I had known from my talks with Endymion that the Lion Maiden was popular, but I had never imagined to what extent. Seeing her then, standing among the people and receiving their greetings, I finally understood. Even Arthur, a titan of presence and psionic charisma, seemed more like a passenger held aloft by her grace. I knew, in that moment, that we were seeing something profound—and that the two of them, together, would change the fate of our world. I simply never could have predicted to what extent.

  Pallikári was, in a word, ambitious.

  The immense town that surrounded the Leos Palace and spanned the entirety of their island home wasn’t classified as a city solely due to the definition of the word no longer holding the same meaning. Had they been on Terra prior to the stellar age, Arthur knew, then the ‘town’ of Pallikári would have numbered among some of the greatest cities of mankind.

  Over ten million people lived, worked, and went about their lives within the expansive island metropolis.

  When they drove down from the palace toward the city, Arthur noticed through the holographic displays layered over the solid steel of the doors they were approaching what appeared to be a suburban area of very expensive houses.

  “The wealthier residents of the town prefer to live near the palace.” Circe explained before Arthur could ask.

  He turned to her when she spoke, and saw her casually leaning against the right side door while she looked out of the false window.

  “And where are we going?” Arthur asked while observing her.

  “We’ll go a little of everywhere,” Circe answered with a smile, “but we’ll end up at my favorite restaurant. It’s built on the beachfront, at the southern peninsula of the island.”

  “It’ll be dark in a few hours, won’t it?”

  “The sun sets at around forty-six hundred hours LST,” Circe confirmed with a nod.

  “LST?” Arthur asked automatically while thinking it over. “Laconian Standard Time?”

  “Laconian Southern,” Circe said with a wry smile. “Sorry, I forgot you didn’t know.”

  “You clarified it,” Arthur said with a smiling shrug. “So we’ll be in town until sunset?”

  “Yep!” Circe confirmed with a nod. “We’ll spend about four or five hours showing you the town, and then we’ll finish at the beachfront for an early dinner.”

  “Toured, Wined, and Dined. What a lucky man I am,” Arthur said with a chuckle.

  “And don’t you forget it!” Circe noted with a pointed finger and a laugh.

  From there, the day proceeded precisely as Circe had dictated, to no surprise of Arthur’s. She first took him to the bustling metropolitan heart of the town, where painstaking effort had been made to ensure that anything a consumer of any wealth bracket could desire—within the limits of mid-Rim technology—was available. Everything from basic toiletries to interstellar starships and more besides. Swords, guns of ballistic, plasma, and beam varieties, air cars, personal shuttles, and even things as mundane as hydroponic vegetables.

  The first thing Arthur noticed was how easily Circe was recognized.

  Even among the crowd she stood a head above most of the people in the streets and within the shops, and in the rare instances she didn’t, it was usually either off-worlders or the rare native with clear gene enhancement at play.

  The second thing he noticed was the keen interest people paid to him.

  At multiple points during their outing, the heiress quite literally dragged him around to look at things, or playfully shoved him into shops or entertainment venues, all with the comfort of two people that had known each other for years.

  It did not go unnoticed by passersby, all of whom seemed to recognize the tall, strong, and beautiful Leos Heiress on sight. The looks he received were equal parts curious, suspicious, scandalized, envious, and even jealous at some points. Men and women, young, adult, or elderly, and even some AI—none of them were exceptions. They looked at him, the tall blond stranger with the gene-enhanced features and martial bearing, and they wondered.

  He only held their attention for so long, however.

  It was nothing compared to how they reacted to Circe.

  She was, in Arthur’s assessment, utterly beloved.

  More than one person every so often stopped to request a photo with her, or to shake her hand, or simply offer her good fortune and the gods’ blessings. Some pleaded with her to bless their children, or offer up a small prayer for an unwell loved one, or simply look at some manner of tribute they’d made for House Leos, or for Circe specifically.

  And yet through it all, nobody ever violated her space. Nobody ever acted entitled to her time, or her attention, or her presence. They treated her with respect, with adoration, with reverence. There was an almost sacrosanct manner to how the people of Pallikári, in their many and myriad forms, reacted to the presence of their heiress—their princess among them.

  Beloved, Arthur considered in the midst of it all, didn’t do the people’s ardor credit.

  From his observation, they seemed to worship her as a goddess made flesh.

  Circe’s psionic aura no doubt played a heavy part in it, but Arthur couldn’t lay the adoration of the masses solely at the feet of the esoteric power Circe had been born with. Psions only enhanced what already existed, and Circe—despite her elite breeding, high station, wealth, and exclusive upbringing—was a princess of the people through and through.

  Throughout it all, he found himself surprised to be having a genuinely enjoyable time. It was something he hadn’t expected, and even with the memories of his time as Zacaris contrasting the ‘backwater’ technologies of Pallikári to places like Camelot or the immense Ecumenopolis City-World of Mars, he found that he enjoyed his time with Circe, Perseus, and Endymion more than he ever had visiting the ‘stellar age wonders’ of the Core.

  Circe, especially, captivated his attention as the hours raced by.

  Be it their psionic densities, their resonance, or simple chemistry—he couldn’t deny that there was an ease to being around Circe. Even his memories of Zacaris failed to bring up a similar instance of such overt and immediate familiarity with another person, resonance or not.

  It wasn’t a romantic kind of ease either, though the back of his mind certainly felt a certain tension with the untitled princess. There was just something easy about spending time with the woman that Arthur could not fully pinpoint.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  It was a mix of many things, in truth.

  It was her general love for life, and the way she would stop to fawn over children, or go out of her way to make room for the elderly, or even pause in the middle of the street to soothe the tempers of aggrieved pedestrians engaged in disagreements.

  All of these things and more comprised the image of a woman who was as sincere as she was headstrong, as kind as she was passionate, and as warm as she was ferocious. Circe Leos was the warrior princess trope he’d read about so often as a boy brought to life. What was more, she embodied it effortlessly. It was impossible not to like her.

  It was impossible not to find himself caught up in her aura, aware of it or not.

  The chemistry between them hardly helped matters, either.

  It was manifested in the subtle palpitations that took hold when she touched his arm, or the faint warmth in his body when she laughed, or the way he could drink in her eyes and smile with no sense of limit to the enjoyment.

  He worked hard to suppress the reactions, knowing they could lead nowhere good.

  Basic attraction, however, was one of the few things the geneticists had not managed to develop a reliable means of controlling. Their legacy allowed mankind to shape itself to appeal to those attractions from culture to culture, be it the willowy and tall preferences of Eurasian peoples, or the more robust and stoic preferences of ethnic Polynesians.

  The examples of varied preferences were as numerous as there were ethnicities and cultures of mankind, and in all cases attraction was a culturally and societally subjective measurement.

  Still basic attraction remained, and all Arthur could do was try to suppress it.

  After the stores, entertainment venues—including a particularly amusing karaoke stop-over—and spending enough drachma that even Perseus commented in amazement at the sheer amount of stuff Circe had insisted on buying; they organized transport for her purchases back to the estate, and finally piled back into the air car.

  The farewell they received, or rather that Circe received, was riotous.

  It was an emotionally charged mix of joy at seeing her, and heartbreak at seeing her depart—and Arthur was reminded once again of the sheer power of psions when interacting with people with little to no notable density of their own.

  When at last the final farewells were given and Circe and Arthur were driving away from the metropolitan heart of Pallikári, he turned to the heiress and quietly observed her while she stared out of the window.

  Her smile was somber while the car moved through the town.

  “You seem melancholy,” he said carefully. “Did you not wish to leave?”

  “No, it’s not that,” Circe denied without looking at him. “Pallikári is thriving, and we are providing for our people’s growth exactly as we should, but with what’s looming…”

  “You’re worried about what will happen if you’re unable to keep ruling them.”

  “Not ruling them,” Circe said immediately and with a frown while turning to him, though her tone wasn’t recriminating—only firmly corrective. “It may be that way on paper, but we don’t rule them. We protect them. We guide their development.”

  She turned back to look out the window, and continued more quietly. “We aren’t their masters, we’re the highest level of public servants there are—and unlike the elected ones that run the day to day affairs of the town, of which there are many; our duty is inherited through the blood. We have a sacred responsibility to Pallikári, and all of Graecia.”

  His memories as Arthur Zacaris almost made him scoff at the sentiment.

  If nothing else, that reaction alone was justification for what Nataliya had done.

  Arthur did not want to be the kind of man that scoffed at noble convictions.

  “You were right,” he admitted while looking out of his window in turn, and thinking over the events of the past few hours.

  His smile, when it came, was genuine. “Today was fun.”

  Circe glanced over at him again, and he caught her grin out of his periphery.

  “Arthur Magellan, did you just admit to having fun?” she asked teasingly.

  “Enjoy it while you can, Circe,” he responded lightly. “It won’t happen again.”

  The heiress laughed warmly and snapped her fingers.

  “Challenge accepted.”

  The drive to the restaurant was a quiet one after that, and Arthur quietly appreciated the views and sights of Pallikári while they drove. With the island having a central elevated plateau and descending land all the way to the sea, the town was built in ‘levels’ ranging out from the undeveloped perimeter of the Leos estate, which also marked the upper limits of the immense island habitation.

  Driving to the beachfront took them ‘downward’ steadily as the car navigated through a respectable amount of evening traffic, though the vast majority of people were either on grav-bikes or driving electric vehicles.

  True to Circe’s words, there were no air cars visible in the sky above Pallikári, and when Arthur did witness sky traffic from the window, a quick tap of the screen doubling as his window zoomed in on a transport shuttle descending toward the main starport built toward the western edge of the island.

  Traffic to and from the spaceport was about the only exception to Circe’s statement, and even then, it was largely limited to back and forth transport flights or the occasional merchant vessel descending through the use of a special license.

  It raised questions about why they would choose Pallikári, and what significance the island held to justify a House as prestigious and ostensibly powerful as Leos remaining there. Logically, they should have sought out land in Sparta generations prior.

  The Ascendancy was one of the oldest Rim nations, after all, with Hyperion having been settled by the dispatched deep-space Ark-class terran colony ships three hundred years prior. Comparatively, the youngest Fringe nations were each five hundred years old, and many of the dominant Verge and Mantle nations were even older at six and seven hundred years old, to say nothing of the oldest nations in the Core.

  Human expansion, for whatever reason, had encountered a notable gap of two hundred years between the colonization of the Fringe and Rim that nobody could provide an adequate explanation for.

  His memories from his life on Albion shed no light, either.

  It was a mystery many had tried to solve, though none had succeeded.

  Given the Grand Imperium’s attitude toward its secrets, the silence was no surprise.

  The worlds in Sol were leagues older than even the oldest extrasolar nations.

  But that was, naturally, to be expected. Mars had already been halfway toward becoming an industrial juggernaut of military production and consumer manufacturing before the first extrasolar colonies had even truly developed.

  The Grand Imperium, and specifically Terra, had unquestioned primacy for a reason.

  Arthur’s thoughts were disturbed by the slowing of their transport, and a warm hand on his arm.

  He turned to find lightly tanned feminine fingers on his bicep, and followed them up to Circe’s smiling face. She was leaning toward him from the other side of the car, and her grip on his arm was like the heat of the sun.

  Arthur worked to fight through the fugue of her psion density, and the intensity of their incredible resonance while it overwhelmed his better sense. He willed himself to focus with every iota of his mental discipline, and smiled at Circe politely in turn.

  “We’ve arrived.” she said warmly. “Follow me, Arthur.”

  “I’ll follow you anywhere.” he said without thinking.

  Circe’s expression flickered, and then she laughed. “Tease.” she said while turning away.

  Arthur could only smile back and, while his Zacaris self mentally snarled at him for being so easily influenced, followed her out of the car into the orange-gold light of the Hellenic dusk.