Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 704: Vows

The ceremony was simple, because the people getting married wanted it that way.

There was no priest. There was no long rite, no scripture, no stranger standing between them to make it official. Ananta Regalon had never needed an outside authority to tell it what was true, and a wedding was no different. The four of them simply walked to the twin arches as the last of the daylight faded, and the tens of thousands of guests fell quiet, and the only sound across the whole vast field was the soft hum of Ainen’s lanterns waking in the dark.

Noah and Kira stood beneath the right arch. Almond and Lily stood beneath the left, where the two arches met and intertwined overhead. They did not need anyone to speak for them. They spoke for themselves.

Noah went first, and his voice was steady now, the way it had not been when he announced this. He looked at Kira and did not look anywhere else.

"I climbed three layers with you." he said. "I would climb a hundred more. Wherever you go, I go. Whatever takes you, takes me first. I am yours, in every life this world gives us, and in every one it does not."

Kira’s eyes were bright, but her voice did not waver either.

"You have been my home since before I had one," she said. "Through every layer, every fight, every dark stretch where the only certain thing was your hand in mine. I will hold that hand until the world ends. And if it ends, I will find you in whatever comes after, and hold it there too."

They were grandchildren of the two old swordmasters who stood watching at the front of the crowd, and Silvester and Hiroshi gripped each other’s arms and did not bother hiding what was on their faces.

Then it was Almond and Lily, and the whole field leaned in, because everyone there knew what these two had built together, and everyone wanted to hear what they would finally say out loud.

Almond looked at Lily, and for once, the man who always had a plan had nothing planned at all.

"You and I have schemed our way across a whole world," he said, and a low laugh moved through the crowd. "We have turned oceans. We have ended a Monarch. We have never once lost, when we played the board together." His voice softened. "But you were never a piece on the board to me. You were the reason I played at all. Every move, every long game, every impossible thing we pulled off, I did it to build a world worth standing in beside you. So here is my last scheme, and my best one. I will spend the rest of forever at your side. That is the whole plan. I do not need another."

Lily smiled, and it was not her clever smile, not the one that hid nine moves. It was the real one, the one almost no one ever got to see.

"You think you out-planned me," she said. "You did not. I decided on you a very long time ago, and I simply let you believe it was your idea." The crowd laughed again, and her smile gentled. "I have read everyone I have ever met. Every intent, every angle, every lie. You are the only person I never wanted to read, because I already knew. You are mine, Almond. You were always going to be mine. And I yours."

And then both couples leaned in, at the same moment, beneath the joined arches, and sealed the oaths the only way that mattered.

They kissed.

And the sky came apart in light.

It started above the arches and spread outward across the whole field in a single breath.

Fireworks, but not the kind any world had made before. The kingdom’s powers had gone into them, and they bloomed across the dark sky in colors that did not have names. Ainen’s exotic flames climbed first, cold blue and corrosion green and a dozen others, bursting into vast slow flowers of fire that drifted instead of fading. Lily’s Dreadlings, shaped for once into something joyful, leapt skyward and detonated into showers of dark-and-silver brilliance. Clovelle’s Skydread squadrons cut burning trails across the high air, weaving patterns of light that braided and crossed and broke into rain.

Kayla sent vines of living light climbing into the sky to bloom into flowers a hundred feet wide. Saffa and Fraisea fired off bursts of structured energy that hung in the air as glowing geometric shapes, turning slowly, catching and throwing the colors of everything around them. Natalia’s exotic monsters added their own light, the glowing ones rising on great drifting wings, the light-trailing ones streaking upward to leave long bright ribbons hanging in the dark.

The whole sky over the venue became a moving cathedral of light, layer on layer, color on color, the work of an entire kingdom’s worth of power spent on nothing but beauty. Tens of thousands of guests tipped their heads back and watched it with open mouths, the soldiers of four kingdoms lit in shifting colors, the new Asura Executives among them staring up at a sky that, three months ago, none of them had even been allowed to look at as free people.

It went on and on, wave after wave, the kingdom emptying its joy into the dark, until the last great flower of exotic flame opened slow and golden above the arches and drifted gently down over the newly married couples like a blessing made of fire.

For a moment, the whole field was silent.

Then it erupted in a roar of celebration that shook the planet.

Natalia let it run exactly as long as she wanted it to, and then she stepped up to the center of everything, and her voice carried across the entire venue with the ease of a woman who had commanded fleets.

"They’re married!" she called, and the roar climbed higher. "The oaths are spoken, the sky is lit, and the serious part is over!" She threw her arms wide, and behind her the music swelled up out of nowhere, deep and bright and impossible to sit still through. "So I have exactly one order left for all of you, and you had better follow it. DANCE!"

The venue changed.

It was built for this too. Natalia had planned it from the start, and at her signal the whole field transformed. The blossom-carpet between the arches and the feasting grounds cleared itself into open floor as Kayla’s flowers folded down. The lanterns sank lower and brightened, washing the ground in warm shifting color. The music rolled out across the miles of venue, and from the high air Clovelle’s fleet trailed soft light down over everything, and the entire planet became one enormous, glowing, exotic dance floor under a sky still smoking faintly with the last of the fireworks.

And everyone danced.

They danced in their own ways, in their own places, and no two corners of the venue looked alike.

On the open ground near the arches, the family danced together, the way they always did everything. Kexell had Gopu on his shoulder and was stomping out something enormous and ridiculous that cleared a wide circle around him, the little dragon shrieking with joy and the old dragon roaring laughter, and people kept getting pulled in despite themselves. Julian spun Bianca through a fast bright turn and she let him, laughing. Marcus moved like a man who had no business dancing and did not care. Even Viktor unbent enough to join, precise and a little stiff, until Liang said something that made him actually grin and loosen.

Silvester and Hiroshi did not dance so much as stand at the edge with cups in their hands, watching their grandchildren spin under the lights, two old swords finally allowed to be just two happy old men.

In the sky, it was something else entirely.

Clovelle led a whole airborne dance up among the drifting fireworks-smoke, her Skydread squadrons and dozens of guests who could fly weaving through the high air in great sweeping spirals of light. The flying ones of Natalia’s exotic monsters joined them, glowing wings cutting slow arcs through the dark, and the whole upper air became its own dance floor, bodies and beasts turning together against the stars while the music reached up to meet them.

Across the rest of the field, the four kingdoms danced too. Kezryx soldiers and Ronethis officers and Dravokh warriors and Velkarion folk, rivals a season ago, moving now to the same music on the same ground, the old lines between them softened by light and joy and Ainen’s endless food and the simple impossible fact of being alive and welcome. Jaskrit himself was seen dancing, badly and happily, with a cup raised the whole time.

Almond and Lily danced in the middle of all of it, slow, foreheads nearly touching, untroubled for once by any board or any plan or any frontline still to come. Just the two of them, married at last, in the heart of the kingdom they had built out of nothing, under a sky their family had set on fire for joy.

The music played on. The lanterns burned. The dancing did not stop for a long, long time, on the ground and in the sky both, across a glowing planet that the whole layer would soon hear about.

Ananta Regalon had married two of its own.

And it had done it beautifully.