Davos. The city of Dogs.

Somewhere in the outskirts sitting between five elements school territory and fire sect land, a city stood tall and old and unpleasant in the specific way that places with long memories tend to be.

The buildings were grand in structure if not in condition. Stone that had been impressive once, now carrying the weight of decades without anyone caring enough to maintain what time was taking apart. The streets smelled like piss and old rain and whatever had been left in corners long enough to become something else entirely. The walls surrounding the city were thick and high, built with the particular intent of keeping whatever was inside, in, rather than keeping anything outside, out.

That detail said most of what needed saying about Davos.

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The central region had strong clans, advanced magic, old nobility with long names and longer histories. But mixed into all of that, sitting in the gaps between the powerful things, was filth.

Cities like this one. Ravaged by poverty, running on competition for resources that were never enough to go around, chaotic in the low-level constant way that never fully erupted into anything clean but never fully settled either.

Few of them existed.

But they were enough.

For someone like Leon, who had the attention of more than one powerful faction pointed in his direction, a city full of fugitives was close to ideal. Looking for one specific person in a cesspool of people who were all hiding from something was a near impossibility. Everyone here had a reason to mind their own business. That culture was one of the few things Davos reliably produced.

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"I would like to rent a courtyard for one year."

The district office was large and smelled like the street outside had gotten in somehow. Leon stood at the clerk’s desk and spoke at a normal volume, looking at an older man with wrinkled skin and the particular expression of someone who had been sitting in this chair long enough to read situations quickly.

The old man read this one in about two seconds.

"Keep it down, kid." He didn’t raise his own voice. "There are snoopers everywhere. Why don’t you come into the back."

He said it with a tinge of something that sat closer to genuine concern than anything transactional.

And it was warranted.

This was a bad part of town even by Davos standards. Most people here operated on daily rent, their next night’s shelter directly tied to whatever their hands produced that day. Getting a room for two weeks was already the kind of thing that drew looks. A full courtyard for a full year was so far outside the local frame of reference that it stopped being a rental inquiry and became an announcement.

An announcement that the wrong people would hear within minutes if it stayed in the open.

The old man was trying to help.

"There’s no need." Leon didn’t move toward the back. "If anyone here wants to cause trouble for me, they’re welcome to try."

He didn’t release his own energy when he said it.

He left that to the two standing on either side of him.

—boom.

—boom.

Arian’s presence rolled out first, level three and sitting right at its peak, the kind of output that had weight to it, the kind you felt in your chest before you consciously registered what you were feeling. Ember’s followed immediately after, a flaming energy that ran hotter than its stage suggested, the kind that dried the air slightly and made the scalp prickle just from proximity.

Both of them standing in a district office in the city of Dogs, neither one of them particularly concerned about the audience.

"That...."

The old man’s frown settled in slowly.

Level three wasn’t a title that showed up in places like this without a story behind it. For people their age it suggested a backer with real weight, real investment, real interest in their development. That wasn’t common.

But it also wasn’t great mage. Level four was a different category entirely. True dragons, the kind that could step around disasters rather than through them, the kind that made entire factions reconsider their plans when their name came up.

Level three was strong. It wasn’t untouchable.

The old man looked at Leon again.

Looked at the two women.

Looked at Leon once more.

"Friend." He said it carefully. "I understand."

He drew up the lease contract without further argument, filling in the criteria Leon specified, his brush moving across the paper with the efficiency of someone who had processed stranger requests than this and learned not to ask follow up questions.

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Naturally a few people snooped.

By the time the contract was signed, at least two or three sets of eyes in the district office had noted the address and filed it away for later use. Leon clocked each of them without turning his head and did nothing about it.

He had done his research before choosing this part of town.

This district operated like a branch of a branch. Everyone here answered to someone, who answered to someone else, and the whole structure ran on a shared understanding of risk assessment. They looked like a loose collection of bandits and low-level criminals, and that impression was accurate on the surface. But underneath it was a kind of pragmatic order. You didn’t bite something that looked like it might bite back harder. You filed information away and waited to see what it was worth.

They would watch. They wouldn’t move yet.

That was fine.

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The courtyard sat on the east side of the city of Davos, directly adjacent to the wall that surrounded the whole place.

Leon had specified his requirements and gotten most of them.

A pool. A long circular courtyard similar in layout to the one he had used back in Bloodrock. A small underground chamber for meditation and training, separate from the main space, quiet in the way underground rooms tend to be when built thick enough.

It cost fifty thousand gold coins to walk in the door.

Between what he had pulled from the undergod territory and what he had taken off two hundred students and three transcendent elders of the five elements school, money was not a problem. It hadn’t been a problem for a while. By any reasonable measure Leon was operating at the level of a small treasury.

He didn’t think about it much.

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"I am at your service, Master Leon."

Seated humbly on the courtyard floor, hands folded, posture straight, a woman with grayish skin spoke without looking up.

She came attached to the unit. Had been attached to it for years, maintaining the space through the long stretch of time when no one occupied it, keeping the pool clean and the stones swept and the underground chamber aired out on a schedule that nobody was asking her to keep but that she kept anyway.

The last master who had used this courtyard had been here twenty years ago.

Before the area around it had gotten dangerous enough to push most people with options somewhere else.

She was in her mid-forties now and the surprise of seeing a new face cross the threshold was visible for just a moment before she composed it back into stillness.

Leon looked at her briefly.

"I need a butler who can handle tasks for me." He said it without softening the edges of it. "You’re too old for that kind of running around. After you find me someone suitable, continue with your normal duties around the courtyard."

She didn’t flinch at it.

Just nodded once, steady.

What Leon needed was someone with legs and local knowledge. Someone who could move through Davos without drawing attention, source materials quietly, handle the kind of errands that required being present in places he currently could not be.

He was planning to enter the transcendent stage here.

In this courtyard.

In this underground chamber.

Everything else was preparation for that.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​