Chapter 1720: Overwhelming Pressure
To reach such a state of existence, such a tragic relationship with pain...
Black Fang’s expression shifted.
The stern analytical mask cracked as a brief light behind her eyes materialized while she watched this man look genuinely hurt on her behalf over a life he hadn’t lived and wounds he wasn’t responsible for.
She held that look for exactly long enough to feel it in her heart, then sealed it away.
"We’ll discuss everything when the time is right."
Quinlan nodded. "Yeah."
While the two were discussing, Myrasyn leaned toward Sera, her voice dropping to a whisper.
"Do you think I could also...?"
Sera’s hands paused.
"I mean, I licked his..." Myrasyn faltered as she searched for the academic term, failed, and pressed on regardless. "I did far more than Black Fang did, and she barely even moved her hand! Why did she become this so-called ’Beloved’ and not me? Should I drink his blood too? Is that the missing component?"
Sera stared at the queen with an expression so flat it could have been used as a surgical table.
"No," she spoke slowly. "The blood alone won’t do it for you."
"Then what is it?!" Myrasyn pressed forward, leaning in. "Tell me! I need to understand the mechanism!"
Sera’s flat expression somehow deepened even further, but the queen’s earnest, desperate, scholarly eyes left her no escape.
"Sucking the penis of a man you barely know is what whores do, not ’Beloveds.’"
"Hie!"
Every drop of blood drained from Myrasyn’s face so fast her ears went pale white.
Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. No words.
The carefully rebuilt dignity she’d been assembling since pulling his pants up collapsed into dust, and the queen stood frozen in the wreckage of it with her lips still faintly tingling from the act in question.
She turned on her heel without a sound and waddled toward the exit of the cell, intent on finding her royal robes, staff, and crown, her steps carrying the stiff, mechanical precision of a woman whose soul had temporarily left her body.
Quinlan watched her go, then looked down at Sera.
The healer’s face was glowing with satisfaction so pure it bordered on divine, her lips pressed together in a giant grin she wasn’t even trying to hide.
*Smack!*
He spanked her. "You could’ve worded that better."
The sound echoed off the cell walls, and Sera’s satisfied grin cracked into a laugh she tried to swallow and failed, her healing hands flickering gold as her shoulders shook.
"Could I have?" she giggled. "Yes, of course..."
Then her eyes began dancing with joy. "But I feel as if my revenge had been properly administered just now..."
Quinlan shook his head, amused.
It was time to return to the battlefield.
...
Serelis Windgrace had been fighting the blue-skinned woman for two minutes straight, and every second of those minutes had been a masterclass in why elven ranger training meant nothing against whatever this creature was.
The woman moved like liquid between Serelis’s strikes, twin daggers weaving patterns too tight and too fast for eyes trained on forest canopy warfare, and the mouth mask she wore beneath cold, ice-blue eyes gave nothing away.
No expression. No tells. Just efficiency so clean it bordered on art, and the blue soldiers flanking her fought with the same terrifying cohesion that told Serelis this was no ordinary summon.
This was their general.
She’d barely survived the last exchange, catching a throat-bound dagger on her crossguard at the cost of a position she’d never recover, and the blue-skinned general disengaged sideways with a fluidity that made Serelis’s parry look crude by comparison.
Then the pressure hit.
It didn’t come through sound or sight or any sense the ranger corps had drilled into Serelis. It came from deeper, from the place beneath instinct where her blood lived, where the thing that made her an elf rather than a human or a dwarf or a beastkin sat coiled around her spine and had never once spoken to her in her entire life.
It spoke now.
Serelis’s legs locked.
Her blade arm froze mid-swing, and across the killing field around her she watched every elf on every side of the battle do the same.
Loyalists stopped mid-thrust, mages let spells die on their fingertips, hundreds of thousands of elves locking up at the same instant as if a hand had reached into their shared marrow and squeezed.
But it wasn’t just elves who stopped.
The pressure that rolled across the battlefield alongside the racial call was physical, a crushing wave of bloodlust so dense that dwarves stumbled, beastkin dropped to their haunches, and human soldiers found their legs buckling under a weight their bodies could not explain.
The blue-skinned general had already stopped fighting.
Her daggers hung at her sides and her ice-blue eyes were fixed on a point to the left and above the battlefield, and her gaze finally showed emotion.
Joy. Pure, unmistakable joy, dancing in those cold eyes as they looked toward something Serelis had not yet seen.
The ranger commander followed her gaze, left and upward toward the sky above the fortress ridge.
Her heart stopped.
Five figures walked across the open air as if an invisible road had been laid for them alone, high above the battlefield where the dying light caught them against the smoke-stained sky, and the air around them rippled outward in waves so dense that Serelis could see the distortion from the ground, concentric pulses of pressure that bent the light and pushed the smoke apart in expanding rings.
The man in the center wore black armor that drank what little light reached it, moving across the sky with the unhurried stride of someone walking through a garden rather than above a war. Power bled off him in currents that even Serelis could taste on her tongue like copper and ozone.
The Primordial Villain.
On his left walked death.
A woman in black clothing, dark hair, serpent tattoos pulsing violet. Her eyes were open and the purple spirals churning inside them cast light of their own, twin violet lanterns burning in a face so still it could have been carved from the same stone as the fortress below.
The pressure coming off her was not the man’s. His was authority, heavy and alive, a force the world had to acknowledge whether it wanted to or not.
Hers was absence.
The air around her died.
Where the man’s aura pushed outward in waves, hers pulled inward in a void that swallowed heat and motion and hope, and the soldiers on the ground directly beneath her path stumbled as their limbs went cold and their breath came short.
It was like walking through a shadow that had intentions, and every combat instinct Serelis possessed screamed at her to run from something that was already closer than running could fix.
The Venomborne Terror.
Alive and free.
On the far left, a young elven woman with golden blonde hair trailed half a step behind the man with her hands clasped behind her back and an expression of such open, unhurried amusement that she might have been watching street performers from a balcony.
For a moment, Serelis thought she was looking at the traitor queen herself, such were the similarities in their physical appearance.
But such a carefree expression alone told her otherwise. Their always regal queen, who had reigned over them for numerous millennia, would never make a face like that.
Then Serelis’s gaze moved to the man’s right, and her blood went cold for a different reason entirely.
The real Queen Myrasyn Ael’vyrn moved across the sky in full royal regalia.
The ceremonial robes that only the sitting monarch of all elves was permitted to wear billowed behind her in fabric so white it blazed against the smoke.
The Royal Crown sat on her head, and her famous staff rested in her right hand with its crystal head burning so bright it cast a second shadow beneath everyone it passed over.
She was alive. She was free. She was here.
And she was walking beside the Primordial Villain as if that was exactly where she belonged.
On Myrasyn’s right, half a step behind, Aelindra followed with her head bowed and her arms at her sides.
Every elf who looked up recognized the councilwoman who was supposed to be sitting on the throne.
But the image they saw was instead a broken woman trailing behind the sister she’d deemed traitor.
The five of them crossed the sky in silence that weighed more than the battle had.
Then Myrasyn stepped forward.
She left the man’s side and walked ahead of the formation until she stood alone in the air above the center of the battlefield, and when she spoke her voice carried the magic of a monarch’s decree, amplified through the staff until it reached every elven ear on the field as clearly as if she were standing beside them.
"Members of the elven race."
"Hear me."
