would be guided as it grew, and how it would provide power to its bonded soul. But also of how rare a natural magic soul was—usually less than one a continent. One that could also become arcane was nearly impossible to find. One that could complete the trifecta of all three of the arcane was literally impossible for an elf with three perks as the maximum. They had to cheat to find such a soul. They began looking through dimensions using Asnandi’s key, to find a person—or a soul that could be bonded.

If they could find this soul, the kingdom would receive allies to save it from other dimensions. And then grow and thrive beyond anything it had seen before.

But it took time. King Calida stored the Yggdrasil seed in his line’s greatest vault, safe from anyone not of his family, until they could find there new champion.

            Then the magic flared, and a dragonflight was born. The once-oppressed Storm Dragons of the Blue Lands flew across the kingdom, destroying it in a week of terror. The king himself was caught in his castle, with mere minutes of warning. Knowing that Chao was coming for him to avenge slights to his own line and children, the king gave Wylla Asnandi’s key, and the secret of the king’s bastard child…and a willingly accepted geas to keep her from revealing the plan and details to anyone, even if they tried to magically compel her—a final protection to keep the tree from the dragons or the orcs. Wylla fled into the night as the king challenged Chao, watching from outside the city through magics as the king died to the dragon and the empire suffered its death knell. Knowing that her purpose was to find a new king, one worthy to bond with the tree and lead them all to renewed glory.

            The king himself faced death tired and nearly despairing, but with one tiny hope—that Wylla could still complete the plan and save all his people by giving them a new, stronger king.

            The one tiny upside was that the disunified orcs and goblins of the Blood Tribes were pushed from the lands as well, back to the swamps they had come from. The heart of the kingdom of Averia quickly became a land exclusively for dragons and beasts, its once proud people dead, fled, or enslaved.

***

            Leo snapped back to himself, and to the glowing figure in front of him.

            The magical echo of the old king, the last remnant trapped in the vault, spoke. “Did you see? Did you understand?”

            The remnant’s voice was raw with desperation and hunger. The old king had desperately wanted to save his kingdom and people.

            “I did, and I do,” Leo said.

            “Will you accept the quest? Will you plant the seed and rebuild the kingdom?”

            “Do I have to in order to enter the vault?” Leo asked.

            “No,” the echo of the old king said, its voice a defeated whisper.

            “But only I can use the seed?” Leo asked. “If I don’t do it, no one will?”

            “The chances of another suited to the seed coming along is infinitesimally small,” the old king’s echo said, the hope in its voice renewed. “You must be the one, Leo-Never-Leonard-Evans. Someone else could, perhaps, rebuild the kingdom, but only you can truly lead it to greatness through the seed! No one else has the chance you do. You must be the next king! I implore you!”

            Leo glanced at Lily. She had red spots high on her cheeks. After a moment, however, she turned to him as well. “I wanted to be queen, but I see it’s not in the cards. No wonder sis didn’t like my plan…”

Lily’s soft blue eyes stared deep into his. “Will you stay, Leo, and rebuild Averia with me, now as its king?”

            Leo thought. He had wanted to matter, and more, to show his ex-wife, his parents, Audrey, and the rest of the world that he mattered. It was still mere days from the time he had disappeared, and perhaps he could make it back. But as far as duty went, his only duty, arguably, was to Audrey, and she was either here, in Wylla’s body, or dead.

            And if he wanted to make a difference in the world… he’d never have a better chance than the one here. Decision crystalized, a decision that he’d been toying with since his first level regardless.

            “I will, Lily. I always wanted to build, and this is certainly that. I’ll reforge the kingdom and build it to heights never before seen, however long that takes me. Or die trying. You have my word. Although your kingdom made choices I think ethically questionable, and I will seek to guide it down other paths. No slaves as the easiest one I will be saying no to. No genocide against sentient species with the capacity for good either.”

            Lily smiled. “I can accept those terms. Together, then.”

            He nodded and stepped toward the vault. A door formed and let him in, the obsidian surface simply melting away. As he passed into the vault, the ghost of the king disappeared, that magic dissipating. At the same time, magic washed over him, and he became the new owner of the vault.

            The entire vault was empty but for four things. Three were scrolls, each inside a crystal case.

            The last was the seed. It was the size of Leo’s head, and when he stared at it, it was like looking into Asnandi’s Key. Leo saw other realms, fantastical things, like worlds where it rained fire and forests of thousand-foot trees, before he tore his eyes away. The power of the seed washed over him—incredible, bizarre magic that warped space at the edges of his vision.

            “Well, we’ve a lot to do,” Leo said. “Shall we?”

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