What felt like an entire day of travel had actually only been two hours.

Not that either Lisandra or Alphonse was complaining. They were both too busy being quietly, genuinely impressed, because Amael hadn’t slowed down once. Not a single reduction in pace, not a moment of breathing, not the slightest indication that carrying two full-grown women across an ocean at that speed was costing him anything at all. He moved through the sky with the same unhurried ease as someone taking a morning stroll.

Well. He was the son of a Guardian God.

This might be the minimum expected from someone like him along defeating a Guardian Spirit.

Somewhere over the open ocean, Lisandra had quietly abandoned her pride.

It had happened gradually, the motion of flight, the warmth of being held securely, strong and reassuring chest until her grip had shifted from avoiding contact to genuinely holding on, her fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt. Then her head had dropped slightly. Then her eye had closed.

Then she was simply asleep, tucked against his chest with her expression completely unguarded for the first time since he’d known her,.

Alphonse remained awake the entire time, arms still looped comfortably around his neck, watching the world pass below with quiet attention. The ocean stretched in every direction, vast and featureless and strange in its scale, so different from the landlocked kingdoms she’d spent her entire life navigating.

Then, without any announcement or visible landmark to explain why, Amael simply stopped.

They hovered in the middle of open ocean. Nothing but sky and sea and the sound of wind surrounding.

"Are you lost?" Alphonse asked.

"Why would I be?" Amael replied.

His silver eyes moved across the surrounding air, reading something that wasn’t visible, checking something maybe. Then, without explanation, the arm that had been supporting Lisandra’s legs shifted.

The change in position reached Lisandra before consciousness did. Her eyes opened, bleary, confused—and found a face approximately one inch from hers.

She went completely rigid.

Amael had pulled her up into a closer hold, her body against his chest rather than draped across his arms, her face now at level with his. He was looking not at her but at his own right hand, which he’d freed.

Lisandra stared at the inch of air between their faces and forgot, temporarily, how to produce words.

Above his outstretched palm, something began to form.

A pentagon of deep, luminous red materialized in the air, rotating slowly. Both women instinctively read it as a mana circle, because that was the category their minds reached for first.

But it wasn’t. The symbols were too unique, too layered, written in a language they couldn’t read.

Whatever it was, it was significantly more than mana.

The circle swirled, picked up speed, and then—

The world simply shifted.

Not gradually. Not with any transition. Between one blink and the next, the open ocean vanished entirely and they were hovering above land, a massive, sprawling island that had not been there a moment ago.

"What the—" Lisandra’s voice came out involuntary, her eyes going wide as she looked down.

Below them was nothing like any civilized territory. No roads, no settlements, no cleared land or cultivated fields or any of the usual signatures of habitation. Just a forest, dense, layered forest that stretched in every direction to the island’s edges.

The sounds that drifted up were not the sounds of any settled place: low, resonant growls that carried across impossible distances, howls that had no clean beasts equivalent, the wingbeats of enormous birds passing through the air around them at eye level without any apparent concern for the humans now sharing their altitude.

One of those birds, vast, with a wingspan that put it in a different category from anything Lisandra had encountered in her considerable experience, passed close enough that she could see each feathers. She tracked it with her eye until it disappeared into the clouds.

"What is this place?" Alphonse asked dumbfounded. She was looking at everything at once, her sapphire eyes moving from the forest to the birds to the glimpsed shapes of mana beasts below that were, by any reasonable measurement, too large from what she had ever faced. Some of them were taller than the trees they moved through.

"Hold on a little longer," Amael said, and launched forward again, even faster.

Ahead, the largest peak rose above everything else. Amael aimed for it without hesitation, and for a few seconds both women were certain he was about to fly directly into solid rock—

Then they saw it. Not a natural formation or at least, not entirely. A hollow carved into the mountain face at altitude, set back enough to be invisible from any angle that wasn’t directly in front of it, accessible only from the air.

Amael slowed and landed with ease on the stone shelf at its entrance.

He set Lisandra down, his arms releasing her.

She took an immediate step backward and stood there for a moment not looking at him. Being held like that, that close, for that long, by a man....it had never happened before.

"You can get down too," Amael said, to Alphonse still at his back.

Alphonse unwrapped her arms from his neck and stepped down.

The space they’d landed in was larger than the entrance suggested, a broad, high-ceilinged hollow that went back into the mountain farther than the exterior implied. It was sparse but not neglected. A straw bed occupied one area, some clothes were folded or laid nearby, and the general arrangement had the lived-in quality of somewhere that was genuinely used rather than merely stored. Clean, organized in its own way.

"What is this place?" Lisandra asked, turning on the spot, taking stock of the dimensions.

But Alphonse wasn’t looking at the interior at all. She had drifted to the edge of the entrance, where the hollow opened to the outside, and was standing there looking out at what the elevation revealed.

From up here the island unfolded completely—the full, scale of it, green and wild from edge to edge, the forest canopy moving in slow waves when the wind caught it, enormous birds tracing lazy arcs through the lower sky, mana beasts visible even from this height as dark shapes moving through the trees below. The horizon curved. The light was extraordinary.

Amael came to stand beside her. Lisandra drifted over a moment later, drawn by whatever was on their faces, and went still when she saw it for herself.

"An island hidden from most," Amael said with a smile. "An island of peace."

No matter how many times he came here, he would never get enough of it.

"A Khaos Princess found this place," he continued then, more quietly. "Thousands of years ago. She hid it, from everyone, from every power and Gods that might have reached out and came to her."

"Khaos Princess?" Lisandra glanced at him.

Alphonse turned slightly as well, curious.

Amael didn’t elaborate on the title, filed it past them as something that would take longer to explain than the moment called for, and continued.

"She wanted freedom more than anything else in the world," he said. "Not comfort or power or recognition, just freedom. She resented duties and obligations and the entire machinery of Eden’s rule, the way it reached into everything and assigned every person a purpose they hadn’t chosen." His silver eyes stayed on the horizon. "So she came here. She built her own world at the edge of the known one, among the only company she actually trusted—her beasts. The ones who didn’t want anything from her except her presence."

"She sounds like someone I would have liked," Alphonse said quietly, after a moment.

"I would have liked as well," Amael added.

"You don’t know her?" Lisandra asked, turning to look at him with open surprise. Given the way he’d spoken about her she’d simply assumed he knew her.

"She died long before I was born," Amael said.

Both women went quiet for a bit.

"Did they find this place?" Alphonse asked after a moment. She didn’t specify who they were, she wasn’t entirely sure herself but they doubted she just died of natural causes.

"If they had," Amael said, letting out a short laugh, "this place would look considerably less peaceful than it does." He paused, his eyes on the forest below. "I don’t know exactly what happened to her. Only that at some point she must have stepped outside, left the protection of this place for whatever reason and something found her out there. The island itself was never touched."

"If not even Gods could find this place," Alphonse said, turning toward him puzzled, "how did you find it?"

"Before she died, she entrusted the key and the knowledge of this place to one of her sisters," Amael replied. "I obtained it from her." The corner of his mouth lifted slightly. "Finding this place afterward still took me years. The key tells you it exists and enters. It doesn’t tell you where."

"Why would her sister tell you about it at all?" Lisandra asked, her brow furrowing slightly. "If it was this important, this hidden, why hand it off to you?"

"Who can say what goes on in Princess Merithra’s mind at any given moment," Amael said, sighing. "But if I had to guess, she simply wanted to pass the responsibility to someone who would actually use it. Someone who would be here."

"That seems rather careless," Lisandra said, something almost offended in her voice on behalf. "It was a gift from her sister, wasn’t it? Something that personal, just handed off—"

"It wasn’t exactly a gift," Amael said. "And Enigma’s wish was never really about ownership. She wanted this place to survive, for the island to remain hidden, for the beasts to be left in peace. She didn’t much care who carried that responsibility forward. Only that someone did."

"And now that someone is you," Alphonse said.

"Yeah." He nodded briefly.

"But what exactly is there to tend to?" Lisandra asked, genuinely confused now, scanning the vast, untouched wilderness below. "It’s already hidden. The beasts seem to be managing themselves well enough. Can’t you simply... leave it alone and let them live?"

Amael shook his head slowly.

"Enigma didn’t hide this island only because she wanted privacy," he said. "She hid it because she understood what would happen if anyone with the wrong intentions found it." He paused. "These aren’t ordinary beasts. Some of them are old enough and powerful enough that they’d be considered weapons by anyone looking to use them. Eden’s people. Opposing forces. Anyone building toward a war." His silver eyes moved across the distant treeline. "She kept them safe by keeping the island invisible. That protection doesn’t maintain itself, it needs someone here."

"So you’re a guardian," Alphonse said raising a brow.

"Something like that." He glanced between them and smiled. "Though as of today, I won’t be handling it alone."

Lisandra stared at him for a beat, then slowly crossed her arms. "You are just offloading your responsibilities onto us."

"What I’m doing," Amael said, entirely unruffled, leaning back against the rocky wall with his eyes returning to the view, "is offering you the single best hiding place in the known world. Hidden from every Gods, every kingdom, every person who might have reason to look for you. You can rest here." He tilted his head slightly then. "Of course, if you’d prefer to leave, that option exists whenever you want it. But you won’t find better anywhere else."

"And you?" Alphonse asked him. "Are you going back to Celesta now?"

"No." He shook his head. "I’ll stay here for now. But I can’t make it permanent, I need to show my face in the outside world occasionally, otherwise my paranoid father will actually start looking for me. And if he looks hard enough, long enough, there’s always the small chance he stumbles onto something he shouldn’t."

He knew the place was well hidden and safe but he didn’t wish to take any risks in losing it.

"So that’s why you never just stayed here forever," Lisandra said, in understanding. "You wanted to."

"It would have been much simpler," Amael acknowledged. "But my situation doesn’t allow for simple."

"So you’re staying with us now?" Lisandra asked him almost hesitantly.

"Planning on about a month, at least," he said.

"A month?" Alphonse raised an eyebrow. "Didn’t you just say your father would worry and start searching if you were gone too long?"

"A month to a God is approximately what a minute is to us," Amael said. "I could stretch it considerably longer if I wanted to. I just have some people I need to see eventually."

"A whole month," Lisandra said, and then the full implication arrived and the color began rising in her face as she looked around. "Together? Here? Sleeping?" She looked at the single straw bed and her voice climbed slightly. "On that?"

"Together," Amael nodded, his expression serious, maybe too serious. "One bed. We press together for warmth, it gets cold at altitude during the night. Body heat is the best solution."

"L—Like absolute hell it is!" Lisandra’s voice cracked on the last word, her face now thoroughly, completely red from the neck up.

"Then build your own," Amael said, extending one arm toward the vast wilderness spread below the entrance. "Plenty of materials down there. Though I should mention—" And here the faintest ghost of a smile appeared— "It isn’t exactly a normal forest. But I’m sure two former Demigod rulers of warring kingdoms can manage."

Lisandra’s chin went up immediately, all embarrassment temporarily overridden by pride. "We absolutely can." She turned to Alphonse. "Come on, Alphonse. We’ll be back up here in twenty minutes with everything we need."

"I don’t mind the shared bed, Lisa," Alphonse said, with a small sigh though she stepped forward and dropped off the entrance ledge after Lisandra.

"You are a woman now, Alphonse! Drop the act already, you aren’t in Celesta anymore" Lisandra’s voice floated back up from below. "Start acting like it means something! I will need to teach you what being a woman is!"

"I doubt you can do help me about that..."

"What does that mean?!"

Amael watched them descend toward the treeline calmly.

He gave it twenty minutes, generously.

They’d be back before that, wearing expressions he was looking forward to seeing.

An island built by a Khaos Princess could never be ’ordinary’.