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.
