Chapter 1674: Misbehaving Fanatics
"We congratulate you on establishing your family, Holy Son!"
One sentence. Perfect unison. Tens of thousands of throats delivering it as though every woman in the valley had been waiting so long to say the words that the timing came on its own.
’The announcement...’ Lilith realized.
Then Isveth drew her sword.
The blade came free in a single clean motion, and the Head Maiden reversed it and drove it into the earth at her feet, point-first, both hands releasing the hilt in the same breath.
An offering. Her authority surrendered to the ground before the man it served.
Then she went to the ground after it, forehead touching the grass, palms extending forward, and behind her the army followed in a wave that swept from front to rear in one long breath.
Full prostration, foreheads to the earth, hands out.
Matriarchs in ceremonial white folding low.
Shrine elders who had shepherded the faith of their people for eight and nine thousand years laying themselves flat.
Young maidens whose beauty would have stopped courts on the continent lowering their faces into the dirt with their hair spilling across the ground, long ears laid flat in the deepest gesture of submission their culture knew.
The sound of an entire army going down at once was a soft rush of silk, leather, and steel settling that lasted three full seconds before the valley went still.
The wind caught trailing robes, loose hair, ears pressed to the earth. The image was an ocean of prostrating elven beauties laid out at one man’s feet and calling it an honor.
Lilith stood on the hilltop and watched.
She had heard the reports about elven defections. The Primordial Villain had elven allies.
She had assumed it was a faction. A city, maybe. Dissatisfied elves leveraging a political opening.
This was a race on its knees, and the reverence on every face she could see from the hilltop was absolute and burning, directed at the armored man twenty paces from her as if he were a deity who had descended to walk among mortals.
Quinlan sighed.
The sound carried down the hillside, and the valley heard it.
"I’m grateful for your words," he said. "Truly. But do you plan to do this every time we meet?"
They didn’t need to think long.
"YES!"
The chorus hit the hilltop like a wall, tens of thousands of voices delivering a single syllable with the certainty of a natural law while still face-down in the grass.
Quinlan’s head tilted.
"...It’s very inefficient."
Isveth’s voice rose from where she lay, composed and unhurried despite her forehead being in the dirt.
"Holy Son, in our long lives, we have learned to appreciate the small things. A beautiful butterfly alighting on a branch. A bird’s song at dawn. A gorgeous bloom opening in spring."
A pause. "Kowtowing to the heir of the First Elf, whose direct blood we never thought we’d ever get to bow down to, is an honor we could never grow bored of. I ask for your understanding..."
Across the valley, heads nodded against the grass.
The motion rippled through the ranks in a single wave, and the unanimity of it struck Lilith harder than any part of the spectacle so far.
She had watched armies salute their generals.
She had watched nations bow to kings. She had never seen a host nod in unison while kowtowing because they genuinely could not imagine a better use of their time.
"She’s begging for permission to prostrate herself over and over again?" Bronnya murmured under her breath, asking for clarification. The tanker’s brain was doing overtime right now.
From where Lilith stood, she could see Quinlan’s posture shift.
The easy confidence in his shoulders faltered for a breath.
It lasted a heartbeat. Then it was gone.
"So be it." His voice carried down the hill, and it had changed. "I acknowledge your devotion, graceful descendants of my mother."
A collective exhale traveled through the valley, warm and soft.
’He said we’re graceful!!’ Across the front ranks, the tips of long ears turned pink as many youngsters squealed in shocked delight.
Matriarchs whose composure had survived millennia of politics went red in the cheeks. Shrine maidens bit their lips. The elders flushed from cheek to ear-tip as if the Holy Son’s words had reached past the ceremony and touched the women underneath.
"Now, rise," Quinlan said.
Nobody moved.
A handful of maidens in the front rank shifted their weight, and the motion stopped. The rest stayed exactly where they were, still prostrate, faces warm, the picture of women who had heard the command perfectly well and decided they hadn’t.
Quinlan’s voice came a second time, and it carried an edge now.
"I told you to rise."
The valley flinched.
The color in the ranks deepened, and the host rose with the flustered haste of people who knew they’d been caught misbehaving.
"Master! The pretty ladies are bad girls!! Blossom can tell, they heard Master the first time!!" The blonde dogkin, standing next to the man, delivered her observation clearly enough for the ranks to hear, sniffing in their direction.
She had detected the stench of misbehaving women.
Cheeks burned. Two shrine maidens in the second rank refused to look up. Three more were smiling into the ground, and the energy that traveled through the rising army was unmistakable: beautiful women getting scolded by the man they adored and finding the experience delightful.
Isveth was the first to rise. The Head Maiden pulled her sword from the earth, sheathed it, and stood with her office’s composure intact, but her ears were crimson and she had absolutely been one of the pretenders.
"Head Maiden," Quinlan called. "Brief me."
...
The briefing was efficient and thorough.
While Quinlan’s women had endured the Bloodfather ritual and the hours of agony it carried, while he himself had deployed human and beastkin armies into Elvardian territory and bent a duke to his will, the elves had not been idle.
Isveth’s shrine maidens had carried the Holy Son’s call across the nation within hours. Magistrates mobilized. Matriarchs armed their households.
Now, they reached their destination, the edge of the Elvardian Heartlands, the inner region where the wealthiest and most powerful crown loyalists and their territories lay.
The Heartlands were not the outer territories Quinlan had already swept through.
Many of the outer nobles had their elites held up thanks to their invasion of the Vraven Kingdom, leaving behind a barren land.
But the inner region was the core of Elvardian power: dwarven fortress-cities with blacksteel gates and rune-forged defenses that had been layered and reinforced across millions of years, loyalist elven strongholds whose ancient wards drew power from the land itself.
These nobles, favored by the Council, were not required to contribute to the war effort on the same level.
Furthermore...
They had other allies present as well.
Quinlan looked at the army that had assembled itself in his name.
"You’ve done well. Let’s continue."
The column formed within minutes. Quinlan and his women at the head, the elven host at their backs, and the Scarlet Lilies trailing at the flank with nothing to say and a great deal to think about.
Just like that, they stepped into the heart of Elvardia, ready to push all the way.
