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Glory to my bum ass proofreader: Solare.
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John's senses returned by slow and stubborn degrees.
At first there was only sound.
Three voices drifted around him through a heavy, golden haze, one soft and dreamlike, one dry and irritated, and one cool enough to frost glass if it had any more patience left to lose.
They seemed very far away at first, as though he were listening to them from the bottom of a deep lake, but each breath pulled him a little closer to the surface until words began separating themselves from the blur.
"…dearest…"
"…mine champion…"
"…if he hath broken himself, I shall be deeply annoyed…"
John's brow twitched. His body felt warm all over, strangely light and terribly comfortable, as though someone had set him down upon the softest thing in the world and then taken personal offense at the idea of moving him. He opened his eyes a crack.
Moonlight, silverish black hair, and blue robes. Golden radiance in the corner of his vision. A pale doll-face hovering above him held the restrained irritation of a woman who had already considered six ways to bury him and discarded each of them on practical grounds.
John blinked once, twice, then let his eyes drift half-shut again.
"Huh…" He muttered dizzily. "One of those dreams again… no Melina and Malenia this time, weird…"
The annoyed and exasperated look Ranni and Marika shared over his head was immediate, synchronized, and almost eerily identical.
"Be gentle, please…" John whispered, not noticing or caring in the slightest. He closed his eyes more fully and surrendered bonelessly to the mercy of whatever feminine tribunal had chosen to stand over him this time. "I've had a long day…"
Marika let out a low sigh through her nose and folded her arms beneath her chest.
"At least his brain appears to function." She muttered.
Ranni's spectral face, far more expressive than her puppet body, narrowed into a frown of deeply personal suspicion.
"I am not wholly convinced." She grumbled. "Mayhap I ought to crack open that thick skull and inspect the matter myself."
"Ranni…" Rennala chastised softly, her melodic voice floating down like moonlight over still water. "Be kind. He hath only just returned to himself."
John, who had by then fully realized that his head was in fact pillowed in Rennala's lap, opened one eye again and looked up at her.
The Queen of the Full Moon smiled down at him with sleepy maternal fondness and immediately resumed threading her fingers through his hair the moment she saw he was conscious enough to appreciate it.
He smiled weakly back at her.
"Thank you…" He murmured, and meant it.
Rennala only hummed and scratched lightly at his scalp in answer.
The effect on him was catastrophic. He let out a soft breath through his nose and made no move whatsoever to get up.
Ranni noticed that instantly.
Marika did too.
The little witch's spectral expression flattened into a stare so dry it could have desiccated fruit. Marika's look, by contrast, landed somewhere between disgruntlement and helpless amusement, as though she had expected precisely this and still found it faintly absurd to watch happen in real time.
John, with the serene audacity of a man who knew he was being judged and had chosen comfort anyway, wiggled his head a little deeper into Rennala's lap and only then turned his attention back to the matter at hand.
"Why'd I black out?" He asked, glancing up toward Marika. "That didn't happen with Godrick's Great Rune."
Marika's gaze softened a little into something more thoughtful.
"The other Great Rune doth not concern itself overmuch with thy senses, does it?" She replied dryly.
"Nor is it so intimately bound to the soul itself. The Great Rune of the Unborn is not fully awakened in the same manner it would be at its height, but even diminished without the Divine Tower's activation, it remains a nexus of unborn possibility and unsouled becoming. Accepting such a thing into thyself was never going to be a small matter."
John closed his eyes again and hummed in agreement, though it was difficult to sound particularly burdened by cosmic revelation while using a moon queen's thighs as a pillow and receiving absent-minded head scratches like a pampered housecat.
Rennala, entirely pleased with how comfortable he had made himself, continued stroking his hair with dreamy affection.
Ranni, deciding someone in this room had to retain a relationship with reality, steered the conversation in a more practical direction.
"So…" Her voice sharpened. "Now that thou hast charmed thyself into my mother's favor, tamed her wolf, planned our wedding, and acquired her Great Rune, what exactly dost thou mean to do with the disaster thou hast created outside?"
John opened one eye and looked up at her.
"We could kill everyone we don't want around." He said easily and without a care in the world.
All three women stared at him.
John shrugged noncommittally against Rennala's lap, as if the action would grant him the certainty of a man making an entirely reasonable suggestion.
"I'm serious. The higher-ups in this academy clearly wanted Rennala out of the way. They left her in here for centuries and never cared enough to help her. You don't let your Queen rot in a library full of nightmarish toddlers unless her continuing weakness is politically useful to you."
The atmosphere shifted at that.
Because for all the bluntness of the way he said it, none of them could truly deny the possibility.
Rennala's fingers slowed in his hair.
Ranni's spectral face lost some of its sharper annoyance and settled into colder thought.
Even Marika, who had spent longer than any of them watching institutions decay from the inside, looked toward the shelves and shadows of the library with a grimness that said she found the idea all too believable.
Rennala, for all her gentleness, was not blind enough to miss the shape of what he meant. The sadness in her eyes deepened just a little, and John felt it even without looking up.
It hurt her, of course it did. Raya Lucaria had once been her life's work, her kingdom, her great proud house of glintstone and moonlit thought. To imagine that same institution quietly benefiting from her irrelevance was a cruelty too fitting to be implausible.
John exhaled softly and pushed on before the silence could deepen into resignation.
"Or… we tear the whole rotten thing up from the roots and rebuild it properly."
That made Ranni look down at him again.
John's grin returned, slow and wolfish. "We go for merit. Not lineage. Not whoever has the oldest name, the fattest purse, or the most useless relatives sitting on important chairs. A real academy. One where sorcery actually matters more than the politics around it."
Rennala blinked down at him. Ranni narrowed her eyes.
Marika, behind them all, looked far too interested. He was, after all, following the same ideology towards sorcery as his master.
John turned his head just enough to glance between mother and daughter. "And if you want someone to help clean house, I know a witch who'd be perfect for it. Sellen."
Rennala tilted her head. "I do not know the name…"
But Ranni did. Her spectral face changed very slightly; not surprise, exactly, but the keen little shift of a woman recognizing a piece being moved onto the board that might prove unexpectedly useful.
"Sellen…" She murmured. "Sorceress of Raya Lucaria. Exiled. Brilliant. Reputedly dangerous. And quite unwilling to bow where lesser minds expect it."
John pointed lazily upward from Rennala's lap. "That's the one."
Ranni's lip twitched.
"She is… intriguing." The little witch admitted the word as though doing so cost her some private pride. "And perhaps somewhat of a kindred spirit."
John laughed. "There we go, see? You're already thinking like a ruler."
Ranni gave him a flat look. "Do not flatter thyself. I am thinking like someone surrounded by opportunistic lunatics."
"And yet you're still thinking."
She ignored that.
The conversation moved from there into something more substantial.
John, still half-draped in moonlight and Wolfy's fur and Rennala's indulgence, talked them through the shape of it as he saw it: reclaim the academy, remove those who could not be trusted, rebuild its structure around actual excellence rather than bloodline games and noble rot, and turn Raya Lucaria from a decaying relic into a living force again.
Rennala listened with quiet attention, her hands once more playing slowly through his hair. Ranni paced in a short arc beside them, one hand at Wolfy's neck, two folded behind her, one resting at her hip while she thought.
John, sensing her hesitation, decided subtlety was for lesser men.
"You should just take it back."
Ranni stopped pacing.
"It is your birthright as much as any crown these fools pretend to serve." He continued. "And if you're already plotting to reshape the world, then having the greatest sorcerous institution in the Lands Between under your influence seems like a pretty decent move."
Ranni gave him a deeply unimpressed look.
"How fortunate that such a choice would also benefit thee just as much, is it not?" She asked dryly. "If the academy stands wholly on my side, then it also stands, by extension, on the side of my husband. A lord of the academy indeed. How convenient for thee, darling."
John laughed outright at that.
"Don't worry so much about your territory." He said with easy amusement. "I don't want it, and I don't need it. But let's not pretend it wouldn't help you to have a Lord carrying two Great Runes standing on your side."
He looked at her then with bright, shameless intent.
"I'd imagine a lot of your enemies would think twice, and then thrice over." He said softly. "Especially once they realize they've made not only the Witch of the Dark Moon their enemy, but someone strong enough to shatter Demigods and Dragons alike."
Ranni squinted at him, seeing clean through the sweetening coat he'd layered over the pitch.
John only smiled more openly.
"I'll use you, and you'll use me." He laughed, leaning back farther into Wolfy's fur as if this were the most natural and comfortable negotiation table in the world. "Seems fair enough to me. Doesn't it to you?"
All three women reacted in their own ways.
Rennala looked between them with the soft, delighted concern of a mother watching two frighteningly intelligent children learn they enjoyed plotting together far too much.
Marika raised one brow, openly impressed despite herself.
Ranni, however, went very still in thought. After a few moments, she walked over to him.
She stopped directly above where he reclined against Wolfy's flank and stared down at him with a small, satisfied, relieved smirk.
"There…" She said softly. "At last thou speakest in a language I can understand properly."
John's answering grin was immediate and hungry.
Ranni bent slightly, one hand still rubbing absently at Wolfy's thick neck while another reached down and caught John lightly by the chin. She tilted his face up toward her, bringing their noses almost close enough to touch.
"Very well." She murmured. "I accept thy terms… darling."
John's smirk widened into something almost ecstatic.
He rose quickly, not fully to his feet, but up onto one knee so that despite his greater height, the difference between them narrowed to something intimate and deliberate.
Slowly, with no suddenness in it whatsoever, he slipped one arm around her waist and drew her in until the folds of her dress brushed his coat and the cool moon-sorcerous scent of her filled his senses.
Ranni did not pull away.
Behind them, Rennala made the softest, happiest little sound John had ever heard from a woman so thoroughly broken by time.
Marika, on the other hand, looked both pleasantly surprised and faintly horrified.
Because what she was watching now was not mere flirtation.
It was chemistry. And not soft, blushing, sweet chemistry of the sort John sparked with Melina or Roderika.
This was something sharper, and more dangerous. A meeting of two creatures who could smile and lie and scheme with equal grace, each fully aware the other was doing it and finding that, for reasons neither would admit gracefully, deeply appealing.
"Stars preserve me, they really do suit one another in this exact and deeply troubling way…" Marika muttered under her breath as she stared at them for a long second.
Rennala, naturally, reacted as any mother would upon seeing her daughter and new son-in-law hovering nose-to-nose and smiling like a matched pair of elegant devils.
She floated forward at once.
Before either John or Ranni could brace for it, Rennala swept both of them into a sudden embrace, pulling daughter and demigod alike against her with delighted force.
"My favorite little evil schemers~!" She cooed warmly, laughing through the words. "Oh, how lovely the two of thee look together…"
Ranni made a small, strangled sound of protest; as John, half-crushed between moon queen and moon princess, only laughed and surrendered to the hug immediately.
Wolfy, traitorous beast that he was, barked happily and pressed in against the whole pile as though determined to make certain no member of this newly assembled and catastrophically dangerous little family escaped the moment too soon.
Rennala released them after a few lingering seconds, letting John and Ranni separate just enough to recover the shape of individual dignity.
Or, in John's case, something adjacent to it.
Ranni stepped back first, smoothing the front of her gown with two hands while her spectral face worked very hard to reassemble all the cool composure her mother's embrace and Johnathan Pendragon's shameless existence had just damaged.
Wolfy remained pressed against her side, tail sweeping in broad, satisfied motions that made it obvious he considered this entire exchange a success.
John, meanwhile, straightened at a much more leisurely pace, one hand still resting at his waist, the other brushing idly over the place where Ranni's fingers had gripped him earlier. His grin never left him. If anything, it only widened the longer he looked at her trying not to look rattled.
Ranni noticed that at once.
Naturally, she decided the best course of action was to pretend she was not at all rattled and immediately put him to work.
She coughed into one hand, all prim little regal poise. "Very well then. Go fetch thy witch."
John blinked once, then smiled as though she had just handed him the greatest gift imaginable.
"Oh? That's how you're asking me?"
Ranni's spectral face flattened.
John folded his arms and tilted his head. "C'mon, darling. If you want a favor, at least ask properly."
The Witch immediately crossed the distance between them in two quick steps, caught him by the collar without a shred of hesitation, and dragged him down to her eye level.
John's smile only widened.
Rennala watched with open, moonlit delight. Marika, hovering nearby, looked only a little more restrained in her amusement, though the corner of her mouth betrayed her.
Ranni's voice came out low, slightly strained, and very clearly threaded through clenched patience.
"Wouldst thou please…" She said, every word polished to deadly courtesy. "...go and fetch Sorceress Sellen so that we may determine whether she is worthy of fitting into our plans in any meaningful capacity?"
John stared at her from inches away for a few moments before giving her the warmest, most infuriatingly pleased smile she had seen from him yet.
"Well~..." He murmured. "See? Was that so hard~?"
Ranni released his collar with a sharp little motion and brushed invisible creases from his coat as if touching him for too long had somehow offended her standards. Then she shooed him away with one hand.
"Go. Before I reconsider."
Rennala let out a soft, adoring sound from where she floated nearby and clasped her hands together.
"Oh, sweeting~, be nicer to thy husband…" She cooed.
Ranni turned to her mother with a wry smile that tried very hard not to become a grimace. "I am being nice."
John, hands on his hips now, beamed at both of them like the world's most self-satisfied bastard.
He didn't move.
He just stood there, moonlight washing over him, coat falling cleanly over his broad frame, teeth bared in a shit-eating grin so offensively bright they might as well have twinkled.
Which, somehow defying physics and the Elden Beast itself, they did.
Ranni stared at him.
The twinkling annoyed her more than it had any right to.
He remained exactly where he was, basking in the silence with all the relaxed insolence of a man who knew perfectly well what he was doing.
Rennala, missing the murderous undercurrent entirely, looked between them with tender interest. "I am waiting, sweeting~..."
Ranni closed her eyes.
John's grin sharpened. Just a fraction.
Ranni opened them again and, with visible internal suffering, forced a smile onto her spectral face.
"He is…" She said carefully, voice smooth and strained all at once. "...A capable, surprisingly resourceful, and… irritatingly effective man."
John bit the inside of his cheek hard enough to save himself from laughing aloud.
Rennala lit up. "There now! Was that so difficult?"
Ranni's smile trembled with concealed violence.
John muffled a laugh into the back of his hand, then lowered it and gave both mother and daughter an elegant little bow.
"As you wish, my Queens."
The Grace answered him at once.
Golden light coiled up around his body in soft spirals, threading over his shoulders and through the moonlit shadows of the library while Wolfy barked once in surprise and Rennala smiled at the sight with dreamy fondness.
A heartbeat later, John vanished.
…
He reappeared in the Roundtable Hold's accommodation wing in a quiet flare of Grace, directly in front of the door to Sellen's new rooms.
For precisely half a second he considered behaving like a reasonable person.
He then discarded the thought entirely.
He grabbed the handle, swung the door open without knocking, and strode inside with the full confidence of a man who had never once in his life learned the value of announcing himself properly.
"YAHOO–!"
The word had only just left his mouth when an azure comet of glintstone screamed past his face.
It hit the wall behind him with a deafening crack and exploded a smoking hole clean through stone, wood, and whatever decorative dignity the room had possessed.
John froze ever so slightly as dust and blue sparks rained down over his shoulder.
Several inches to the left and he would have probably been missing part of his head.
At the far end of the room, Sellen sat half-turned in her chair behind a broad desk, one hand still extended toward the door, glintstone staff lowered only by degrees. Her other hand rested atop an open book she had very obviously been reading before he barged in like a drunken soldier entering a tavern.
She stared at him for a second before an exasperated sigh left her.
"Oh… it is merely you, little tadpole." Her voice was velvet-soft and wholly unimpressed. "Knock next time, if you please. It would be a shame to lose a treasured pupil to my older instincts."
She withdrew her hand and closed the book with neat, elegant finality.
John looked back at the hole in the wall, then to her, then pointed at himself.
"No!"
That got a real laugh out of her.
It was soft at first, then warmer, richer, and touched with that same dangerous amusement he kept finding himself addicted to.
While she laughed, the Roundtable itself reacted. Grace surged quietly through the walls around them, golden and unseen save for the faint shimmer it left in the air, and the blasted hole behind John began fixing itself.
Broken stone slid back into place. Charred edges smoothed over. Splintered wood re-knit itself in seconds until the damage vanished as though the Hold had simply decided not to tolerate architectural nonsense in its corridors.
Sellen pushed the closed book forward over the desk and rose smoothly to her feet.
"Very well…" She said, indulging him now with obvious curiosity. "I shall humor this dramatic entrance. What is it that thou art so eager to brag about?"
John just smirked and dropped the bomb without an ounce of ceremony.
"I secured you a meeting with Rennala, Queen of the Full Moon, and her daughter Ranni, Witch of the Dark Moon." He folded his arms. "And the future of Raya Lucaria is on the line."
Sellen stared at him blankly for a few seconds.
She then let out a low, disbelieving laugh and shook her head as though she had already decided he was about to reveal this as some elaborate attempt at early tutoring or one of his increasingly deranged flirtation routines.
She stepped away from the desk and toward the plush alcove where they usually held their lessons, skirts and dark scholarly robes swaying around her hips.
"If you desired an early lesson, little tadpole, you need only have asked properly. Though the lesson plan for tonight is not yet complete, and–"
"I'm serious."
That stopped her dead.
Sellen turned back and saw that John's smug grin had not shifted by even a hair.
Her jaw actually dropped.
"By Lusat's crystalised ballsack…" She breathed before walking toward him.
Fast.
Her face cycled through disbelief, suspicion, sudden calculation, and then something much brighter and more dangerous; the quick-rising thrill of ambition spotting a door opening where there had only ever been a wall.
"You are actually serious." She reached him and searched his face once, then twice, as if checking for the tiny signs that would indicate he was bluffing.
John leaned forward slightly, arms still crossed, grin widening.
"For real real."
Sellen's beautiful face went briefly blank, before it turned feral with excitement.
"Ohoho~!" She surged forward, grabbed both his arms, and laughed with delighted, near-manic glee. "I could just about kiss you!"
Her fingers tightened around him.
"Take me there!" She demanded immediately and shamelessly, eyes blazing with hungry excitement. "Take me there now, Johnathan."
Marika's voice drifted through the back of his mind in a long, resigned lament.
"Thy charisma is a curse upon this world. Thou findest every woman's weakness as though guided by providence itself."
John's smirk deepened.
'That includes you, doesn't it?'
Marika scoffed softly.
"Not on thy life."
Grace answered before she finished.
It rose around John and Sellen in spirals of warm gold, curling around her dark robes, his coat, the desk, the books, and the entire room in a soft flood of sacred light.
Sellen did not let go of his arms even as the Hold dissolved around them. If anything, she leaned in closer, as though terrified the chance might vanish if she loosened her grip for even a second.
John only laughed.
And the two of them disappeared together in a flare of Grace, ambition, and very poorly concealed excitement.
…
Golden Grace and pale lunar sorcery folded over one another for a breathless instant, then reality gave way beneath John's feet.
The Royal Grand Library returned around them in a wash of drifting motes and old moonlight.
Sellen appeared beside him with one hand still half-curled around his sleeve from the reflexive grip she'd taken in the Roundtable, and the moment her boots touched the floor she went still.
Then her head turned, and turned again.
Then slowly tilted upward as her sharp blue eyes drank in the impossible vertical breadth of Rennala's library; the winding shelves, the hovering books, the old lunar glow saturating everything in soft silver and amber, the juvenile scholars peering from alcoves like eerie little ghosts in scholar's caps, the half-dreaming atmosphere of a place that had stopped being merely a library centuries ago and become instead a shrine to memory, grief, and knowledge too dangerous to be shelved openly.
"Oh…" Sellen breathed, that one sound carried more naked delight than John had heard from her yet.
She took one slow step forward, then another, gaze darting from the higher galleries to the circling books around Rennala's seat, then toward the older locked side-chambers and private study niches nested in the walls beyond.
"I was permitted here only once…" She murmured, and this time there was no cultivated sorcerous poise in her voice at all, only the unguarded hunger of a scholar standing in front of a long-lost holy site.
"This is where they kept it… the restricted theory, the incomplete formulas, the older manuscripts, the dangerous research, the star-observation records that never reached the lecture halls…" Her eyes gleamed brighter with each word. "Gods, they truly kept so much of it here…"
John chuckled softly and stepped closer, then gently nudged her with one elbow.
Sellen whipped toward him with immediate, offended annoyance already rising to her lips…
…and remembered exactly where she was.
Her eyes slid past him.
Rennala and Ranni were both looking at her.
Rennala's expression held dreamy curiosity and soft amusement. Ranni's was narrower, sharper, but no less entertained beneath the surface. Even Wolfy had lifted his head from where he sprawled beside the queens, staring at Sellen with the bright, evaluating attention of a beast already deciding whether this new arrival smelled interesting.
For perhaps the first time since John had met her, Sorceress Sellen looked just slightly, genuinely embarrassed.
A faint flush rose along her pale cheeks. She straightened immediately, coughed once into her hand, and redrew her dignity around herself like a robe reclaimed before it could fully slip.
"My apologies." Her tone returned to velvet, though only just. "I thank you for the audience."
There was only the barest amount of formal reverence in it. Enough to be polite, and definitely not enough to pretend she was the sort of woman who grovelled for crowns.
Rennala seemed to find that delightful rather than offensive.
Ranni, if anything, looked more interested.
Sellen inclined her head slightly and introduced herself properly.
"I am Sorceress Sellen. Former prodigy of Raya Lucaria, current exile by the pettier will of lesser minds, and…" Her lips curved very faintly. "...as my pupil has no doubt already made abundantly clear, a woman with opinions regarding the future of this Academy."
Rennala let out a soft, musical laugh.
"And I am Rennala." She whispered gently, with none of the grand self-importance lesser royalty always seemed to cling to. "Though I suspect thou already knew that."
Sellen's posture eased by a hair.
Then Ranni spoke.
"Ranni." Her tone remained cool, but she gave the courtesy all the same. "Daughter of the Queen, mistress of my own path, and currently the one deciding whether thy presence here becomes opportunity or mistake."
Sellen's brows rose just slightly.
It was a small thing, but John caught it. So did Marika. Sellen had clearly expected to be measured, perhaps dismissed, perhaps challenged; but not met so directly, and certainly not answered with equal courtesy.
She accepted it quickly.
"Then I shall endeavor to make the better case."
Ranni's mouth twitched faintly.
"By all means." She folded two arms while the other two rested more lightly at her sides. "Explain to me this vision of thine for Raya Lucaria. And while thou'rt at it…"
Her eyes narrowed just enough to make the air crisp. "Tell me how thou managed to secure a private audience in my mother's library. I confess myself curious what kind of leverage would make Johnathan Pendragon insist upon thee so strongly."
Sellen glanced at John, then back to Ranni, Rennala, and finally back at John again, more thoughtfully this time, as if genuinely wondering what in the ever-loving stars he had done, who he had blackmailed, what impossible card he had played, and how many corpses or confessions were currently hidden behind that smug grin.
"An excellent question." She admitted.
Ranni exhaled through her nose.
"He vouched for thee."
Sellen blinked once.
"That was enough?"
Rennala giggled at that, sleeves shifting softly as she floated an inch higher with her amusement.
"Why would it not be?" She asked warmly. "'Tis my lovely son-in-law's word. That is no small thing."
That hit Sellen harder than the first revelation had.
She turned slowly toward John.
He gave her his usual shameless grin and a shrug so casual it ought to have been criminal.
Sellen then looked at Ranni.
Ranni rolled her eyes but nodded anyway.
That was all Sellen needed.
John watched the exact instant she put it together. Her brilliant, dangerous mind moved through the implications fast enough to almost be visible:
John had somehow talked, flirted, bluffed, bulldozed, or otherwise reality-warped his way into the confidence of the Queen of the Full Moon and the Witch of the Dark Moon in under a day. Possibly in under an hour. And possibly while also breaking half the Academy and stealing from the rest.
A smile threatened at one corner of Sellen's mouth.
She smothered it ruthlessly.
Then she turned back to the Carians and began.
It was the real Sellen then.
Not the teasing tutor, or the flirtatious witch who called him little tadpole and tolerated his nonsense with far too much indulgence.
This was the scholar. The heretic. The exile with stars in her skull and no patience left for mediocrity.
"Raya Lucaria has spent too long pretending preservation is the same thing as greatness."
The library quieted.
Even the juvenile scholars seemed to still, as though some older instinct in the place recognized the cadence of true academic blasphemy and leaned in to hear it better.
Sellen folded her hands lightly before her.
"The Academy was not founded to become a mausoleum for respectable theories and safe repetitions. It was meant to push. To test. To fail gloriously and learn from the wreckage. To reach into the stars and ask questions no pious fool could bear to hear aloud."
Her eyes sharpened.
"But over time, lineage replaced merit. Cowards inherited shelves they never could have filled by talent. Lesser minds learned they could call themselves guardians of propriety and, in doing so, shackle everyone brighter than they were."
Ranni's expression grew more intent.
Rennala listened with her chin lightly resting against one hand, gaze soft and old and terribly alert now beneath the dreaminess.
Sellen went on.
"I would see the Academy restored to what it was meant to be. A place where worth is proven, not assumed. Where study is earned by intellect and will rather than family names and political insulation. Where dangerous theories are not buried merely because they frighten the comfortable."
Her lips curled faintly. "And where sorcery advances rather than curdles into ritualized cowardice."
She began pacing as she spoke, slow and measured, the rhythm of a lecturer who had wanted a hall for this speech for years and been denied one.
"I would reopen the sealed archives under ranked access by capability, not nobility. Restructure the faculty around proven scholarship. Separate ceremonial posturing from actual magical innovation. Establish combat, experimentation, and applied sorcery as respected branches rather than tolerated embarrassments. Rebuild Sellian and primeval lines of inquiry where useful, regulate them where necessary, and stop pretending the future can be secured by worshipping the past."
John watched Ranni and Rennala exchange the smallest of glances.
Because the shape of it was obvious.
It was, in its bones, the same thing John had been pushing for; a rebuilding on merit, not inherited title. A system where rot at the top was not protected by age or surname. A world remade because the existing one had proven too compromised to simply patch over.
Ranni noticed it first and looked at John with open suspicion.
"That philosophy…" She said slowly. "It resembles thine rather closely."
John put a hand to his chest in theatrical humility.
"I had an amazingly enlightening master guiding me."
He then winked at Sellen.
The sorceress very nearly lost the iron line of her composure.
The feeling that bloomed in her chest was warm, sudden, and far more dangerous than she liked; pride, yes, but also recognition. Acknowledgment. The quiet thrill of hearing one's thought echoed back from a student and realizing something had truly taken root there.
Sellen mastered her face a heartbeat later and turned back to the Carians before John could enjoy it too openly.
Rennala smiled knowingly, having felt that very same sensation many times before with her children.
Ranni, for her part, leaned back a fraction and considered Sellen anew.
"...At the level of ideals, I find little there to object to. Mother?" She said at last.
Rennala nodded softly. "Nor I."
Sellen's shoulders eased only slightly.
Ranni lifted one hand gently, curling it as starlight gathered at her palms.
"But ideals and philosophy are one matter. There remains one last thing."
John blinked.
Sellen did too.
Marika, however, already knew. John felt the shift in her attention before she spoke.
Rennala knew as well. Her mouth curved in a soft little smile of maternal inevitability.
Moonlight rose around them before either John or Sellen could ask.
It gathered from the library floor, from the circling books, from the pale seams in the stone and the silver behind the windows, all coiling together in a bright, cool spiral. Space folded. Gravity tilted.
A heartbeat later the world changed.
They appeared atop a large open rooftop.
It was broad and empty save for old weather-worn stone, intricate lunar designs worked into the floor, and high elegant fencing of carved iron and glintstone lattice bordering the edges. Above them spread the enchanted sky of Raya Lucaria, azure and dense with magical haze. And around them rose neighboring towers and sloped roofs, their white-blue stone catching the light like carved moonbone.
Wind curled over the platform in cool streams.
John looked around once and felt an old memory twitch. He knew this place. Not perfectly, but enough to recognize its bones.
Sellen's lips curved at once.
"A combat trial." Her voice held pure delight. "Of course."
Ranni chuckled softly.
Rennala clapped once, lightly, as though this were the most natural thing in the world.
"Well, yes." The moon-queen said easily. "Surely my daughter would never keep a sorceress near her plans who could not defend herself capably. One must be practical about such things."
Sellen looked genuinely pleased.
She rolled one shoulder and the air around her stirred faintly with glintstone responsiveness, her whole posture shifting from poised scholar into something leaner, more predatory.
John lifted a hand.
"Before you two start trying to vaporize each other, would you be okay if I disappeared for like… a second?"
Sellen turned her head toward him.
The smile she gave him was beautiful.
And full of murder.
"Run along, little tadpole…" She said sweetly. "Before I decide your concern sounds dangerously like disrespect and a complete lack of faith in your teacher."
John raised both hands at once in surrender, grinning like a doomed idiot.
"All right, all right. Message received."
Marika looked at him with total disdain.
"Pervert."
John nodded cheerfully. "A masochist too, apparently."
He accepted the title so freely that Marika didn't even bother trying to stop him.
Then he turned and sprinted.
Behind him, sorcery bloomed.
He felt it before he heard it; moonlight gathering, glintstone sharpening, the crackling swell of high-grade magic being called into readiness on the rooftop he had just abandoned.
John laughed under his breath and leapt to the neighboring roofline, boots thudding across old slate and glintstone runnels as he cut across Raya Lucaria's upper reaches.
Below and around him the Academy was in motion now.
Sorcerers, knights, and soldiers were converging toward a larger structure off to the side; a looming pale building with broad fronts and severe steps that looked, in this world rather than the game, less like an academic hall and more like a massive magical courthouse.
Faculty, noble retainers, enforcers, and worried students all seemed to be gathering there with the grim urgency of people preparing for some institutional disaster.
John gave it a glance and dismissed it instantly.
"Later…"
He turned away and kept moving.
A few more long jumps brought him to the upper span above the Debate Parlour. He recognized the shape of it almost at once; the broad glasswork, the older stone ribs, the high roofline with its exposed academic vanity and decorative uselessness.
"Bingo."
He hit the glass ceiling hard enough to break through with a clean explosion of crystalline panes and dropped into the upper ramparts above the parlour's inner space.
Below him students screamed.
A pair of junior sorcerers spotted him on the rafters and pointed in horror. Someone shouted that the Demigod was inside the ceiling. Another shouted something less coherent but significantly louder.
John ignored all of them with complete serenity.
He moved through the upper passage and rampart ledges, stepping over old beams and through dust-heavy architectural cavities until he found what he'd been looking for tucked into a more secluded nook above the parlour.
A chest.
John crouched, popped the latch, and opened it.
Inside lay a talisman wrought in old golden form; not a ring, not a seal, but an icon worked into the shape of a symbolic knot and holy gesture, small enough to wear, potent enough to matter.
The System reacted at once.
A pane unfolded across his vision in clean gold text.
[ITEM ACQUIRED: RADAGON ICON]
[Type: Legendary Talisman]
[Effect: Shortens spell casting time.
A treasured symbol of concentration, discipline, and miraculous swiftness in sorcerous execution.]
[Lore:
A legendary talisman depicting the Second Elden Lord Radagon.
Shortens the casting time of sorceries and incantations.
As the husband of Rennala of Caria, the red-haired Radagon studied sorcery, and as the husband of Queen Marika, he studied incantations. Thus did the hero aspire to be complete.
He came to power as the lesser head of a great golden host, and yet he was no mere conqueror; Radagon sought mastery wherever power and truth could be found, though whether he ever attained wholeness remains a question left to history and the Gods.]
John read it once, and then again, more slowly.
Marika went quiet.
The solemnity that touched her then was subtle but unmistakable; not sharp grief, not even regret in its rawest form, but something older and more exhausted. A silence with a man's name in it.
John exhaled softly.
"Yeah… That tracks." He muttered.
He equipped it, and the change was immediate.
Though it wasn't dramatic like a Great Rune, nor violent like dragon communion. It was finer than that.
A mental pressure he had not even fully noticed before simply lifted from his thoughts and nerves. The timing between intention and execution shortened. Spell-shaping pathways in his mind felt cleaner, quicker, less burdened. As though a weight had been shaved off the distance between idea and manifestation.
John let out a low, satisfied hum.
"Oh, that is nice..."
He rolled one shoulder, flexed one hand, and smiled with quiet approval as the item settled into him and became part of his combat rhythm.
Below him, the terrified students were still shouting up at the rafters.
He ignored them completely and turned, making his way back the long way around, in no hurry at all now, strolling across the Academy rooftops while moonlit wind tugged at his coat and distant sorcery flashed somewhere behind him where Ranni and Sellen were no doubt busy testing each other's patience and magical limits alike.
John took his time returning.
He moved across the upper roofs of Raya Lucaria with an ease that would have made the Academy's lesser sorcerers physically ill if any of them had been foolish enough to look up and keep looking.
The enchanted sky above the academy remained dense and azure, rich with sorcery and thin veils of moonlit haze, and the wind at that height tugged lazily at the dark coat Melina had packed for him.
He could feel the duel before he properly saw it.
Magic carried differently when cast by true sorcerers. It thrummed through the air in layered currents, each incantation and each glintstone formula leaving behind a brief aftertaste in the world. By the time John reached the outer edge of the test rooftop, he already knew two things.
First, Sellen was losing.
Second, she was having an absolutely fantastic time doing it.
The rooftop came into view all at once when he vaulted the final rail and stepped lightly onto a higher adjoining ledge.
Ranni and Sellen were already deep in the latter half of their duel.
It had ceased looking like a simple contest some time ago. The floor of the wide rooftop was carved through with glowing lines and broken patterns where successive layers of sorcery had scored, burned, frozen, and shattered the stone.
Pale moonlight and glintstone-blue radiance kept flashing across the fencing around the edges, painting the old ironwork in shifting color while wind kicked around dust, pages, and glittering sorcerous residue that had not yet decided whether it wanted to settle or remain a part of the battle.
Sellen stood nearer the middle-left of the arena with one hand extended and her staff angled across her body, dark robes snapping lightly around her calves as she shifted her footing.
She was breathing harder now. Hard enough that the exertion showed.
Ranni, by contrast, stood farther back and to the right, calm as moonlight over still water.
Her puppet body moved with unnerving precision, never wasting motion, while her spectral face floating over and around it revealed the quieter truth; alertness, focus, a sharpened delight, and the faintest glimmer of smug satisfaction each time she answered one of Sellen's attacks with contemptuous ease.
And that was the thing that fascinated John most.
Sellen would cast first.
A clean Glintstone Comet, sharpened and accelerated to punch through conventional wards.
Ranni answered with a heavier, colder version of the same principle that struck Sellen's spell mid-flight and erased it in a spray of azure sparks.
Sellen pivoted, drew a second circle lower and faster, and fired a fan of staggered shards intended to force motion and limit angles.
Ranni moved one hand across the air gently, and a moonlit veil of precisely spaced glintblades appeared in front of her, intercepting each shard with crisp, almost insulting neatness before sending the spent fragments skittering across the rooftop like broken glass.
Sellen shifted again, changed disciplines entirely, and lanced a spear of compressed Carian force meant to punish a static opponent.
Ranni answered not with movement, but with a more elegant Carian piercer of her own, one denomination finer, longer, and more exact, her spell riding down Sellen's and breaking it apart before it could even properly bloom.
It was obvious, within seconds of watching, that Ranni outclassed Sellen completely.
Every spell Sellen chose, Ranni either knew better, answered more efficiently, or countered with some adjacent form of sorcery designed to leave Sellen slightly more pressured and slightly more aware of the gap between them.
And yet Sellen still held her ground.
That was what made it impressive, she adapted constantly.
Each time Ranni showed she had the superior answer in one school, Sellen forced the angle into another. She changed timing, distance, cadence, sequence. She baited, feinted, layered, and occasionally abandoned a spell half-formed just to cast a worse but faster one at a more dangerous instant.
She was being outclassed, yes. But not entirely overwhelmed, broken, or humiliated.
She was surviving against a superior witch by refusing to become readable.
John grinned and crossed the last stretch of stone to where Rennala stood watching from the safer side of the platform.
The Queen of the Full Moon brightened immediately when she noticed him and patted the place beside her with quiet delight, as though he had merely returned from a short walk and not from robbing the Academy again during her daughter's duel.
He took the offered space quickly, dropping into a crouch and then an easy seated position near the edge of her moonlit skirts.
Wolfy was absent from her side for the moment, having apparently decided that observing a sorcery duel from a distance was less interesting than somewhere else in the complex, but Rennala herself looked entirely content to watch her daughter test his teacher.
John folded one knee up and leaned his arm across it, gaze fixed on the fight.
Rennala, seeing where his focus had gone, smiled softly.
"Watch their wrists, dearest. And not merely the staff, nor merely the circle." She murmured. "The true choice comes just before either."
John squinted slightly, then tracked what she meant.
Sellen's shoulder set before her cast.
Ranni's fingers relaxed before hers.
The first sign of commitment came before the visible shape of the spell.
John's eyes lit with understanding.
Rennala giggled softly beside him and let him work the rest out.
He hesitated at another exchange when he saw Sellen weave a double-stacked phalanx only for Ranni to collapse the line with a crescent of moonlit pressure before answering from a different angle entirely, Rennala only guided him lightly.
"She is not answering only the spell, she is answering the intention of the cast. Look at where your teacher wishes the battlefield to be after the strike, not the strike itself."
John blinked, but he saw it a moment later.
Sellen's magic was designed to herd while Ranni's counter was designed to deny the herding and force Sellen back into honest space.
"Oh…" John muttered, impressed. "I see it."
Rennala's smile widened with maternal pride. "Yes. Quite."
From inside his mind, Marika huffed faintly and added another observation of her own.
"And note that my daughter doth not require a staff."
John had noticed that too. Ranni had nothing in hand, she simply cast.
He narrowed his eyes a little.
Marika answered before he could ask. "And why would she? Ranni built that puppet body herself. Thou thinkest she would not have crafted one with the qualities of the highest class of catalysts worked into its form? Her body is the staff."
John let out a low whistle. "Well. That's unfair."
"It is efficient." Marika corrected.
Down on the field, Sellen heard enough of the side discussion to know she was being academically upstaged while fighting for her life.
"Do stop teaching my pupil over my shoulder while I'm busy!" She called out, clearly annoyed, even as she snapped a glintstone arc through the place where Ranni had been standing half a second before.
Rennala raised one hand to her lips and laughed.
"Fufufu~…You are doing beautifully, dear!"
That did not help Sellen's mood in the slightest.
The duel intensified.
Sellen, perhaps irritated by being outclassed so cleanly in direct academic terms, shifted toward ruthlessness.
Her next sequence came lower, stranger, and far less polite.
She used debris and glare. She hid lines within other lines. She forced angles with near-invisible setup shards that existed only to shape where Ranni would prefer not to stand in the next second.
Ranni's expression sharpened with approval.
She was still superior, but now Sellen was at least making her work for the superiority.
A sequence of Carian glintblades burst from Sellen's staff in a widening arc. Ranni answered with lunar pressure that crushed two, bent the third, and evaded the rest. But Sellen had only used them to mask the real cast, a compressed comet she sent through the opening behind them.
Ranni turned, caught it with a larger, colder glintstone current, and dispersed it.
Sellen vanished one step into a blur of glimmering distortion, reappearing farther left than she had any right to with her staff already drawn back.
A dark sorcery swelled at its tip.
John's eyes widened ever so slightly.
It screamed forward in near-silence, black-blue and deceptively muted, a starless lance with the killing subtlety of something built to slip through sight itself.
Night Comet.
Ranni's pupils narrowed for the first time in the entire duel.
She did not give ground.
Instead, her upper right hand lifted with sudden precision, fingers tracing a small, elegant arc through the air just as the nearly invisible Night Comet tore toward her.
A pale Carian sigil bloomed before her in a flash of moonlit sorcery, sharp and circular and exquisitely controlled. The dark comet struck it a heartbeat later.
The rooftop rang as rather than slipping past her shoulder, the Night Comet shattered against the retaliatory spell in a burst of blue-white sparks and warped starlike fragments.
The broken force of it twisted inward, seized by Ranni's counter, and from that stolen sorcery three spectral glintblades spun into existence behind her in a silent halo of cold Carian light.
Sellen let out a breathless, sharp laugh.
There was blood on one sleeve now, sweat at her brow, and fury in her eyes bright enough to make her look almost feverishly beautiful.
"How generous that the great Witch of the Dark Moon should be forced into using Carian Retaliation. The Carian family's own answer to disloyalty and descent within the Academy." She said with cutting sarcasm.
Ranni's spectral mouth curved into a small, cool smile as the three glintblades hovered at her back, humming softly with stolen intent.
"Aye." She replied without the slightest shame. "Thou should feel honored. Not many are worthy of forcing my hand so far."
"The moon and stars would one day go their separate ways…" John smirked and murmured under his breath, referencing something he knew no one else would understand.
Rennala heard him as Sellen was forced to dodge the glintblades.
Her face lit up in quiet delight, not because she fully understood what he meant in that moment, but because the line rang with the sort of tragic-poetic nonsense her family kept accidentally producing as if cursed by the cosmos to always sound a little legendary.
She patted the top of his head. "My clever boy~!"
John shamelessly leaned into the praise.
On the field, Sellen reached the end of her chain of conventional options and did the sensible thing any truly dangerous sorceress did when refinement stopped being enough.
She escalated.
Her free hand swept back. Crystalline glimmer ignited behind her in clustering facets. The air around her staff sharpened, thickened, and began to fill with the prismatic density of crystal sorcery, lines of structure building one inside the next until the whole spell looked less cast than grown.
Ranni did not interrupt her.
She simply stood there, perfectly still, watching.
John rolled his eyes at once. "Oh, come on."
Marika chuckled. "Heavens forbid she allow another woman her dramatic flourish."
Rennala nodded eagerly. "That is my daughter, yes."
Sellen noticed the insult too, and it only sharpened her smile.
The crystal mass behind her surged into formation.
A true Crystal Torrent, dense enough to grind ordinary wards to powder and turn a man into glittering ruin if he stood in its path too long.
Sellen's expression went hard and fired.
A roaring stream of razor-bright crystal shards and compressed sorcery erupted across the rooftop in a blinding line, shrieking as it tore the air apart and raced for Ranni with all the weight of a siege engine given magical precision.
Ranni smiled almost fondly and lifted one hand and touched the air at the last possible second.
Darkness answered as a miniature singularity of sorcery bloomed in front of her, black and perfect and hungry in a way the eye recoiled from instinctively. Eternal Darkness opened like a wound in space itself, and the entire Crystal Torrent bent into it at once.
Every shard, streak, and bit of killing momentum.
All of it was dragged screaming into the tiny black star and devoured whole.
John barked a laugh of amusement.
Rennala looked so proud she might have floated off the roof.
Sellen's eyes widened, though to her credit she did not lose herself to the shock. She cut the torrent the instant it became worthless and tried to pivot into another cast, but decided against it as the Eternal Darkness remained.
Any additional sorcery she would have shaped would be dragged at once toward the hungry void, wasted before it could even properly leave her staff.
Ranni walked around the spinning miniature abyss with calm, unhurried grace, moving to one side as though strolling around a decorative fountain rather than a compact hole in reality.
She then raised one hand, and stars gathered at her fingertip.
They clustered into brilliant, many-pointed motes, unstable and furious and ancient in origin. The pattern of the cast was wrong in the way only truly old sorceries were wrong; not built to be neat, not built to be kind, but built by someone who had stared too long into the cosmos and come back carrying a weapon.
Sellen saw it and went still for a heartbeat.
Her voice came out almost breathless.
"Stars of Ruin…"
Even John felt the weight of that recognition.
It was one of the great sorcerers Lusat's legacy.
Something legendary. Something far beyond what the average Academy peacock in robes had any right to handle.
The Eternal Darkness winked out.
And in the same heartbeat, Ranni let loose the stars.
They screamed forward in a flock of blue-white destruction, curving and correcting with predatory malice, too many to cleanly dodge and too intelligent in their tracking to simply outstep all at once.
Sellen did the only thing she could.
She braced, and started to cast even though she knew she was too late.
John's fingers twitched ever so slightly.
One moment he was seated beside Rennala. The next he was there.
He crossed the distance in a burst of force and instinct, appearing directly in front of Sellen just before impact as if the rooftop itself had failed to keep up with him. He twisted, put his draconic arm and shoulder forward, turned his back to the worst of the incoming storm, and took the Stars of Ruin head-on.
The impacts came in brutal succession.
Blue-white stars burst across his back, arm, and shoulder in rapid detonations that chewed through his coat, shirt, skin, and scale alike. Power hammered through him in hard, drilling bursts that sent him skidding half a pace and lit the air around him with splintering arcs of ruinous starlight.
He grunted through clenched teeth.
It hurt.
His System flared warning-red at the edge of his vision and shaved a clean, ugly chunk off his vitality.
Roughly a third, enough to matter.
By the time the last star broke itself against him, the smell of scorched cloth and singed blood mingled with glintstone residue in the air.
Behind him, Sellen stared up with a wide, shaken gaze.
Speech left her for a moment entirely as John let out a rough breath, straightened, and glanced over to her with a chuckle that was perhaps slightly more strained than he intended.
"You don't have to thank me."
That only made Sellen blink harder, then exhale a helpless little laugh of disbelief she could not quite contain.
Ranni lowered her hand, and a small pout appeared on her spectral face.
John saw it and burst into another laugh.
"Oh, don't look at me like that! I couldn't let you maim or kill my teacher over a test duel."
Ranni clicked her tongue. "What a bore."
Then, with supreme pettiness, she brushed imaginary dust from her sleeves and shoulders, calm and immaculate as ever.
She had not been hit once.
Marika appeared beside Rennala with a sigh that was half irritation and half unwilling pride.
"Idiot." She informed John. "Tank one of my daughter's Stars of Ruin again and I shall let the next one teach thee better sense."
Rennala, meanwhile, looked radiant.
"Ara~! You took that wonderfully, dearest!" She clasped her hands together with delighted admiration. "Such a strong boy~!"
John, bleeding slightly and feeling exactly enough pain to know he had done something cool, accepted the praise like a starving man accepts soup.
Sellen finally found her voice.
Her laugh came out a little shaky at first, but the scholarly awe in it took over quickly.
"Is… is that sort of spell common among Carian royalty?"
Ranni smirked.
Rennala, on the other hand, lifted one hand to cup her cheek and answered with absolute sincerity.
"Hmm? Why, yes. Of course." She blinked dreamily. "I know it myself, along with little Azur's Comet. Is that strange?"
Sellen stared at her.
There was no fear in her face, or defeat either. Only a raw, burning, ecstatic fascination.
The kind of look some people reserved for divinity, and Sellen reserved for dangerous knowledge.
"That… is absolutely wonderful." She whispered.
Then, with a shamelessness John recognized instantly because he had clearly been studying under her for a reason, Sellen straightened and asked,
"Would Your Majesty permit me to witness it properly? Even once?"
Rennala laughed into one hand. "Ara~... You flatter me, dear."
"I am entirely sincere."
"I believe thee." Rennala smiled, warm and pleased. "And I would gladly show a few little tricks to my lovely son's master. Provided thou continuest to teach him in turn, though not too much all at once. A few lessons with my boy would be lovely."
Sellen accepted immediately. "Gladly!"
Marika muttered dryly, just loud enough for John to hear,
"You truly are perfect for each other."
At that, Ranni looked from one woman to the other and then back at the still-smoking rooftop with naked incredulity.
"Why are you all ignoring the result of the duel?"
Sellen's face did not lose a shred of its delighted interest as she answered lightly. "If the result meant I was unfit then you would have killed me already."
She tilted her head, one elegant brow rising as she gestured very faintly to her own still-intact person.
"And since I remain breathing…"
Rennala nodded immediately, because she was right, of course.
John did too.
Even Marika gave an approving hum.
Ranni stared at all of them as though the entire rooftop had collectively betrayed her right to be dramatic about winning.
Then she clicked her tongue in annoyance.
It was a tiny sound.
But it held the exact flavor of a woman deeply, specifically irritated that no one would let her posture with proper finality after a beautiful victory.
John let out a long breath and brushed at himself with both hands, trying to restore some measure of dignity after tanking a legendary sorcery with his body and then standing in the middle of a rooftop while everyone discussed the result like it had merely been a mildly disruptive weather event.
It did not help much.
There was dust across his coat, blood drying dark along one shoulder where Stars of Ruin had bitten into him, and enough scorched fabric and shallow tears in the cloth to make him look like he had just survived a very enthusiastic celestial mauling.
He flicked at one sleeve, frowned at the scorch marks, and then gave up on mortal effort entirely.
"Marika… site of Grace, please." He asked with a tired little sigh.
The goddess, floating nearby with pale gold splendor. She held the poise of a queen who had watched this idiot somehow survive himself for days on end, and giggled.
It was brief, soft, and entirely too entertained.
Then she inclined her head and snapped her fingers.
A Site of Grace bloomed at John's feet at once, golden and pure and impossibly out of place atop Raya Lucaria's cold scholarly heights. It spiraled upward in quiet, living light, wrapping around his body in warm currents that sank into skin, soul, and cloth alike.
The pain in his shoulder eased first, then vanished entirely. Torn fabric knit itself. Dust slid away. Blood disappeared. By the time the Grace dimmed, he looked once again like a demigod who had merely had an exciting afternoon, rather than one who had just intercepted a starborn killing spell with his spine.
John rolled his shoulder once and let out a pleased hum.
"Much better."
Sellen, still riding the high of her duel, watched that with open fascination and no small amount of greed. There was bright life in her eyes still, delight not yet dulled by thought or caution, and a little blood at the corner of one sleeve that only made her look more vivid.
John glanced between her, Rennala, and Ranni.
"So…" He asked lightly. "...are we done testing my teacher, then?"
Rennala answered first, with a soft smile and an easy nod. "I should think so, yes."
Ranni crossed two arms and tilted her head, the spectral line of her mouth carrying the faintest trace of smugness. "Provisionally, but aye. She is useful."
Sellen did not seem even slightly offended by that. If anything, she looked delighted to have forced such a verdict out of the Witch of the Dark Moon.
John took that as sufficient confirmation and clapped his hands once, softly.
"Perfect. Then I'm going to slip off for a minute, activate my new Great Rune, and I'll be right back." He pointed vaguely between the mother, daughter, and sorceress as though assigning perfectly normal household tasks.
"You three can get started on the first step of the plan without me, and I'll join you in a second."
Rennala nodded as though this were the most natural sentence in the world.
Ranni only gave a small hum of acknowledgement.
Sellen, on the other hand, looked visibly enthralled by the casualness with which such absurd things were being discussed around her.
Activate my new Great Rune, he had said.
As though one merely stepped out to stretch one's legs and awaken divine law between conversations.
Her mouth twitched upward.
"What a completely unreasonable place this has become..." She murmured, sounding far more charmed than disturbed.
John grinned. "You'll fit right in."
That got a laugh out of Rennala, a tiny eye-roll from Ranni, and a dry huff from Marika.
John took one step back, ready to call on Grace, but Sellen's voice stopped him.
"Johnathan."
He turned his head toward her quickly. "Yeah? What's up?"
She was smiling. It was not her usual poised little curve of the lips, or the dangerous amused expression she wore while carving students open intellectually, but something brighter, and more openly ecstatic.
She stepped toward him with slow, easy confidence, glintstone light catching in her dark hair and painting the edges of her robes in blue.
"I have not thanked you yet."
John's expression softened. "For this?"
He gestured lightly around them, at the rooftop, the Carian royals, the impossible conspiracy of ambition now taking form in moonlight and Grace. "That's the least I can do for my treasured master."
Sellen's eyes glinted as she let out a soft little giggle and closed the distance between them fully.
Then, to his mild surprise, she reached out and turned him slightly by the shoulders, fussing with the front of his restored coat and smoothing the collar into place with neat, elegant fingers.
The gesture was intimate in a maddeningly understated way.
John went still and let her.
Sellen looked up at him once she was satisfied with her adjustments, and there was that same ecstatic brightness in her face, sharpened now into something almost feverishly pleased.
Her voice dropped low.
"If it was your goal…" She whispered. "...then you have officially succeeded in charming and bribing your way into my heart, little tadpole."
That caught his full attention immediately.
John's brows rose, the grin on his face softening into something more intent as he looked down at her properly.
"Oh~?" He asked, openly intrigued. "I wasn't entirely planning on that."
His mouth curled again. "But I can't say I'm mad at the result~..."
Sellen's laugh came out softer this time, and warmer still as she grabbed him by the collar.
John barely had time to blink before she pulled him down and kissed him without the slightest hint of delicateness or shyness.
It was a hot, decisive kiss, all scholar's composure abandoned in favor of pure, shameless intent.
Her mouth met his with the kind of confidence only a woman entirely certain of what she wanted could manage, and when he responded in kind she deepened it immediately, one hand still twisted in his collar while the other rose to the side of his jaw.
There was heat in it, tongue and breath and delighted audacity, just enough to make it very obvious that Sorceress Sellen had not acted on impulse alone.
She had chosen this.
John, for all his confidence, did not think he'd get here quite this quickly.
By the time she let him go a few moments later, his collar was slightly crooked again and Sellen looked entirely unrepentant.
She stepped back, turned toward Ranni and Rennala with a calm, shameless smile, and folded one arm lightly beneath her sizable chest as if she had merely concluded a piece of business.
For a heartbeat, the rooftop was very quiet.
Rennala looked pleasantly surprised, one hand rising to her lips as a delighted little laugh escaped her.
Ranni looked… annoyed.
Though it wasn't loud or dramatic, it was enough that the slight flattening of her mouth and the narrowing of her eyes became immediately noticeable to anyone paying attention.
John paid attention, and quickly tucked that away for future use.
Marika, meanwhile, was the only one who seemed entirely unsurprised.
She looked at him with the dry patience of a woman who had watched him throw himself at this exact outcome from the moment he met Sellen.
"I am more surprised it took this long with how hard thou wert trying to get into that woman's robes." She muttered sardonically, though she was still clearly amused.
John winced inwardly. 'That is so mean.'
"It is also true."
Rennala, still floating in dreamy delight, clasped her hands together softly. "Oh, youth is wonderfully spontaneous…"
Sellen, hearing none of Marika's commentary and entirely unconcerned with the reactions of anyone else present, glanced back at John with a look that made it abundantly clear she would not have objected in the slightest had he chosen to kiss her again right there.
John, because he possessed at least one functioning survival instinct, decided not to press his luck.
Especially not with Ranni standing there wearing that small, inscrutable expression that suggested the stars themselves might develop opinions if he made the wrong move.
So he did the smart thing.
And he took the win.
Awkwardly, he cleared his throat, adjusted his collar again, and flicked a brief glance toward Ranni. She only rolled her eyes and looked away, as though insulted by the very suggestion that she might care who he kissed or who kissed him.
Which, naturally, only made him suspect she cared at least a little.
Rennala giggled again, all honeyed moonlight and delighted maternal approval.
Sellen still looked as if she'd thoroughly enjoyed herself.
Marika looked like she was revising her estimates of how obnoxiously successful he could be in a single afternoon.
And Johnathan Pendragon, in one of the rare flashes of wisdom granted to him by fate, Grace, or sheer terrified instinct, called on teleportation before the heavens themselves could come down and punish him for his outrageous luck.
Golden light rose around him in a spiral.
He gave them all one last grin, far too pleased with himself to be respectable, and vanished in a wash of Grace before the stars could decide they had finally seen enough.
-----------------------
Author's Note:
Power stones, please.
Honestly, I didn't come into this chapter planning this kiss. But it just felt natural and flowed properly in my head lol
The math made sense, so I merely carried the two as it were.
…
Next Chapter Title: MOTHER'S EYES
…
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