It seemed that the gods favored Leo, for the day of his wedding was a beautiful one, despite being very early spring. Birds flew around in the early morning sunlight, most chirping and singing joyfully—although the raucous seagulls spoiled the mood a bit.

From atop the palanquin Leo was sitting on, he could see most of the first district, and even the road leading to Ygg’drasil had been cleared the night before. The elves used flower patterns to signal various holiday spirits, and white flowers were for love in Averia, although Leo had never learned why. So, he was carried on the palanquin by twenty or so people, including his leading dukes and adventuring buddies, through a city street filled with tens of thousands of white flower arrangements on most of the doors, windowsills, and posts that could be seen from the road—but a road that was cleared of traffic and stalls.

But not the elves lining the outer edges of the road. White flowers flew out at the pavilion, thrown by his subjects, who cheered and occasionally called bawdy, if poetic, advice. Quite a few even called stanza’s in High Averian, which Leo thought of as ridiculous dedication.

Although his subjects knew they could be cheeky, as well. Vyrneal Ironbranch raised his stump and called out, “Now you’ll be able to keep doing what you were doing, King!”

Some of the elves around hjm gasped, and others laughed. Leo spared him a wave and a laugh, feeling his own cheeks heating slightly.

Leo was having fun, although this wasn’t exactly what he had in mind when he thought of a marriage ceremony.

But the event was a state function as well. That meant that everything had to be done in a way that the Averian public would understand and approve of—or at least, not be offended by. A ton of planning had gone into it, and it was almost six weeks of waiting after Leo had announced he was ‘tired of waiting.’

The council, including Leo and Lily, had settled on a final ceremony, one that was about eighty percent marriage ritual of Iluvin Eturia and twenty percent what Leo knew from his home world. Although there had been a bit of overlap regardless. Leo might have pushed for more of what he was familiar with, but he didn’t want to upset his people, and introducing a foreign marriage ceremony for the King wasn’t worth the hit to the very high reputation he had with his citizens.

Leo couldn’t deny it was usually good to be King, but occasionally, the sheer hassle got to him.

Fortunately, Lily had leaned into female stereotypes by being crazily excited for nearly every aspect of planning a wedding without also leaning into the stereotype of being upset when minor details went wrong.

Leo darkly assumed that after being stabbed nearly to death multiple times, Lily’s sense of what constituted a disaster had been dramatically recalibrated from the mortal norm.

But whatever the reason, he was glad.

Leo himself had little to do with the planning. He had ridden to war for a good deal of the last six weeks, Val and Feng by his side. It had been a short, sharp war against the tribes. His combination of ghost wolf cavalry and expanded sky elf air force alone would have made the fight an easy one, but adding a few small cannon had made it brutally one-sided.

Leo had given them a chance to stop fighting ahead of time. He had formally vassalized the warrens and proclaimed his sovereignty over them to the human tribes to make it legitimate. He had even proclaimed that he would conquer anyone attacking him in a further bid to induce peace. but no one had listened, and the human tribes had attacked. A single pitched battle had dissuaded them from any form of continued action, and the cavalry and flyers ensured that they were forcibly absorbed afterwards.

The land had been very pretty up in the scrub-plateau of the middle territory… in a stark way. It reminded Leo of the lands of Nevada where lake Tahoe wasn’t. Leo, however, could also clearly see that it would most likely be a permanent, albiet small, drain on his government coffers unless some rare or magical resource was found in the plateau. But the territory did provide hearty soldiers and a buffer for Stonehaven, which he needed badly now to safeguard his tiny but burgeoning industrial capacity.

As Leo was thinking about the time leading up to his wedding, the palanquin crested the slight rise in the marble road leading to the grand plaza. Since the Kingdom still lacked a palace, it had been decided to do a pseudo-outdoor event, bringing the majority of the city to see their king officially married. A huge pavilion—a large, extremely complicated felt hall, really, like an over-sized circus tent—had been raised over two days across the grand plaza.

At the outer edge of the giant pavilion stood Molly—Mollynia Greatwillow, priest of Iluvin Eturia.

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It was standard for the priests of Iluvin Eturia to oversee the marriage ceremonies in the Kingdom of Averia, and Leo was personally pleased to have Molly oversee his ceremony. She had been with him from nearly the beginning, joining him at the same time as his first settlers landed on Elgin Isle. She had fought by his side in the founding war. She had made Lily feel like a member of the society here, something Lily had desperately wished for.

And early on, she had flirted with Leo quite heavily, although she had stopped doing that ever since Lily and Leo had made their relationship formal.

It was hard to remember that Molly—Mollynia Greatwillow—was quite high in the religion of Iluvin Eturia. It had taken Leo quite some time to associate the flirty, usually irreverent priestess with her role, but it appeared as if there wasn’t a higher ranked priest than her in central Beldin, possibly the entire continent. Even the dryad Thea, who was over Level Twenty, answered to her.

Molly had walked into Leo’s kingdom near unannounced about thirty months ago… and now the church of Iluvin Eturia was the majority religion of his entire realm and moving into another two dimensions. Additionally, another god—the Keeper—was in negotiations to join Iluvin Eturia’s pantheon, and Molly had gained effective control of two temple stones. The other churches even accepted her minister role. The part of Leo that was now always thinking of his kingdom and its internal and external relations quietly catalogued away her clear effectiveness at her job. Of everyone in his realm, be it displaced noble or angry dragon, Molly of all people was probably the only one that had any chance whatsoever to muster the popularity and might to challenge him politically.

She had been an amazing ally and friend both though, so Leo didn’t think it would come to that.

Leo turned his mind back to his marriage. Molly almost never looked the part of her role, but today, she pulled it off in style. Her sexy body was covered in a tight but flowing green dress that emphasized her femininity, and she wore a laurel crown and carried a staff that blossomed with leaves and flowers as if alive. She was a living avatar of fertility as she turned and motioned Leo into the pavilion.

His heart hitched very slightly. Compared to the times he had risked death, marriage shouldn’t seem like a big deal. But he was committing his life to one woman exclusively. Given that he had the proven ability to become immortal, and Lily might manage the same, that was a long time. Leo wasn’t the kind of man that moved from woman to woman, but still—it was a lot to commit to.

He took a deep breath, then grinned sheepishly as Molly smiled knowingly.

“She’s worth it, Leo,” Molly murmured to him.

“Easily,” Leo said, meaning it with all his heart. Molly smiled and turned into the pavilion. Leo pulled himself together and stepped after her.

The pavilion itself was huge, a massive creation that had gone up over a couple days. It was a tent, but the center had been cut out, so that the sun shown down on a patch of dirt that had been cut into the center of the grand plaza. Grass, bushes, and a couple trees had been planted and magically grown to make a patch of nature.

Leo walked forward past row upon row of his own citizens sitting on wooden benches arranged like a sports stadium around the outside, so that everyone that wanted to be here could have a seat. Judging from the way everyone was packed in—and still coming in from the crowd that had lined the streets outside—everyone had, in fact, wanted to come see Leo married.

Leo entered the faux grove at the center of the giant tent, and was presented with four elves holding huge stylized petals of felt braced against wooden poles. As Leo entered, “a bee to flowers,” to quote Molly, the elves—Duke Zir, Councilor Keltren Orsini, new head of House Orsini, Duchess Rezendria, and Duke Iolum Sweetgrass, the nominal elected Duke of Hywyl Pools—pulled the felt back, imitating the petals of a flower folding outward before the dawn sun.

Revealing Lily in all her glory.

Leo’s breath caught. Lily was, somehow, even more beautiful than before. She was in a white dress, a sign of love in both Leo’s culture and his own. It flowed across her body before flowing out at the bottom. It was stitched with the outlines of flowers across everything. She was also adorned with gold and emerald jewelry, and her beauty shown through far more than before, practically bringing Leo to his knees with his physical reaction to her.

The gasps of the crowd, and some child calling into the silence afterward, “She’s so beautiful, mom!” told Leo that he wasn’t the only one effected. Lily grinned at him, grabbing the last shreds of his focus.

Leo shook back to himself, noting that he had made an Intelligence check to resist being affected by her magical beauty. Not that he wasn’t effected, but he could act.

She still appeared as some fae sex goddess as Leo walked up.

“Woof,” Molly said sotto voice as she took Lily’s hands and placed them in Leo’s. Leo folded his hands around Lily’s as he had been taught. It was a symbol of protection and cherishment in the church, a promise to his future wife.

Lily stared into his eyes, her smile threatening to crack her face in half, her violet eyes alight with joy. “It’s real, Leo, after two years.”

Leo grinned back. “It is, my beloved. It’s real, it’s forever. The happy ending we were promised.”

At the last, Lily’s eyes went quizzical for a moment.

“Back to the ceremony, please,” Molly gently reminded, and the two lapsed into silence.

Neha came walking up behind them, dressed in a red dress that flared at the bottom, giving her half a look of an actual flower—something Molly had insisted upon once she learned of the ‘flower girls’ from Leo’s own ceremonies. She had merged the role into the ring bearer.

Molly held her hands to the sky through the open pavilion top, then lowered her hands, touching tree, bush, grass, then dirt.

Then she began a long eulogy to the virtues of Iluvin Eturia. Fertility, producing children, and protecting and providing for a family were favored means of showing a life the goddess would approve of, apparently.

Leo could certainly approve of that as well. He settled back, letting the ceremony roll forward, basking in the happiness of his bride to be and anticipating the feast and the night afterwards.