Luca and his older Stavros sit in the mundane holiday house Stavros has commandeered to plan out what they’re going to do.

“List all the people you think would be open to communication,” Stavros says.

And that’s a complicated question.

Luca honestly didn’t care what happened at first, not in that numb state after being first shipped off to the school at fourteen.

Haochen Xia wasn’t even the one who found him when his magic was blocked – it was a group of anti-mage extremists that tried to kill him. That did kill his mum, and ma went mad from it, though she was already halfway there. His ma always hated him anyway, and really it wasn’t a surprise when ma tried to kill Luca too for cursing them with his mere presence.

But then Luca met the grimoire pretending to be a student, sent to keep tabs on the heritage heirs in the school, and genuinely thought he had a friend. Felt he could tell Wei Zhang anything, that maybe things were going to be okay because Luca wasn’t alone anymore in this new world, his whole self-identity rewritten because he’s a mage and he had biological parents who fought in a war and people take one look at his face and call him by his dad’s name.

Until Wei tried to steal his soul, where his magical core is.

And then it was for revenge, pure and simple. Haochen came after him when the grimoire was destroyed - when Luca absorbed it, devoured its soul and its magic and learned just what kind of Dark magic the high mage was capable of.

(When Luca realised what kind of horrors he himself was capable of if pushed, he swore to be better, and set himself on the straight and narrow.)

Luca would dodge attempts at murder from the borderline insane high mage and threw himself into any opportunity to interrupt Haochen’s plans because he was angry. He was vengeful, playing at being a hero. He met the other high mages through things like international Loops games and winning duelling tournaments. Luca hated all of them.

He met Stavros as he snuck into an anti-mage underground facility, trying to find a friend who had been kidnapped, but instead he found Stavros in a coma as they pulled the magic from him to power weapons. Luca saved dozens of mages that day, but nothing was done about it because a high mage was backing the ‘research’.

(Luca killed high mages, almost as much as Haochen Xia did by the end.)

Stavros didn’t rest until they found Rafael, who had madness in him from years alone with the wolf screaming in his head, locked away in what people called a reform centre but was really an easy way to harvest creature parts for sale. Stavros and Luca were getting through to him when a high mage released all the cages and they became trapped with feral creatures banging at the doors. Rafael pressed the kill switch on all of the collars -his own still unable to be broken off- and he considered it a mercy killing.

Luca made friends with the lost, the stepped-on, and the outcast. He pretended he was their champion, their hero, and they praised him, reassured him when things didn’t go well and told him it was going to be okay.

Luca didn’t want any of it, none of it, he didn’t want to lead them but they looked at him like he was meant to be doing something and Luca just wanted a quiet life - because now he had Stavros and they could be happy living as a family, but people wanted him to step up and what else could Luca do, eighteen and lost?

It was an all-out war by then. He dropped out of school to fight. Stavros was lost trying to protect Luca. People died, people always die. The floating island almost fell. The high mages toppled one by one. Haochen rose to the peak without any resistance because of his soul sweeper machine -built off the anti-mage technology- and left empty shells of people as he only grew stronger.

Luca devoured the rest of Haochen Xia’s soul and the immense power burned him alive from the inside.

He woke up though, stumbled, fell, and got back to his feet because that’s what he’d always done, what else could he do? He figured out what year it was pretty quickly but didn’t know Stavros’ house when the man was young, didn’t know Rafael’s, wouldn’t dare go to someone he didn’t trust explicitly with himself so injured and confused.

Luca only knew where dad lived because Stavros would talk about it so often, showed him the manor once, just rubble like something imploded from under the floorboards.

Luca had died earlier that day, had seen his friends die - and then he sees his dad with such immediate love and easy acceptance, meets his grandparents for the first time and they’re so happy to see him. They fix his injuries and get him a warm meal.

Nicholas tells him immediately what the situation is, like Luca hasn’t had to beg and plead and threaten to get even the most insignificant details because for all that people rallied around him, he was only a figurehead, and everyone knew it.

Is it any wonder why he’s so enchanted with his dad?

“No one?” Stavros asks worriedly when Luca spends too long silent, struggling to list all the people he thinks would be open to communication.

“There are people,” Luca admits. “The guardian in the beacon tower of the island, some…others.”

“There were more, right?” Stavros tries. “We had an entire militia doing all-out guerrilla warfare.”

“We had foot soldiers that followed someone else’s orders, who had thrown their lot in with me,” Luca corrects. “We had people who needed time to be convinced, who changed sides to ours, who saw what was wrong after it was shoved into their faces. There…isn’t a single person who I can walk up to right now, explain what’s happening, and get immediate help from.”

Stavros sighs, sitting back and dragging a hand down his face.

“I don’t need anyone else anyway, not when I have decades to stop this,” Luca huffs. “I can do it myself.”

“We,” Stavros says firmly. “We can do this, Luca. Let’s make a list instead of everything we need to fix and we go down the list by whatever needs to happen first.”

“The anti-mage facilities who had you,” Luca says immediately. “No – no, the creature reform centres. The anti-mage labs haven’t started yet, I don’t think, but the reform centres -Rafael’s- are operating. Take out two people and the rest are staff, easy to round up.”

“One is a high mage and the other is a multimillion-dollar merchant in the public eye,” Stavros points out. Then he smirks, still vicious even when he killed them once already for Rafael. “It’ll at least take me a few days.”

Luca laughs, because he thinks he should, not because he thinks the situation is funny.

“Ayad is old power,” Stavros says. “Especially Vinaya, with her work, can stall the merchant. The high mage will take planning.”

“I don’t want to put my grandparents in danger,” Luca admits.

“They know how to handle themselves,” Stavros counters. “Just tell them what’s happening with the high mage and they’ll help. Even in small ways if you’re really worried about them staying out of it.”

Luca nods but he’s not agreeing. “I’ll think about it. Right now I want to go after the pieces of Xia’s machine, destroy them first. Then root out the high mages we need to take down.”