Mira had never seen her captain look so nervous before.
She leaned slightly toward Emilia, keeping her voice low. "Never seen him look like that."
"That's how it is for some, when it comes to addressing a crowd," Emilia replied, her eyes fixed ahead. "Though natural leaders not only find their footing eventually, they surpass every expectation of themselves in the process." A small smile touched her lips. "Watch."
Asta stood at the forefront of the podium, facing the gathered crowd spread out before them.
The mages of Terbisia.
Today was the day he was to introduce himself as their new Baron. Luxanna stood at his side, composed and steady. Behind them by a few feet stood Mira, Emilia, and Shyvana.
"You think Asta's a natural leader?" Mira said, grinning despite herself. "I think so too."
Emilia reached over and ruffled her hair. "I was under the impression your eye had already settled on Darryl. Which is it then? Younger men, or older?"
Mira went red immediately. "That's not... of course I like Darryl. He's the coolest person I know. Even blind, he still fought for us. And won." She fidgeted with the hem of her sleeve. "The Captain's different. I want to say he's like an older brother, but it's more than that too. The way he always knows what to say. The way he checks on all of us, like it actually matters to him." She paused. "Like the dad I never had."
"He is scarcely old enough to be anyone's father," Emilia said, dry but not unkind.
"I know that." Mira pouted. "That's why I said brother too." She glanced sideways at Emilia. "What about you though? You like him, don't you?"
Emilia raised an eyebrow. "And what leads you to that conclusion?"
Mira folded her arms. "Don't bother denying it. I see the way you watch him. You think you're being subtle." She lifted her chin slightly, proud. "But I've learned to sense Ki now. You like the Captain."
Emilia was quiet for a moment.
Not the kind of quiet that meant she was caught off guard. Mira had learned the difference by now. This was the kind of quiet that meant Emilia was deciding exactly how much she wanted to give away.
"Observing someone," Emilia said at last, "is not the same as liking them."
"You observe everyone," Mira said. "But you don't watch everyone the way you watch him."
Emilia said nothing to that.
Mira counted that as a victory and turned back toward the podium.
Asta had stepped forward. The crowd had grown still, the low murmur of voices fading as he raised his head and looked out at them. He wasn't smiling yet.
Then he exhaled once. And something in his posture shifted.
"My name is Asta," he began, his voice carrying clearly across the square. "Just Asta. I'm not from Demacia. I'm not a noble, and I'm definitely not someone who ever thought he'd be standing in front of a crowd like this, being called a Baron." He paused. "Honestly, the whole thing still feels a little insane to me."
A ripple moved through the crowd. Not quite laughter. Something closer to relief.
"But I'm here," Asta continued. "And as long as I'm here, I'll tell you exactly what I told the council of Demacia when they first asked me what I wanted." His eyes swept the gathered mages, unhurried, landing on no one in particular and somehow everyone at once. "I don't want anything from you. I'm not here to use you or to make myself look good or to add your names to some list that benefits me later."
He let that sit for a moment.
"I'm here because no one should be hunted for something they were born with. And if Terbisia is a place where mages can live without fear, then I want to make sure it stays that way. Whatever that costs me."
The square was very quiet.
Mira felt something tighten in her chest. She had heard him say things like this before, in smaller rooms, to her, to smaller groups of people. It never got less affecting.
Luxanna began to speak next, taking her place beside Asta with the composed grace of someone who had grown up in front of crowds. Her voice was warm and certain, filling the spaces his plainness had left behind, giving shape to the politics and the promises and the formal assurances that a gathering like this required.
Asta stepped back half a pace and let her.
"He does that," Mira murmured, more to herself than anyone.
"Does what?" Shyvana asked from just behind her, arms folded.
"Steps back. When someone else can do something better than him, he just... lets them." Mira watched him. "He never makes it a big thing."
Shyvana was quiet for a moment. "I never noticed."
Mira glanced back at Emilia.
Emilia was watching Asta.
And she wasn't even pretending otherwise anymore.
---
The courtroom Luxanna had chosen for their meeting was more library than chamber.
Or it had been, before the earthquake.
Shelves that had once lined the walls from floor to ceiling now leaned at angles that suggested they had given up rather than collapsed. Books were stacked in uneven towers across the long central table, some of them water damaged at the edges, others simply displaced and never returned to their proper places. Two of the tall windows had lost their glass entirely, and the afternoon light came through them clean and unfiltered, illuminating the dust that still hadn't fully settled weeks later.
Mira had offered to fix it with her magic the first time she saw it.
Luxanna had smiled and said she rather liked it this way. That it felt lived in.
Mira had decided then that she liked Luxanna very much.
She sat now at the end of the long table, her pumpkin staff resting against her knee, watching as Asta dropped into a chair across from Emilia with the particular kind of exhaustion that came not from physical effort but from standing in front of hundreds of people and trying to mean every word.
Shyvana took the chair beside the open window, arms folded, and said nothing. She had been quieter than usual since the ceremony. Not unhappy. Must be perks of being a soldier.
Luxanna settled into the chair at the head of the table, her hands folded neatly in front of her. Even in a broken down library with half its shelves tilted sideways she managed to look composed.
"Well," she said. "You survived."
"Barely," Asta said.
"You were fine," Emilia said, without looking up from the small journal she had produced from somewhere. "You were nervous for approximately the first four sentences and then you forgot to be."
Asta looked at her. "That's not reassuring."
"It wasn't meant to be. It was an observation."
Mira hid her smile behind her sleeve.
Asta leaned back in his chair and looked up at the cracked ceiling for a moment. Then he straightened and looked around the room, properly, the way he did when something had shifted in his thinking and he was catching up to it.
"We need to fix this place," he said.
"The library?" Luxanna asked.
"The whole city." He gestured broadly at the walls around them, at the uneven shelves, at the window frames with no glass. "Not just this building. All of it. I walked through three streets on the way here and two of them still have damage from the earthquake that nobody's touched." He paused. "That's not acceptable."
Luxanna's expression didn't change but something in it softened slightly. "Resources have been... limited. The restoration efforts were concentrated on the areas with the most foot traffic. The rest was simply further down the list."
"Move it up the list then." Asta said it simply, without accusation. "I'm not criticising what you did before. You managed this city through a crisis with whatever you had available. But things are different now." He rested his forearms on the table. "Who do we talk to about getting the work started properly?"
Luxanna considered for a moment. "The city has its own craftsmen of course, and they are more than capable. But for something at this scale, for all of Terbisia and done well, you would want someone with the infrastructure to support it."
"The Durand family."
Everyone looked at Shyvana.
She unfolded her arms and leaned forward slightly. "They have already sent a number of their craftsmen here. They arrived shortly after the Harrowing, when news spread of what had happened in Terbisia." She paused. "I spoke with two of them during the ceremony. They are already coordinating with the local builders. They came prepared."
"They came before anyone asked them to?" Asta said.
"Yes."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded once, the way he did when something settled correctly in his mind. "I want to meet them."
"I can arrange it," Luxanna said. She made a small note on the paper in front of her, precise and neat. "Is there anything else before we move on?"
Asta was quiet for a beat longer than usual.
Mira recognized that quiet. It was the one that meant he had been thinking about something for a while and had finally decided to say it out loud.
"I don't want to change the way you've been running this city," he said, looking at Luxanna directly. "You know these people. You know what they've been through. I'm not going to walk in here and tell you that everything you've built needs to be different." He paused. "But I do want to change how the rest of Demacia sees this place. And the people in it."
Luxanna met his gaze steadily. "Go on."
"Where I come from," Asta said, "magic isn't something people hide. It's something they use. To protect people. To serve their kingdom." He leaned forward slightly. "There's a system. Magic Knights. Organized squads, each one with a captain, each one answerable to the crown. They compete, they train, they go on missions. And the best of them are celebrated. Not feared."
The library was quiet except for the wind coming through the empty window frames.
"You want to build something like that here," Luxanna said. It wasn't quite a question.
"Not just here," Asta said. "Here first. But the point isn't Terbisia. The point is what Terbisia becomes. If people in Demacia see mages protecting towns, responding to crises, doing the work that knights do, it's harder to call them monsters." His jaw tightened slightly. "It doesn't fix everything. I know that. But it changes the conversation."
Luxanna was silent for a long moment.
Mira watched her. She was doing the thing that composed people did when they were genuinely moved but had too much dignity to show it plainly. A very slight stillness. A careful breath.
"The Magic Knights," Luxanna said quietly.
"It worked where I'm from," Asta said. "Took time. But it worked."
Emilia had stopped writing in her journal.
Mira noticed but said nothing.
"There will be resistance," Luxanna said.
"I know."
"There are those in Demacia, even now, even after everything, who will see an organized body of mages not as protection but as a threat."
"I know that too." Asta's voice didn't waver. "But they already see mages as a threat. At least this way the mages have somewhere to stand."
Another silence.
Then Luxanna unfolded her hands and set them flat on the table. "The name needs work though."
Asta looked baffled. "Wha... The Magic Knights is an amazing name. Back home, whenever someone heard of the Magic Knights, there was always joy and respect in their eyes."
"But that is only what it is called in your homeland," Emilia said, the faint curve of a smirk at her lips. "Demacia is far more different from where you come from. Fundamentally different, even."
"You would also do well to consider the weight of the title itself," Shyvana added, her arms still folded. "Knight is not something freely given here. Even I am called a guard rather than a knight, and the Dragon Guard are, in every practical sense, the same as any knight order in this kingdom."
Asta looked around the table at them.
Then his face fell.
"I really have to change the name?" He looked genuinely crestfallen. "Aww man.
Luxanna pressed her lips together in the way Mira had come to recognise as her version of trying not to smile.
"The concept itself is sound," she said carefully. "It is only the name that requires some thought."
"The concept and the name are the same thing," Asta said, with the tone of a man who had just been told his favourite sword needed a different handle.
"They are not," Emilia said.
"They feel the same."
"That is because you named it."
Mira did not bother hiding her smile this time.
Asta leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms, staring at the cracked ceiling as though it might offer him something useful. The afternoon light coming through the empty window frames caught the side of his face and for a moment he just looked tired.
"Alright," he said finally. "What would work here?"
The question opened the room up. Luxanna reached for her quill. Shyvana unfolded her arms for the first time since she had sat down.
"It would need to carry weight," Shyvana said. "Something that sounds like it belongs here. Like it was built for Demacia rather than brought into it."
"Something that doesn't lead with magic," Luxanna added, turning her quill slowly between her fingers. "Not because magic is something to be ashamed of. But because if the name begins there, that is where people will stop listening."
Asta frowned. "So we hide what we are?"
"No," Luxanna said. "We lead with what we do."
That landed differently. Mira could see it in the way Asta's frown shifted, the resistance in it giving way to something more considered.
"We protect people," he said.
"Yes."
"We serve."
"Yes."
He was quiet for a moment. "Back home the squads all had names too. The Black Bulls. The Golden Dawn. The Crimson Lion." A corner of his mouth turned up slightly. "Yami always said the name didn't matter as long as the people carrying it were worth something. But he also chose the worst possible name on purpose just to make a point."
"Sounds like him," Emilia said.
Asta looked at her sideways. "You've never met him."
"No," Emilia agreed, returning to her journal. "And yet."
Mira stored that exchange away quietly.
"What about Demacian Mage Guard?" Asta asked.
Emilia raised an eyebrow. "To guard against mages?"
"What, no." Asta replied.
"That's what it sounded like." Luxxana sighed. "And Vanguard might seem a bit too pretentious."
"Why not just call them the Demacian Mages," Shyvana said.
Everyone looked at her.
She met their eyes without particular expression. "It is simple. It says what they are. It carries no assumption about what kind of power they use."
Asta turned the words over visibly, the way he did when he was testing the weight of something. "Demacian Mages," he repeated.
"It has precedent in simplicity," Luxanna said, warming to it. "Demacians understand corps and orders. It would not sound foreign to them."
"It doesn't sound foreign to me either," Asta said slowly.
He said it like that surprised him slightly.
Another short silence settled over the table, more comfortable than the ones before it. Outside, the wind moved through the empty window frames and somewhere further into the city came the distant sound of hammering. The Durand craftsmen already at work, Mira supposed.
"Demacian Mages," Asta said again, quieter this time.
Then he looked up. "Each squad still gets its own name though. I'm keeping that."
"Naturally," Emilia said, without looking up.
"I'm serious."
"I know. That is why I said naturally."
Luxanna set her quill down and folded her hands. "Then it is decided." She looked at Asta with an expression that was composed and warm in equal measure. "The Demacian Mages of Terbisia."
Asta nodded once.
Then he looked around the broken library, at the tilted shelves and the water damaged books and the light coming in through windows that had no glass. "Alright then. I guess the next step on the agenda is you guys."
"Us?" Mira asked, a little surprised.
Asta nodded. "Shyvana's gotten pretty strong, so it's not exactly necessary for her, but the rest of you need to get significantly stronger. After all, it's you guys who'll be leading the squads."
He looked at Luxanna. "And I need to know what you're capable of as a mage. Light magic is no joke and I have high expectations."
Luxanna's eyes lit up with quiet intensity. "I'll gladly meet them."
Emilia raised an eyebrow. "When you say the rest of us."
"I mean the rest of you," Asta said simply. "You especially haven't gotten any closer to becoming the vice captain of the Black Bulls. Shyvana's pulled ahead of you by a wide margin."
"I see." She closed her journal.
Mira felt something cold and excited move through her chest simultaneously. She had sparred with Asta before. Lightly. The kind of sessions where he was clearly holding back so much that it barely counted.
She wasn't sure if she was ready. She was absolutely certain she wanted it anyway.
"What about Darryl?" she asked.
"When he gets back." Asta's expression shifted slightly at the name. Just briefly. "He'll get his own session. I'm willing to bet he gets way stronger too."
Luxanna had been listening with her hands folded, that composed stillness she carried so naturally. But her eyes had not left Asta since he mentioned light magic. There was something in them that Mira recognised because she had felt it herself once, standing in front of her first real opponent.
The particular hunger of someone who had spent a long time being careful and was being offered, for the first time, permission not to be.
"Tomorrow then," Luxanna said.
"Tomorrow," Asta confirmed.
He looked around the table one more time. At Luxanna with her careful composure and her burning eyes. At Shyvana steady and watchful by the window. At Emilia who had opened her journal again but was no longer writing in it.
Then at Mira.
"You good?" he asked.
Mira straightened slightly. "Yes, Captain."
He studied her for a second the way he sometimes did, like he was reading something just beneath the surface of what she'd said. Then he nodded once, satisfied with whatever he found there, and pushed back his chair.
"Good," he said. "Get some rest. All of you."
He stood, stretched once with the complete lack of self consciousness that was entirely specific to him, and walked toward the door.
He paused at the threshold.
"Oh, and Luxanna."
She looked up.
"Don't hold back tomorrow." A corner of his mouth turned up slightly. "I mean it."
Luxanna held his gaze for a moment. Then she smiled, small and certain and entirely unguarded in a way that Mira suspected very few people had ever seen from her.
"I wouldn't dream of it," she said.
Asta left.
The library settled into the particular quiet that followed him whenever he walked out of a room. Mira had noticed it before. The air felt slightly lighter after he was gone.
Across the table Emilia closed her journal with a soft, deliberate sound.
Mira looked at her.
Emilia did not look back. But the tips of her fingers rested on the cover of the journal for just a moment longer than necessary before she stood and smoothed her coat and walked out without a word.
Mira watched her go.
Then she looked at Shyvana, who was still by the window, watching the city below with that unreadable expression she wore when she was thinking about something she hadn't decided how to feel about yet.
"Are you nervous?" Mira asked her.
Shyvana was quiet for a moment.
"No," she said.
Mira nodded slowly. "Me neither."
They were both lying, and both of them knew it, and neither of them said so.