Chapter 1715: No Excuses
A full kowtow. Palms flat in the blood, brow against the floor, the deepest submission an elven queen could offer.
"I do not desire to make light of my actions." Myrasyn spoke into the blood, and every trace of the bubbly queen who’d been bouncing in her chains was gone. "I am guilty, and I deserve the fate I would have received in these dungeons if not for you two."
Sera’s hands stopped glowing.
This was the Queen.
The living legend whose name even low-born nobodies sang with utmost praise and admiration.
And she was pressing her face into dead people’s blood on a dungeon floor for a low-noble girl like her.
"What are you... You’re a sovereign-"
"A sovereign who made horrible decisions behind the excuse of the greater good." Myrasyn’s kowtow deepened, her forehead grinding against the wet stone. "I sentenced innocent young girls like you to fates worse than death because of my greed."
"Greed? But you-"
"’But I did what I had to do?’" Myrasyn cut her off, and the bitterness was directed entirely inward.
"No. That’s not true at all. We are not waging a war of defense. We spent centuries forging alliances, preparing for an invasion of the human lands, because we believed we could take Ravenshade. I told myself it was for our future, that if the dwarven forts and the undead minions held the new border then elven lives would be spared against the humans, that we would only have to worry about the beastkin to the south."
Her nails scraped against the bloody stone.
"But really, I was a weak-willed woman who did what the council and the high nobility wanted of her, and used the greater good as a blanket to sleep at night while girls like you were dragged from their homes to die for my ambition."
The cell was quiet except for the slow drip of blood from the ceiling.
Sera stared at the queen on the floor and couldn’t find a single word.
Her mouth opened, closed, and the rehearsed monologue she’d carried since she started daydreaming about this exact beyond unlikely scenario - confronting the evil creature who threw her life away - had no answer for a woman who wasn’t even trying to defend herself.
Then she felt warmth.
Quinlan’s gaze, resting on her from where he stood on the stone with his shoulder still bleeding, quiet and steady and carrying nothing that told her what to do.
Just warmth, and trust that she’d figure it out herself.
Sera exhaled through her nose.
"Stop groveling in the blood." The words left her softer than she wanted. "Quin just cleaned you up."
Myrasyn didn’t rise. "I appreciate the gesture. Truly, I do."
Her voice was muffled against the floor. "But compared to the real blood on my hands, this is nothing. I’m afraid no amount of the Holy Son’s water will be able to wash me clean."
Sera’s expression went cold all of a sudden, and when she spoke, there was not a single trace of patience in her voice. "Get up."
Myrasyn’s ears trembled.
She lifted her face from the blood and found the young healer looking down at her with eyes that held no warmth and no pity.
"I’m not the Goddess nor the First Elf. I’m not even an Arch Priestess or a shrine maiden. I’m just a nobody from the outskirts, and I don’t do absolution."
Sera’s voice cut clean through the cell. "I have broken bodies to fix and I won’t be playing nanny to your guilt on top of it. So either get up and come here so I can tend to you alongside Black Fang, or stay on that floor and drown in it. But I have work to do."
Myrasyn stared up at her from the blood.
Then the guilt behind the queen’s eyes shifted, rearranging past the shame and everything she couldn’t take back.
She looked at the young elf standing over her with golden light still on her hands and healer’s fury still on her face, and the words that came out of her carried none of the drama or the theatrics or the bouncing energy.
"You call yourself a nobody from the outskirts." Myrasyn rose from the floor slowly, blood running down her forehead and dripping from her chin. "But to me, you are a wonderful young woman with a proper head on your shoulders. Your ancestors have every right to be proud of you."
Sera’s ears twitched.
It was involuntary and brief, the tips flicking once before she caught herself, but the praise had come from the most famous and revered elf alive and no amount of composure training could stop the reflex entirely.
"Okay, okay." She turned back to Black Fang, golden light already pouring again. "Now let me work."
Myrasyn wiped blood from her brow with the back of her hand and crossed the cell before raising her hand to her forehead in a crisp salute directed at Sera.
"If there is anything I can help with, just say the word!"
...
The jade cloak caught wind as Alastair Greenvale crested the ridge with the Consortium’s banners snapping at his flanks, and the battlefield that opened below him was worse than anything his imagination had prepared him for.
It stretched for miles.
Fire, steel, magic, and the dead carpeting the earth in numbers that made individual engagements meaningless from this height.
Kaede’s tear still hung in the sky to the north, vomiting fresh columns of bodies into a war that was already choking on sheer mass, and the undead horde that crawled across the eastern front moved like a dark tide with no visible end.
His eyes found Alexios before anything else.
The King of Vraven fought three hundred meters ahead with a golden longsword that caught the light.
"Fuck me sideways... Why is he here?!"
Alastair’s grip tightened on his reins.
A duke riding beside criminals in foreign lands where he should not be, rushing to back up the most wanted man in the country.
It wasn’t a great outlook, to put it gently.
The Primordial Villain had a talent for arranging indignities.
Quinlan had ordered the duke to rush to his position and back him up, giving Alastair not much of a choice in the matter.
"My lord." His lieutenant pulled alongside him, face pale beneath his helm. "The horizon."
Elvardian banners moved through the treeline to the southeast in columns too organized to be stragglers, loyalist reinforcements marching toward the battle under their own power.
Behind them, further out, the dark mass of a second undead host crept across the plains from the northeast, too far to make out individual shapes but close enough that the scope of it flattened whatever optimism their arrival was supposed to carry.
Alastair drew his blade and pointed it forward.
"For humanity! Charge!"
The jade cloaks surged down the ridge.
...
"If there is anything I can help with, just say the word!"
"Okay." Black Fang was quick to take up the queen on her offer. "Extract his seed."
Her voice came flat from where she hung in Quinlan’s arm, her mouth pulling back from his shoulder wound with blood on her lips and purple spirals still churning in her irises.
Myrasyn’s ears shot straight up.
Sera’s hands froze mid-heal.
Quinlan looked down at the woman in his arms with raised eyebrows.
Myrasyn blinked at Black Fang, then at Quinlan, then back at Black Fang. "I’m sorry, could you repeat that?"
