Leon broke the hug quickly, setting Ira down and clearing his throat with the practiced ease of soone who had decided nothing notable had just been happening and was moving forward on that basis.
He straightened his clothes.
Seraphine was looking at him with an expression that communicated several things simultaneously, none of which she was saying out loud. Her eyes moved—briefly, with an almost involuntary quality—to Ira’s chest region, then away, then back once more before she caught herself and redirected her attention elsewhere with a quiet hmph that she seed to be having entirely with herself.
Ira, for her part, appeared either genuinely unaware that anything had been interrupted or constitutionally incapable of treating it as significant. She stood beside Leon with the easy comfort of soone who had already said everything she wanted to say and was now simply present, which was sohow the most disarming possible response to the situation.
The awkwardness didn’t get the opportunity to calcify into sothing worse.
From a distance, Archon Vyra was coming.
She was leading them—thousands of Pyrans moving across the scorched landscape in organized formation, her centuries of leadership visible in the way the group maintained coherence despite its size and the emotional weight of what they were doing.
Leaving the only world most of them had ever known, even a dying one, even one that had been slowly consuming them for generations. The discipline was real, and it was hers.
Had the timing been even slightly different, Leon reflected, standing between Seraphine’s particular brand of pointed silence and Ira’s particular brand of cheerful obliviousness would have been considerably more uncomfortable for considerably longer.
"Follow ," he said, turning toward the group and moving without waiting for discussion.
The crack in the realm’s atmosphere had accelerated. He could see it clearly now without needing his spatial awareness—the crumbling edge of reality was visually apparent, propagating at several ters per second and increasing. The rate would compound as it spread, each new fracture point creating more edge from which further destruction could propagate. The mathematics of it was straightforward and unpleasant.
The portal location was already ten kiloters from the nearest visible damage. That margin was shrinking.
His clone had read the situation from its own position and acted on it—the sa mind, the sa priorities, no communication required. By the ti the group reached the designated area, the portal to his World Fragnt was already open, and people were already moving through it.
The portal his clone was sustaining wasn’t the careful three-or-four-person trickle that limited mana would have required. It was massive—fifty people moving through simultaneously with room to spare, the clone drawing on its enormous reserves to hold the gateway open at full scale. Archon Vyra’s discipline t the portal’s capacity, and the combination produced speed.
Leon joined as soon as he arrived, opening a second portal beside the first, drawing on his own reserves to double the throughput. Two gateways, both running at full capacity, the combined flow moving thousands of people in a fraction of the ti a single portal would have required.
They couldn’t afford the alternative. The crumbling world was making that clear by the minute.
Archon Vyra kept the formation organized, her voice carrying authority that didn’t require volu—the kind of command presence that ca from centuries of people learning to trust it. The weaker ones first, the non-combatants, the children, exactly the right prioritization for a situation where the margin was uncertain.
Less than five minutes.
The entire population moved through in less than five minutes.
By the ti the last of them were going through, the visible crumbling had advanced enough that relocation of ten kiloters would have barely been sufficient if they’d been any slower. The realm was dying with increasing speed, each passing minute accelerating the tiline of its collapse.
When the flow stopped, Leon counted the remaining presences on this side of the portal.
Archon Vyra. Ira. Ira’s father. Seraphine. Himself.
Ira’s father had been on the elevated ground to one side throughout the process, helping coordinate the organization of the movent with the quiet efficiency of soone who understood logistics without needing instruction. He ca down when the last group went through.
He looked at Ira—a long look, the kind that contained things he wasn’t going to say in this context—then exchanged a nod with Archon Vyra that communicated sothing between them that didn’t require words.
Then he stepped through the portal and was gone.
Leon looked at Seraphine. She held his gaze for a mont with that expression she sotis wore that suggested she was keeping a tally of sothing and wasn’t going to share the current total. Then she looked at the portal, then back at him, and sothing crossed her face—a thought, or the recollection of one. Her expression shifted into sothing that was almost a smile, private and slightly smug in a way that seed directed at so internal conversation rather than at anyone present.
She stepped through.
Ira went without hesitation, diving into the portal with the enthusiasm she brought to most things, gone before Leon could say anything.
The portal closed.
Leon and Archon Vyra stood in the dying realm.
The clone had gone through with the last of the Pyrans—its presence in the World Fragnt would handle the organization of the new arrivals, which would be considerable given the scale of what had just poured through. Two minds operating from the sa base, separated by a portal. He could feel its activity distantly, the way you feel your own hand moving when you’re not watching it.
Neither of them moved toward the other portal. The one that would take Leon to his own world. The one that was several hundred kiloters away, whose location was now fully committed to his mory after one look at the map Archon Vyra had provided—precise coordinates locked into recall that operated at a level most people found unsettling when they encountered it.
They were both looking in the sa direction.
The red dragon.
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