There was a lot of popcorn being chewed as a whole lot of Marked people watched Cameron Dow unload on the kinfolk who had once exiled him. Oh, he was polite about it, or at least not overbearing and arrogant about it.

“Cameron, you know it is policy for spouses not to attend Family meetings...”

“My wife stood by me when my Family did not. Whose vows and bonds do you think I value more highly, Uncle Trevor?”

There was a pained silence around the family table as Maria looked on primly. Even the edges of her Aura indicated she was a tempered Archmage, nearly a half-Sage herself, despite having remained at Mage, like her husband, for so many years.

“See here, Cameron!” the stern voice of Herbert H. Dow II, the half-Sage patriarch of the family spoke up. Despite being nearly a century old, his voice was fine and hale. “We have rules in the Family for a reason...!”

“Please recite the family by-laws as to the rights and rules of a Sage of the Dow Family. I will... stand here and wait while you do so.”

He leaned on Maria’s chair casually, the chair meant for him, his pleasant smile unchanged, but everyone could feel the pressure increasing in the room.

The Dow Family had never had a Sage, and thus were no rules or rights, only the unspoken rule of all Families: whoever was the strongest was in charge!

What did their stares or desires mean to him? He was a Sage, everything they wanted to be and could not achieve. By the old ways, he was already in charge if they considered him a member of the Family!

But that matter was not official yet, either.

“I salute whatever sly person let slip that the elders of the Family were inviting me back to join them, before the actual vote. I imagine it was meant to put some pressure on me to conform to your desires and accept some rules and limitations on my power when I came back to the Dows.” Their uneasy shuffling was not difficult to see.

“Obviously, my elders, you have not done your homework on Families who have made the transition to Great Families. I, however, did, seeking out an easy dozen first Sages for their Families, and asking them what to expect.”

They shuffled even more uneasily under his unperturbed stare. “The first thing, naturally, is that the elders and formerly important members of the Family need to be brought to heel, or be dealt with.” He watched them all stiffen, and his smile grew. “Some of the Sages made allowances for the tedious terms and limitations the Elders tried to place on them, and simply changed their minds over time and removed such limits later on, simply ignoring the protests and doing what they desired to do.

“Most of them simply ignored all the desperate words of their lessers giving instructions to them and forced everyone to submit to them, or be banished from the table. After all, the Family had a Sage now. Nobody else at the table was crucial or necessary unless the Sage deemed them to be.

“Sometimes things got violent, petty, or spiteful, and then shortly thereafter they got bloody. Rebelling against the Sage of the Family wasn’t a very good idea, but sometimes proud men would rather die than be removed from the positions of power that they’ve held for so long.

“I am wondering, now, what the approach of the Dow Family is going to be? Are they going to attempt to put chains and limits on my status, as they did not on my great-grandfather, who can do as he pleases? Try to wrap me up in Family loyalty and make me their toy and tool and figurehead, while the real power sits elsewhere, in those who command, and I, the Sage, merely obey?”

His voice was full of schadenfreude. The older men and women at the table could not meet his eyes which, despite his light tone, were filled with iron and fire.

“I have had the pleasure of associating with some extremely powerful, extremely dangerous, and extremely wise beings over the past decade. They don’t believe in playing games with their lessers, and none of them would agree to be commanded by their lessers... and I am afraid that is what is going to happen today.

“I presume that you were going to try to make a play upon my loyalty to the Family and set me up in some figurehead position where everything can continue on smoothly with yourselves in charge, only with a convenient shield in front of you who you can blame if anything goes wrong, perhaps acting as your bully thug.

“Please, present to me your proposal. I expect to be fairly entertained by it.”

He watched their pale faces look at one another. None of them wanted to be the one to present their proposal to him.

“Cowardice from Dows. Mmm. Is it any wonder I left the Family? As far as I can tell, not a one of you served more than cursory duties during the littoral raids. Keeping too busy with Family matters, paying for a few mercenaries to take your places.” He shook his head slowly. “Uncle Franklin, I’m afraid I’m going to put you on the spot, since you excluded my father from such entertaining discussions. You’re the legal expert here, so you’d have full knowledge of what you were meant to propose. Let’s see it, Uncle.”

The portly, white-mustachioed man paled and cursed to himself at being singled out. Nevertheless, his pudgy hands slowly opened up his leather folder, and he slid a many-paged contract from within out onto the table.

Cameron’s eyes lit up as the contract slid itself across the table and stopped directly in front of his wife Maria. Maria’s eyes glittered darkly as a brilliant ruby fountain pen came out of nowhere into her hand, and under the shocked eyes of the table, she began to read the contract.

She wasn’t even out of ‘terms and parties’ when she started crossing things out, and the Dow Family began to flinch.

“Some of you may or may not have heard that my old preferred lawyer ended up being a spy for the DuPonts,” Cameron informed them all calmly, totally relaxed as Maria tore through the contract. Red ink was lathered all over it, redacting paragraph after paragraph, whole pages disappearing under scarlet condemnation.

The Dows looked on as their hopes died on their faces.

“In addition to serving on the coasts with myself and my children, my wife also decided to take up the legal studies she had set aside when she decided to raise our children. You may or may not be delighted to know that she now has a degree from Harvard Law School, it being convenient to serving in Boston there, and she graduated at the top of her class.” He beamed proudly down at her. “She naturally has taken the bar exam and passed it, and will of course be handling any and all of my legal matters forthwith.

“She has been keeping busy with negotiating contracts for Coralost in the interim, just to gain some necessary experience in the business, of course, and all my operations in India must pass under her eye. I estimate she’s earned us an extra half a billion dollars over the last decade.”

And it went without saying that she’d become chief legal counsel of the Dows after he took power, so goodbye to Uncle Franklin’s position at the table!

“Aunt Sylvia, it came to my attention long ago that you were lobbying intensely against me and my efforts down in Brazil before I left the Family. Furthermore, you’ve been repeatedly trying to get Sydney, Clarice, and Jonah removed from their positions there ever since, despite the sterling efforts, connections, and results they’ve obtained down there. Efforts which, I will freely inform my elders of, I have been advising them on for all of this time, and which you want to open up for your children.”

Aunt Sylvia was bloodless under his cool stare, and also knew that her job as head of human resources was done. Her husband was from the Organzas Family of Brazil, and moving her children into those positions would have been a natural move playing upon Family connections for good business.

“Uncle Jacques.” Cameron’s lidded stare fell upon the muscular, harshly-faced man who was head of Family Security. None of the elders had ever seen the man flinch before, but they did so now. It was a surreal sight to them!

There was a loud slap as a paper file nearly a finger’s-width thick hit the middle of the table. Uncle Jacques just stared as he read the title on it, in his own handwriting.

“Family Security knew that my personal lawyer in the family was feeding information to the DuPonts within two years of her entering service to me. You used her as a catspaw to send false information to the DuPonts so they would not send any more spies, handily sacrificing my career to do so by not informing me. Uncle Jacques, thank you so much for your service to the Dow Family.”

The grim and stern-faced man who’d watched over the entire Family with iron control and zeal for more than two generations slumped back in his seat, seeming to age ten years instantly as he did so.

“But that was a minor thing, of course.” Uncle Jacques’ eyes flickered for a moment, then saw the knives in Cameron’s. “Did you know that Aunt Sealie has been feeding information to the Kaisers for the last thirty years?”

Jacques’ eyes turned along with everyone else’s to his widowed sister, the head of accounting for the Family, his jaw dropping in astonishment.

The prim, narrow-faced woman just glared at him, but it was cracking even as she spit out, “What kind of accusation is this? You have no proof-!”

“The Kaisers kept complete records of every transaction they made with you, just in case. Following the money wasn’t all that hard to do, and they are trusted business partners of the Family. Why would anything be abnormal for them having a rather too-in-depth knowledge of our Family’s finances, which they never alluded to?

“I understand their buyout plans for the Dow ran into a bit of snag during The Great Flood, but they picked up again recently. It seems the Dow Family is struggling in several areas recently, and this came to the attention of the Kaisers with remarkable speed, to the point where they started raising money for the formal attempt at a buy-out or merger.

“Alas, it all fell through when I broke through a few months back. Exile or not, I was a Dow, and attempting to make such a move against the interests of a Sage backed by Coralost was not deemed wise.

“They were also the ones who paid for the attempted intervention of the Red River Sage and several Archmages on the sly, trying to interrupt my Ascension. Investigating why they would care about something half the world away uncovered all of the rest.

“I don’t know if you expected a big payoff or a fatter position, Aunt Sealie, but you can expect neither, now.”

The woman shrank in on herself in horror, realizing that it was done, she was done, and everything had fallen apart.

“Grandfather.” Everyone’s heads turned slowly to Herbert H. Dow III, who started to raise his head in defiance of his grandson, and then froze as something materialized in Cameron’s hand.

The rough crystalline ball with a glowing golden liquid light inside rolled out slowly into the middle of the table, bounced against the file there, and settled over on one side. The liquid within, glowing with its own heavy Light, continued sloshing about, as if in defiance of gravity.

“You, you cannot-!” Herbert Dow the Third blurted out, getting to his feet and reaching for the ball instinctively.

It was just the slightest flicker of Will, and Cameron’s grandfather was smashed back into his seat and held there without the slightest strain.