Before he could take a step toward the door, Jafeila intercepted him.
Her arms and bushy tail coiled around him. She pulled his head down and crushed her lips against his.
He reciprocated instinctively, his tongue slipping inside her mouth and eliciting a moan from her.
When she pulled away, she had a grin on her face. "I'll see you in a little bit," she said impishly.
August left his bedroom.
The halls were dimly lit. Only one out of every three lamps were on, a measure to save magical energy when nobody was around.
The moment he stepped into the hall, every lamp lit up as motion-detecting magic sensed his movement.
"Bastion, good morning," a woman greeted August.
She stood next to the door in full plate armor, a longsword at her side and a tower shield strapped to her back.
"How long have you been standing guard, Ciana?" August responded.
He glanced around the hall. Had she been standing perfectly still? He couldn't imagine how else she had avoided activating the lights.
Ciana was a curious woman. Only slightly younger than August, she had served as a Champion under several Bastions until he finally recruited her.
She had platinum-blonde hair and a fine silken horse's tail. A pair of diamonds shined from within the gorget of her armor.
A single iridescent horn protruded from her forehead, parting her platinum bangs and marking her as one of the rarest of the beastkin: a unicorn beastkin.
Neither Ciana nor Jafeila were human, like August was.
They were beastkin, a race with animal-like features such as ears and tails.
Their appearance varied significantly based on the region their race originally came from.
Many beastkin races had been lost to history over the centuries.
Ciana's race of unicorns were so close to extinction that August had never seen another in his thirty-plus years.
"Sen and I changed shifts four hours ago. Sunstorm was to guard you during the day, but it appears you have work to do early in the morning," Ciana said. "The scouting team—"
"I saw their report last night. I'm heading to the monitoring station now," August interrupted.
Ciana followed behind August as he walked through the empty stone hallways.
The fortress was sprawling, but Falmir had long stopped supplying enough soldiers and staff to keep the place full.
August's power as Bastion kept the fortress running regardless of how many people were present.
A half-dozen men and women sat at glowing desks in the monitoring station.
Holographic charts and figures hovered above the occupied desks.
Another twenty or so desks were unoccupied and unlit.
The far wall was lit up with more charts and figures, and formed a central monitor for August and everybody in the room to use as an overview.
A pair of statues stood in the far corners, depicting the Watcher Omria, the only goddess of the world.
August froze as he entered the room, his eyes running over the central display.
Ciana's hand closed around his arm. She looked up at him in concern.
"Bastion, you're here early," an analyst said, noticing August's arrival.
"Have you seen—"
"Have you confirmed the scouting report?" August interrupted.
He strode forward into the center of the room. Everybody stopped what they were doing and looked at him.
Looking around at their faces, he realized they didn't understand what they had given him last night or what they were looking at.
"Well, all night we've been—" the lead analyst began to say, but stopped when August looked at her.
She gulped. "No, sir. None of our readings match what the scouts reported about the portal.
Monitoring devices installed next to the portal, scanners in the walls, and even the leyline activity readings built into the fortress are all at normal levels.
The sorcerers can't detect anything out of the ordinary either."
August nodded slowly. "You've re-calibrated everything?"
The lead analyst paused and looked to her subordinates. They nodded.
"Yes, sir. At least what we can. We don't doubt the scouts, but…"
"Do the calibration again. Tell Captain Murdas to send out a different team of scouts.
I'll check the binding stone and see what I can read from the fortress and leylines directly," August ordered.
Nothing happened for several long seconds.
August sighed. "We need to confirm if the scout report is correct.
If it is, then I know what is happening and can take the appropriate countermeasures," August explained, looking each of his analysts in the eye one by one.
"If it's wrong, then we can all get some sleep and laugh this off as a false alarm. Understood?"
"Yes, sir," the analysts said in unison.
While the analysts got back to work and several left the room to contact others in the fortress, August turned inward.
Lurking beneath the surface of August's mind was a gargantuan presence.
It seemed to grow in size as he turned his attention to it, threatening to consume his mind.
With long practice, he dove into it—mentally, that is.
What had appeared to be a singular, all-consuming entity revealed itself to be a sprawling mass of mental nodes and magical links.
August followed a mental tether to the closest node. This was the binding stone of this fortress.
Nobody knew who created the binding stones.
They littered the world of Doumahr like discarded relics of an ancient race, but even the oldest records of the First Peoples stated that they were here before them.
What August knew was that Bastions trained themselves to control binding stones, and through them, they controlled the world around themselves.
Through the fortress's binding stone he sensed the world around the binding stone in impossible detail: the temperature of the earth; the heartbeats of every person inside the fortress; the flow of magical energy through the leylines connected to the binding stone.
Time passed at a fraction of the rate it did normally. August watched Ciana blink in slow motion.
Her brow was furrowed, her worried expression cute despite the circumstances.
She still held onto his arm. He couldn't feel her grip.
That was the price of focusing his senses through the binding stone. He lost access to his body's senses for the duration.
Fortunately, he normally only used the binding stone for brief periods and the time dilation effect prevented him from coming to harm or missing anything important.
August pulled away from the fortress's binding stone, and the web of leylines and other binding stones under his control.
Only seconds had passed in the world around him. He looked around.
"August?" Ciana asked quietly.
He ruffled her hair, his hands tickling her pointed horse ears. She gave him a flat look.
While August liked playing with the hair of his Champions, and especially tickling the animal ears of the beastkin, many of them expressed a preference for him not to ruffle their hair.
Naturally, he did it anyway. "I can't sense anything through the binding stone," he said.
"But I expected that. There's… something off about it."
"Off?" she asked.
"Do you ever get that feeling of 'too normal?'" he asked.
"Sometimes. Is that what this is?"
"Probably."
August took a seat. The desk lit up with fancy holographic diagrams, but he ignored it.
Only the return of another scouting team could confirm or allay his fears. Ciana stood next to him.
Almost an hour later, Jafeila entered with two other Champions. All three women had a trio of gems inset into their collarbone.
These were August's trigem Champions. His greatest warriors.