The silence that followed the recognition was almost sacred.
"Sword King Erika..." murmured another of the mages, his voice tinged with respect and relief. "We thought..."
"You thought we were dead?" Erika interrupted with a slight smile, her gaze firm. "Yeah, we started to think that too at one point."
The mages, still kneeling, looked reverently at her and the young man beside her. Kael remained silent, his gaze attentive, almost predatory. His presence - now even denser, sharper - seemed to press down on the air around them, and the most sensitive of the mages felt the hairs on the back of their necks stand on end. He had changed. And a lot.
"By all the gods... you scared us! You shouldn't have sacrificed yourself in that forgotten dungeon, you know." One of the older mages came forward, still on his knees. "We've been tracking unstable magical signals for days... We were close to giving up, thinking they had been consumed by the dimensional distortion..."
