The canyon's new council hall was carved into the cliffside, its high walls reinforced with steel beams and hung with banners of the phoenix — Daniel's chosen symbol. Long tables stretched beneath glowing lamps, and for the first time, the seats were filled not by soldiers, but by envoys.
Daniel sat at the head, Kael at his right, Seris at his left, Bran looming behind.
Across from them sat men and women in fine cloaks, each bearing the seal of a kingdom. Some smiled, some sneered, but all eyes were on him.
The first envoy to speak was from a border duchy — a gaunt man with parchment-thin skin and eyes sharp as needles.
"You've forced the Eternal Guild into silence," he said. "That alone makes you dangerous. My king would rather be your friend than your enemy. We offer grain, livestock, and coin. In exchange, you pledge not to march your 'steel army' across our borders."
Murmurs rippled down the table.
Daniel leaned forward, voice steady. "I don't march for conquest. I fight when I'm attacked. If your king feeds my people, I'll call that friendship."
The envoy nodded, relieved.
Next came a queen's ambassador, draped in jewels. "Our mines are rich, but we lack the means to protect them from raiders. You… have means." Her eyes flicked toward Bran's hammer, Kael's shield, Seris's bow. Then toward the soldiers standing silent in the hall. "We offer iron and gold in return for your protection."
Seris's lips curled into a smirk. "They fear you and want you as their shield."
Daniel's jaw tightened. "Or as their sword."
Not every envoy came with honeyed words.
A young prince from a far northern kingdom slammed his fist on the table. "You bring machines that belch smoke, weapons that spit fire, beasts of steel that no craftsman forged. You are not natural. You are a danger to all of us. The Guild should have crushed you when they had the chance!"
Gasps broke out. Guards shifted.
Kael rose to his feet, hand on his sword, but Daniel raised a hand to stop him.
Daniel met the prince's gaze evenly. "Then be glad the Guild didn't succeed. Because if they had, nothing would've stopped me from coming north next. I don't ask you to like me. I ask you to recognize what I am: a man defending his home."
The prince's face reddened, but he sat back down, cowed.
That night, after the envoys departed, Daniel sat in the council hall with his companions.
Seris leaned back in her chair. "They'll never see you as just a man. To them, you're either a weapon or a threat."
Bran grunted. "Better a weapon pointed at their enemies than a threat pointed at them."
Kael folded his arms. "You stood your ground well today. But diplomacy isn't won by fire alone. If you want this peace to last, you need to show them you can build as well as destroy."
Daniel exhaled, rubbing his temples. "I was trained to fight. Not to talk. Not to play politics."
Seris's voice softened. "Then let us play it for you. You've already built an army. Let us build your voice."
The days that followed were filled with endless meetings.
Envoys from farming kingdoms promised food in exchange for protection.
Merchant lords offered coin and trade routes in exchange for Daniel's steel.
Even the northern prince returned, sullen but cautious, proposing "non-aggression" if nothing else.
The phoenix banner began to spread. Slowly, cautiously, kingdoms beyond the Guild began to whisper that maybe Daniel Mason was not just a soldier with thunder at his back.
Maybe he was the founder of something new.
Daniel stood on the canyon's ridge one evening, watching torches flicker in the council hall below. His companions joined him in silence.
"You think this treaty will hold?" he asked at last.
Kael's voice was steady. "So long as you hold it."
Seris's was sharper. "So long as you don't let your paranoia choke it."
Bran's was blunt. "So long as you remember peace is built like walls — stone by stone, not all at once."
Daniel's hands clenched, his eyes on the stars.
For the first time, he allowed himself to hope that maybe, just maybe, peace could last.
But the soldier in him still whispered:
Prepare anyway.
The council hall buzzed with envoys again, a hive of velvet and titles. Offers flowed like wine—grain for guns, ore for armor, coin for cannons.
Daniel let them talk themselves breathless.
When the last petition ended, he rose. "Hear me plain," he said, voice carrying to the furthest banner. "We won't export our steel."
A murmur swept the room. The jeweled ambassador from the mines blinked. "You mean… none of your thunder-weapons? Not even a small—"
"None," Daniel said. "If I arm you with what I brought from my world, I arm a future rival. I start an arms race none of you can win and none of us survives. You want peace? Then the thunder stays here."
The northern prince—less red-faced than last time, not by much—scoffed. "How convenient, to keep the fire while demanding everyone else bring water."
Daniel didn't rise to it. "I'll escort your caravans if raiders hit you. I'll open our markets, our medics will teach yours, our engineers will help with roads and bridges. But my rifles stay in my soldiers' hands. That's the policy."
Seris leaned into the light, the phoenix on her cloak catching the lamps. "And it's not negotiable," she added, sweet as poison.
Kael's steady presence at Daniel's shoulder made the line feel carved in stone. Bran, behind them, said nothing, but the way his hands rested on his hammer told the room exactly what he thought of foreign fingers on Daniel's guns.
The envoys adjusted their tactics. Most stayed. A few left. The treaty held.
And then, at dawn the next day, the four of them rode out.
Daniel could've sent delegates. He chose saddles instead. The world looked different without a windshield and armor plate between you and the wind, and he wanted to see it the way it would remember him.
They crossed riverlands where fog hugged the reeds and children waved from barges; a hill-country quilted with vineyards; a mountain pass where the air tasted like ice and stone.
Kael rode point, a wall on a horse. Seris flitted from path to ridge like a wisp, reporting on trails no map marked. Bran hated horses, endured them, and said so every hour. Daniel listened, asked questions, kept his temper when minor lords tried to puff their chests into mountains.
He repeated his policy in a dozen courts: protection, trade, medicine, engineering—yes. Rifles, tanks, jets—no.
"Why?" a duchess asked at a riverside banquet, sharp eyes above a sweeter smile. "Allies share blades."
"Blades dull," Daniel said. "And the first rule of peace is knowing where the sharp edges are."
They moved on.
They saw the kingdom of Veldra long before they reached it. Not for towers or banners—but for walls like cliffs, tiered terraces of black stone climbing from a green valley like a crouching beast. Water ran down channels beside the road, whispering through carved lion-mouths, feeding orchards and rice paddies in stair-stepped perfection.
"Someone thinks like an engineer," Bran muttered, grudgingly impressed.
"Or a general," Seris said, eyes narrowing at the overlapping fields of fire.
The gates opened onto a city that smelled of citrus and iron. Market canopies snapped like flags. Smiths sang to the rhythm of their hammers. No one flinched at the sight of the phoenix cloaks. They stared, yes, but there was pride in these stares—measured, appraising, unafraid.
In the great hall, beneath a ceiling of lacquered beams and gold-thread constellations, King Aeron of Veldra rose to meet them. He was lean and weathered, a river-rock man, surface-smoothed but unbroken. Scar across one brow, mirth lines at the mouth, a gaze that weighed and counted.
"Daniel Mason," he said, voice warm and careful. "The soldier who made the Guild blink."
Daniel clasped his forearm. "Aeron of the walls that water built."
That drew the first true smile.
They spoke at length. Veldra was fertile, proud, hard to starve and harder to storm. It sat far enough from the Eternal Guild's heart to breathe, close enough to smell the smoke when things burned. It had held for centuries by trusting stone and water more than treaties.
And then Aeron made it simple.
"Merge with us," the king said.
Silence, clean and ringing.
Seris's eyebrow climbed. Kael didn't move. Bran stopped breathing.
Aeron didn't blink. "Not vassalage. A union. Your canyon and my terraces, one state, two crowns. Shared law, shared roads, shared borders. Your phoenix beside our lion. You bring thunder; we bring roots."
Daniel tasted the weight of it. Merging meant legitimacy beyond banners. It also meant entanglement—his soldiers would be their army; their politics would be his headache.
"And the cost?" Daniel asked.
Aeron's smile tilted. "A future. Built instead of burned. And—" He turned slightly, gestured to the shadowed colonnade. "Kaia."
She stepped out like an arrow stepping from a bow.
Princess Kaia of Veldra wore leather over silk, bracers and rings, hair braided tight and crowned with a plain circlet that looked more used than polished. Her eyes were hot-coal amber; her posture said commander first, royalty second. A sword hung at her hip with the easy weight of long friendship.
She took in Daniel, Kael, Seris, Bran in a single slash of a look. She didn't curtsy. She didn't smile.
"So," she said. "You're the storm that can't keep its hands off other people's skies."
Seris grinned outright. Kael's mouth might've twitched. Bran coughed to hide a laugh.
Daniel kept his face still. "And you're the fire that starts before the tinder's laid."
"Good," she said. "You do have a spine."
Aeron sighed in the way of fathers everywhere. "Kaia… diplomacy."
"I'll be diplomatic when I know we're not marrying a landslide," she shot back, then to Daniel: "If you merge with us, you don't get to hide behind canyon walls when things go bad. You bleed when we bleed."
"That's already my life," Daniel said. "What you're proposing—merger, shared law—that's binding. I don't sign chains. I sign roads."
Her chin lifted. "Then bring roads and see if you trip."
Aeron closed his eyes briefly. "My daughter, Princess Kaia," he said to Daniel, resigned and fond at once. "Commander of our city guard, breaker of three sieges, rider of four governors into the ground when they tried to skim the irrigation ledgers."
"I prefer 'auditor,'" Kaia said.
Seris laughed. "I prefer 'scourge.'"
Kael, ever the shield, cut the banter. "Speak plainly. What are the terms?"
Aeron did. Council seats shared; courts blended; river rights guaranteed. Veldran grain to Daniel's city at fair rates; phoenix engineers to expand Veldra's aqueducts; mutual defense with Daniel's non-export rule carved into first lines of treaty law. And—though Aeron didn't quite meet Daniel's eyes when he said it—"In time, a bond of houses, if there is respect enough for one."
Kaia didn't blush. She rolled her eyes. "In time, if the man can count without his war machine doing the math."
Daniel didn't answer that. He saw what Aeron had built—stone that channeled flood into plenty, terraces that fed more mouths than most crowns dared promise. He saw a people who bowed to their monarch because he fed them first and taxed them last. He saw Kaia's grip on the hilt—callus-thick, honest. And he saw a path where his city could be more than a garrison with children.
"Walk your walls with me," Daniel said.
Kaia snorted. "Try to keep up."
They climbed. The terraces weren't steps so much as decisions; each turn showed how water moved, how fields could be drained in a day, flooded in an hour, denied to an invader and gifted to a neighbor. Kaia spoke the way she fought—fast, precise, with teeth.
"We rotate crops every third harvest," she said, pointing to squares of green and gold. "We break the soil different ways so it doesn't die under us. The Guild tried to starve us thirty years ago. We taught them to starve instead."
"You'll like Bran," Daniel said. "He talks to dirt like it's a person."
Kaia glanced down the slope, where Bran and Aeron argued cheerfully about culverts while locals gathered to watch two men who loved stone speak the same language without a translator. Kael walked the wall like it owed him an apology, counting angles, lines of sight, kill zones. Seris had vanished to the gate towers and reappeared with three friends because of course she had.
"You built a home," Kaia said at last. "Not a kingdom. That's why this can work."
Daniel side-eyed her. "And how do you know I don't want a crown?"
"Because you look at ledgers like they bit you," she said, deadpan. "Kings live in numbers and laws. You live in promises. Hold to them, Daniel Mason, and we'll hold to ours."
They reached the highest parapet. Wind tugged at cloaks and dark hair. Below, Veldra breathed: water over stone, gulls wheeling, market din rising like prayer.
Kaia rested her hands on the warm black rock and spoke without heat, which made it land harder. "My father thinks with river-years. I think with siege-hours. You think with foxhole-seconds. If we're going to merge, you'll have to learn the long counts."
Daniel stared at the horizon until it steadied inside him. "I'm trying," he said.
She glanced sideways. For the first time, her mouth softened. "Good. I'd hate to marry a man who won't learn."
He blinked. "That's… not subtle."
Kaia shrugged. "Subtlety is for people who can afford to waste time."
He didn't laugh. He wanted to. He settled for, "I don't sign chains."
"I don't offer them," she said. "I offer work."
They stood a while and let the city talk to them.
Negotiations took days. They ate Veldran oranges on hot steps, argued in cool halls, walked fields at noon, counted loaves in bakeries at dawn. Aeron proved as stubborn as any general Daniel had ever saluted. Daniel proved as immovable as the canyon he'd carved into a city. Kaia and Seris broke three deadlocks by reducing their fathers to sputtering with ruthless logic.
Bran redesigned an irrigation gate in chalk on a temple floor. The temple keeper wept with gratitude; Aeron had it carved in stone by sunset.
Kael drilled a dozen Veldran guards on the wall until they stopped looking at his shield and started looking past it.
And always, when a minister or lordling or would-be kingmaker slithered in with a honeyed suggestion about "sharing the thunder," Daniel said the same thing in the same calm tone: "No export. Ever." By the third day, even the bold stopped asking.
On the fifth, they drafted terms of union made of water and stone and stubbornness. Two capitals—one canyon, one terrace. One council—half phoenix, half lion. Mutual defense; shared roads; open markets; education exchanges; a clause carved in letters as big as a fist: No weapon of the phoenix shall be given, sold, lent, or taught to any outside the phoenix's own ranks.
Aeron sealed it. Daniel sealed it. Kaia pressed her signet ring so hard the wax hissed.
"Now we see if peace can be built," Aeron said, tired and pleased. "Stone by stone."
Daniel met Kaia's eyes. "Road by road."
She smirked. "And fight by fight, if we must. Let's not pretend we're not ourselves."
He almost smiled back. Almost.
They didn't leave with a wedding. They left with a treaty and an agreement that if the union held for a year—through harvests and raids and rumors—then they'd turn parchment into blood. Kaia would travel east in the spring to live three months in the canyon; Daniel would spend three in Veldra after. No crowns, no vows—yet. Work first.
At the gate, Aeron clasped Daniel's arm. "If the Guild breaks their word, send a rider. We won't stand aside."
Daniel squeezed back. "If raiders test your walls, send two. We don't stand aside either."
Seris and Kaia traded insults that were almost compliments. Kael and Veldra's captain promised to try to beat the other at a shield drill that would probably shatter something important. Bran left behind three new culvert designs and took away a sack of seeds he'd bartered from a farmer who swore they could grow on rock.
As the phoenix-bannered column wound away into the green, Daniel looked back once. Kaia was on the parapet, one hand raised in a soldier's farewell—palm out, fingers steady, nothing flowery about it.
He returned it and didn't look again.
They camped two days' ride from Veldra, under stars like hammered silver.
"You didn't tell her about the F-22," Seris said into the dark.
"No," Daniel said.
"Or the bomb."
"No."
Kael's voice drifted from his bedroll, low and even. "Good. Secrets are gates that only open inward."
Bran rumbled a laugh. "Poet."
Kael grunted. "Shield."
Seris rolled toward Daniel. "You believe in this?"
"I believe in them," he said. "In how they build. In how she won't let me be lazy."
"That's not what I asked."
He stared at the constellations he didn't recognize. "I believe I won't hand the world a match and a pile of powder. I believe I'll protect what's mine with everything I am. And I believe," he said after a long breath, "that if anyone can teach me the long counts, it'll be someone who treats water like a weapon."
Seris smiled into the night. "Hot head."
"Matches burn," Daniel said. "So do stars."
He slept without dreams for the first time in months.
Word of the Phoenix–Veldra Union crossed the map faster than any army. Merchants rerouted caravans. Petty kings counted spears and swallowed their pride. The Eternal Guild didn't denounce it; they watched, and quiet meant calculation.
Daniel returned to his canyon with sunlight on his shoulders and a treaty in his saddlebag. The walls looked taller. The streets looked more like streets.
He gathered his captains, engineers, teachers. "We build schools," he said. "We finish the aqueduct. We expand the fields. And we prepare—because peace is a road that needs guards."
Kael nodded. Seris marked meetings with new envoys. Bran unfolded Veldran paper and started sketching.
Later, alone on the highest scaffold, Daniel looked toward the west. He could not see Veldra's black stone from here, but he could feel the river hum in the treaty wax in his pocket.
He didn't know when he'd marry Kaia. He didn't know if the Guild would honor their line. He didn't know which threat would find them first.
But for the first time, his future felt like more than trenches and targets.
It felt like work.
And that, Daniel Mason could do forever.