Alitia: Crown of Ash

XIII: Searching

Leviathan's shoes crunched onto a small pile of leaves as he walked alongside Aurore and Caius through the trees near Millennium City. "This is the spot where that magical signature was detected, right?" he asked. 

"Yes, it was... Do you have any ideas on how we can trace the magical signature further than this?" Aurore asked him, looking to Leviathan with a small frown on her face. 

Leviathan nodded. "I got this, no problems!" He clasped his hands together before stretching out his arms above his head, and his shape began to shift as he brought his limbs back to his side. When the shift was fully finished, he was on all fours and looked less like a human and more like an animal. He was a dog of some sorts, and he pressed his nose to the ground and began to walk around, his tail flickering back and forth lightly. 

"Do you know what you're doing?" Caius questioned. 

Leviathan snorted. "I'm probably the reason they wanted our help with this search in the first place," he remarked. "I can transform into anything that I want to, and I'm amazing at looking for anything that needs to be found. It's one thing that makes me so amazing." He continued to sniff around the ground before his hair began to stand on end. "There's a magical signature here that I don't recognize... Moon magic... But that's not all. It's combined with something else."

"Moon magic combined with something else?" Aurore echoed, tilting her head to one side. She crouched down next to Leviathan as he turned back into human shape to pop his neck. 

"That means that there's something strange about what we're searching for," Leviathan replied with a shrug. "I don't know what it is quite yet. The traces are faint, like whatever happened here was a while ago. We're going to have to get closer if we want to find out more about whoever is giving off this signal. However, I believe that it has something to do with the moon mage that we're searching for. The magic is too similar to the kind and queen for that to not be the case. This is no coincidence. We're getting closer to our target."

"If that's really true, then where do we look next?" Aurore questioned. "We're going to have to get closer, but we can't do that unless we know where this person we're looking for is."

Leviathan morphed back into animal form and continued sniffing around. "There's no direction that the tracks go. Instead, they just disappear into thin air about... Here." Leviathan shifted back to normal and frowned. "Somebody used teleportation magic to take the target of ours away a few weeks ago, and I'm afraid that, as of now, there isn't a way to figure out the truth."

Caius sighed. "Great. So we've reached a dead end?" he asked. 

Aurore shook her head. "Hold on a moment," she whispered. "He's just being dramatic and theatrical. This is normal for him."

Leviathan threw his arms upwards in a grand gesture. "However, I can totally figure that out! All I need to do is this..." Leviathan began to change shapes again, though this time, he looked more like a person when the transformation was completed. His appearance had grown to be that of an adult, a scholar, by the looks of it. 

"What's with the change in appearance?" Caius questioned hesitantly. 

"When I change shape into another person or thing, I can gain their abilities. In this case, I've shown myself to be a scholar of dimensional magic, so with a little bit of probing, I should be able to figure out exactly where our target disappeared to," Leviathan replied. "It won't take too long to figure out, so you don't need to worry at all. Everything is perfectly under control, and it will be fine soon enough."

"You're sure that you know what you're doing then," Caius said, trying to grapple with the way Leviathan's conversations kept on jumping. With how chaotic his behavior was, it was difficult to say for sure if he was capable of staying on track or if it was a requirement for him to switch the topic using his grandeur every few seconds.