Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

[ A/N: Previous three Chapter (699,700,701) had some context and other issues. I’ve edited them.]

***

The morning after the reunion, the new arrivals met the rest of the family.

There were people they had not crossed paths with on the long climb, members who had joined the main group while this batch was still scattered across the lower layers, and the biggest gap was Ainen and his.

He found them at the long tables under the tree, because that was where Ainen always was, with something cooking. He wiped his hands on a cloth and came around to greet the people he had heard a hundred stories about and never once stood in front of.

”So these are the famous ones,” he said, easy and warm. ”I’m Ainen. I handle the flames, and the food, and on a good day I keep the two separate.” He smiled. ”You’ve all been names to me for a long time. It’s good to put faces to them.”

”You’re the flame one,” Julian said, shaking his hand. ”We heard about you coming up. The man who eats other people’s fire and makes it his own. Half of us didn’t believe it.”

”Believe it,” Bianca said, eyeing the spread on the table. ”Anyone who cooks like this can do whatever he says he can.”

Ainen laughed, and waved three women over, and his whole face changed when he did it, going softer at the edges. ”My wives. Saffa, Clovelle, Fraisea. Half of everything this kingdom built ran through their hands during the war. The dome, the air fleet, the supply lines. I just point at things and set them on fire. They do the actual work.”

Saffa snorted. ”He undersells himself. But not by much.” She nodded to the new arrivals, sharp-eyed and friendly. Clovelle gave a brighter, quicker greeting, already half a dozen questions ready on her tongue about where they had each climbed from. Fraisea was the quietest of the three, but she clasped each of their hands in turn and meant it, the warmth real under the calm.

”Three wives,” Liang said, with a slow, impressed nod. ”And they all still like you. That might be the most powerful thing in this kingdom.”

”It is,” Ainen agreed gravely, and the table laughed.

---

Then something small and scaled came barreling out from under the table, and the mood shifted again.

It was a dragon. A young one, no taller than a large dog, scales a deep shifting green that caught the tree-light, wings still a little too big for the rest of him. He skidded to a halt in front of the new arrivals and looked up at them with enormous curious eyes.

”This is Gopu,” Ainen said, and the pride in his voice was a different thing than anything else he had shown. ”Ours. Mine and theirs.”

”A dragon child,” Viktor said, blinking, recalculating something in that careful head of his. ”I did not see that coming.”

”Nobody does,” Clovelle said cheerfully, scooping Gopu up before he could climb someone. ”He’s a handful. He rebuilt half a propulsion system during the war by taking it apart first. We are very proud and very tired.”

But it was Kexell who had gone still.

The brassy old dragon, who filled every room he walked into, had stopped mid-laugh and was staring at the little green dragon in Clovelle’s arms with an expression no one had seen on him before. He crossed the ground slowly, crouched down to put himself at eye level, and looked at Gopu for a long quiet moment.

”Well,” he said, and his big voice had gone strangely gentle. ”Look at you, little one.”

Gopu looked back at the enormous scaled stranger, tilted his head, and then reached out one small clawed hand toward Kexell’s face, unafraid.

Something in Kexell’s chest made a sound that was almost a laugh and almost not. ”Raised soft,” he murmured. ”Raised loved. Surrounded by people who’d burn the world down for you.” He let the little dragon pat his snout. ”I never had that. Hatched alone. Not another scaled soul in a hundred miles, and nobody who wanted me there.” He looked up at Ainen and the wives, and for once there was nothing loud in him at all. ”You did right by him. Whatever else happens, you did right by this one.”

”You’re family too, you know,” Fraisea said quietly. ”He’s got an uncle now, if he wants one. A loud one.”

Kexell stared at her. Then he threw his head back and laughed, the old volume rushing back in all at once, and scooped Gopu clean out of Clovelle’s arms and onto his shoulder. ”An UNCLE! Did you hear that, little one? You’re stuck with me now. I’ll teach you everything. How to be enormous. How to be loud. How to make an entrance that ruins everyone’s plans.” Gopu shrieked with delight and grabbed two fistfuls of scale, and just like that the solemn thing was gone, swallowed by noise the way everything was, around Kexell.

---

It was into the middle of all that warmth that Natalia returned, and she did not return quietly.

She came through one of John Wicked’s lingering doorways with a sound like a small stampede behind her, because there was, in fact, a small stampede behind her. Exotic monsters poured out of the light at her heels, dozens of them, strange and beautiful creatures she had gathered from across the layer over the past days. Things with crystal antlers and glowing hides. Things that drifted instead of walked. Things that left trails of soft light in the air behind them. They fanned out across the open ground beyond the tree, herded by Natalia’s will and her threads of probability, and stopped in neat ranks like they had been drilled.

The whole reunion turned to stare.

”Right,” Natalia announced, planting herself at the head of her menagerie with the absolute authority of a general who had already won the argument in her own head. ”Wedding logistics. I have been busy. We are not doing this in a cramped pocket realm. Two couples this important deserve a real sky over their heads.”

”Where, then?” Almond asked.

”The planet.” Natalia said it like it was obvious, which, to her, it was. ”Out in the middle plane. Open ground, real horizon, room for thousands. And, more to the point, somewhere our guests can actually reach.” She ticked them off on her fingers. ”Kezryx. Ronethis. Dravokh. Velkarion. The four kingdoms that stood across the field from us, lost the event, and walked out of that realm with every one of their people alive. They’re out there in the layer now, same as us. We are inviting all of them.”

”All four,” Almond said. ”Including the ones we beat.”

”Especially the ones we beat.” Natalia grinned. ”They fought the Doom Monarch shoulder to shoulder with us before we ever turned on them. They conceded clean instead of dragging everyone into the grave. That earns a seat. Besides.” She glanced at him sidelong. ”A certain storm sovereign asked you for tea, did he not? Time to make good on it.”

Almond actually laughed. ”Jaskrit. He did at that.”

”Then he gets an invitation, and so do the other three.” Natalia spread her arms toward the open plain. ”The middle-plane planet is neutral, it is beautiful, and they can travel to it without anyone’s pride getting in the way. So that is where we go.”

”You already chose the spot,” Lily said, amused.

”I chose it three days ago. I have been gathering since.” Natalia gestured at the ranks of exotic creatures behind her. ”Decoration. Labor. Spectacle. Some of these light the night. Some of these grow things. Some of these are just unbearably pretty and I want them there. Now.” She clapped her hands once, sharp. ”Everybody up. We have a venue to build, and I am not building it alone.”

---

They moved to the planet that same day, and Natalia took command of all of it.

It was a good world for a wedding. Wide rolling plains under a deep clear sky, a horizon that ran on forever, soft grass that moved in long slow waves when the wind crossed it. Natalia stood in the middle of the empty plain, turned a slow circle taking the whole thing in, and then began pointing, and the kingdom went to work.

She did not just decorate. She conducted. She had spent the whole warfare event learning exactly what every person in this kingdom could do, and now she spent that knowledge on something with no enemy in it at all, and it turned out she was just as good at building beauty as she had been at building deceptions.

”Kayla,” she called first. ”I want the ground itself alive. Flowers, vines, the works. Make it bloom from here to the treeline and make it bloom on cue.”

Kayla knelt, pressed both hands to the soil, and her plant affinity rolled outward in a green wave. Grass thickened. Buds pushed up by the thousand and opened in slow ripples of color, spreading across the plain until the whole field was a moving carpet of blossom. Her threads ran through all of it, so that with a thought she could make a whole hillside flower at once.

”Saffa, Fraisea. Structure.” Natalia pointed at the center of the field. ”An archway. Two of them, joined. Big. The kind of thing people remember for the rest of their lives. I want it to hold light.”

Saffa and Fraisea went to work together, the same way they had built war-systems, except now they built something to be loved instead of feared. Saffa shaped the framework out of layered energy and crystalline alloy, soaring twin arches that met and intertwined at the top. Fraisea fed it with worked materials and set it to catch and hold light along every line, so the whole structure glowed faint and warm even in daylight.

”Clovelle, the sky is yours. Skydread fleet, but make it gentle. I want it raining petals at the right moment, not raining fire for once.”

Clovelle laughed and took her squadrons up, and where they passed they seeded the high air with drifting blossom and soft light, ready to release on Natalia’s signal in a slow falling curtain over the whole field.

”Ainen. You know what I want from you.”

”Lanterns,” Ainen said, already smiling. ”Flame that does not burn.”

”Thousands of them. Every color you have. I want this field lit like the inside of a jewel when the sun goes down.”

Ainen walked the edges of the field, and behind him drifted small flames in a dozen exotic colors, his origin flame shaped not to consume but simply to glow, hovering at gentle heights all across the venue. Cold blues, soft golds, deep warm reds, colors that had no business existing, every one of them harmless and beautiful.

Natalia’s exotic monsters filled in the rest. The light-trailing creatures were set to wander the field’s edges at dusk. The growing things deepened Kayla’s bloom. The drifting, glowing beasts were placed where guests would walk, living decoration that breathed and moved. Marcus and the Asura Executives hauled and built and lifted wherever raw strength was needed. Big D coordinated the seating and the approaches. Even Gopu helped, zooming back and forth on Kexell’s shoulder carrying small things in his claws and dropping most of them.

By the time the first day’s work was done, the empty plain had become something out of a dream. A field of moving flowers under a wide gold sky, twin arches of glowing crystal at its heart, drifting flames waiting for nightfall, strange beautiful creatures wandering the green.

Natalia stood at the center of it all, hands on her hips, surveying her work with fierce satisfaction.

”And we are not even finished,” she said, to no one in particular. ”Wait until they see the rest.”

Lily came to stand beside her, looking out over the field that was being built for her own wedding, and for a moment the schemer who had turned an entire ocean had nothing clever to say at all.

”It’s beautiful, Natalia,” she said quietly. ”Truly.”

Natalia’s fierce expression softened, just for a second, into something warm and a little overwhelmed.

”You’ve all earned beautiful,” she said. ”Every one of you. After everything.” Then she cleared her throat, and the general came roaring back, and she was already pointing at the next thing. ”Now stop distracting me. We have invitations to send to four kingdoms and a thousand petals to hang. Move.”

And under the wide gold sky of a middle-plane planet, the most magical wedding venue the family had ever seen kept rising, piece by piece.