Not even a minute had passed in the outside world.

The same portal Leon had just stepped through reopened in the exact location he’d left, and he came back through it alone, moving with the purposeful efficiency of someone who had identified a problem and was already three steps into solving it.

The dragon’s state isn’t stable. Thousands of kilometers of distance from the others isn’t nearly enough if it wakes up in the wrong condition.

He’d made the minimum necessary preparations on the Dimensional Worlds side before returning—the dragon was placed in an isolated region far from the Pyran population, spatial markers set so he could monitor it remotely, contingency measures established for the scenario where it regained consciousness before it regained reason. It wasn’t optimistic, but it was managed.

And most important of all, there was his clan there to take care of things, so no accident should happen.

Now there was something else he needed to handle before he left this realm permanently.

He looked in a specific direction with focused attention.

Then his figure blurred.

Kilometre. Blur. Kilometre. Blur.

Each transition was near-instantaneous, his spatial movement carrying him across distance with a convenience that still occasionally surprised him when he considered how recently crossing a single kilometer had required actual effort. He is getting stronger quickly, time and time again.

Less than five minutes of this brought him to the location his memory had retained from his first arrival—the cliffside, the specific geography of it, the way the terrain dropped sharply away into depth below.

Three red portals, embedded deep in the cliff face.

Below them, descending into the rock, is a large natural cave.

Same place. Exactly as she had described.

He dropped into it without ceremony, letting himself fall and then arresting the descent when the cave floor came into his spatial awareness below. The interior was the same and not the same—the quality of the space unchanged, the sourceless dim illumination still present, the cave’s dimensions precisely as he had been told.

But there were those souls who had practically led him there, whether it was an accident or not; still, they were the cause.

Before, it had been two. Now, floating throughout the cave in loose clusters and individually, there were approximately fifty of them—translucent figures that caught the cave’s ambient light without quite reflecting it, present in a way that existed slightly sideways from the normal understanding of presence.

Why so few? 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

The question arrived and stayed with him. This realm had existed for a very long time. Hundreds of thousands of lives had passed through it across the centuries of the Pyran race’s habitation, and that number didn’t account for whatever else might have arrived through those portals over the same period. The mathematics of mortality across that timeframe should have produced something vastly larger than fifty souls.

Yet what he was looking at skewed young. Almost universally. The oldest visible among them might have been thirteen or fourteen by appearance—and those were the clear exceptions. Most seemed younger than that. Considerably younger.

The older ones go somewhere else. Or they simply stop being here. Either way, only the children remain. Even so, the numbers are not adding up.

He didn’t have the answer. He filed the question away for later.

The two he recognized found him before he located them specifically—or rather, they recognized him first, which produced the opposite response of coming forward.

The small girl and the small boy, the same two who had interacted with him before in the outside world, the same two who had fled the moment they understood that this strange silver-white-haired figure could actually perceive them. Their reaction now carried the same initial impulse toward retreat.

Several others had already noticed him before those two even registered his presence—souls with no context for what he was or what his arrival meant, but to them, his presence was just like a show in a circus, like a show he could hear and watch but nothing more, that was why quite a few of them were floating really close to Leon without fear, some even passed through his body in excitement like it was a play.

I appeared in their cave without warning. That part is on me.

He teleported directly in front of the two familiar figures before the retreat could become actual distance, appearing close enough that running ceased to be the obvious immediate option.

He was aware, doing this, of what these two represented in the broader shape of things. They had been the indirect cause of his entire arrival in this realm. Not through malice—they were children, whatever else they were—but through the sequence of events that had begun with that first fall through the portal. The days that followed. The people he’d met. Ira.

If I hadn’t come through here, none of what followed would have happened, including her.

He felt no anger about that. If anything, the debt ran in an unexpected direction—he’d received more from the chain of events that began with falling through that portal than he’d lost by a significant margin.

He wasn’t going to say any of that to a pair of child-souls who were currently calculating whether to flee him again.

He had another idea for the fleeing problem.

This might work. Might not. Only one way to determine that.

He used the Leximancy with minimal force—far below what he’d deployed in combat, calibrated for instruction rather than compulsion, a gentle weight rather than an absolute command.

"Stop."

The word landed.

Not just on the two of them.

Every soul in the cave stopped simultaneously—motion arrested, whatever passed for breath held, fifty translucent figures going completely still in the same instant. The Leximancy had propagated without discrimination, touching every presence in the space because every presence was within range, and he hadn’t thought to narrow the focus.

I did not intend that.

A beat of silence in which he assessed the situation with complete honesty.

Fifty child-souls, all staring at him, all frozen, all processing the same information at once: something had just compelled their stillness without asking permission, and the source of it was the tall silver-white-haired figure who had appeared in their cave without announcement.

The horror was visible even in forms that didn’t have conventional faces to express it with.

Right. I need to address this immediately.

He kept his voice level and calm, addressing the whole cave rather than pretending the broader effect hadn’t happened—that would have been worse.

"Don’t try to run even when you can move again," he said. "I have no intention of harming any of you. Not a single one. I came here for a specific reason, and I’ll say what I need to say and then I’ll leave."

He let that settle for a moment before continuing.

"This realm is going to be destroyed. The process has already begun—it’s only a matter of time before it reaches this location." He paused. "I don’t know whether that would affect you or cause you trouble. I genuinely don’t have the answer to that. But I thought you should be warned regardless. That’s all I have decided to do before leaving this place forever."

The Leximancy’s effect had already dissolved—he could feel it releasing back into ordinary air the moment the necessity for it had passed. The souls were free again.

Most of them didn’t move immediately. The information was doing its own work on fifty simultaneous processing systems, and that tended to produce stillness as a first response regardless of whether anything was actively compelling it.

He looked toward the two he recognized specifically.

"I had made acquaintance with these two before," he said, his tone shifting slightly—less formal, more direct. "I wanted to make sure they heard the warning. That’s why I came." He held their gaze steadily. "Take care of yourselves."

That’s all I can do here. Warn them and leave. Whatever happens after that is beyond what I can control.

He turned toward the three red portals.

The urge arrived immediately as he faced them.

Two portals he knew nothing about. Two unknowns leading to destinations that could be anything, anywhere, with consequences that were completely unreadable from this side. His spatial affinity made the correct portal—the one leading home—easily identifiable once he actually focused on it.

Don’t.

He recognized the impulse for exactly what it was. The same instinct that had produced every significant complication in his recent history. A portal he didn’t understand, a moment of curiosity, and consequences that had taken grueling days to fully work through.