Read Novel Full Chapter 1608 Hostile Maidens
Chapter 1608 Hostile Maidens
The Untouched Tomb sat at the heart of the elven lands, and from the sky it looked exactly like what it was. A pale mausoleum at the center of a sprawl of white-stone sanctuaries, ringed by gardens that had been tended for so long they had forgotten how to grow wild.
Around the central tomb, the sanctuaries leaned in close. Small chapels with arched windows. Meditation courtyards with reflecting pools. Dormitories where the shrine maidens had lived and aged and died for epochs, each generation raising the next to tend the same stone.
To worship Luminara was to be elven.
Every elf on the continent, from the capital's politicians to the woodland rangers on the furthest borders, carried some measure of her in their faith.
The only question was how much. At one end stood those who named her the true goddess, the Mother of All, and worshipped her as the divine itself.
At the other stood the rationalists, Seraphiel's kind, who acknowledged the goddess of all races as real because her influence on the world was measurable, and who thought the First Elf had simply been an early ancestor elevated to myth by a grieving people.
Most elves sat somewhere in the middle. They accepted that the goddess existed and sustained the world, but they did not believe their souls would find her when they died. Their souls would find Luminara, and Luminara would welcome them into the Eternal Forests, where the ancestors rested under trees that never lost their leaves.
The Untouched Tomb was where that middle met its most orthodox form.
It was the pilgrim destination for the faith.
Every year, tens of thousands of elves traveled here from every corner of the Alliance to pray at the outer sanctuaries, to light candles for ancestors they hoped had already reached the Forests, to touch the carved tears set into the walls and whisper the names of the lost.
Some came once in their lives. Some returned every season. The paths between the outer shrines had been walked smooth by millions of years of devotion, and the grass along them grew in careful patterns that no gardener had planted.
At the center of it all stood the mausoleum where one of the First Elf's daughters rested.
Which daughter, none living could say. Accurate records from that age were gone, and the legend was simply that one of Luminara's own had chosen this ground for her final rest, laid herself down in the mountain's stillness, and left the world on her own terms.
The shrine maidens tended her tomb and prayed for her soul as they had prayed for it for epochs, and the elves of the continent came here in their thousands to share in that grief.
The shrine maidens themselves stood at the orthodox end of the gradient. For them, Luminara was mother and goddess both, and everything their faith demanded.
Quinlan descended through a high cloud and landed in the outer courtyard with his boots making no sound on the flagstones.
Bells began to ring.
...
The shrine maidens emerged from every doorway at once.
They came from the dormitories with robes still being tied at the waist. They came from the reflecting pools with bare feet and wet hems. Girls barely into their first century. Women in their prime. Wrinkled elders whose white hair fell past their hips, leaning on carved staffs that had held them up for so long the wood was polished smooth where their palms wrapped it.
Every one of them was armed. Some held blades, some held nothing more than a heavy candlestick or a ceremonial sickle. Every hand gripped something, and every face wore the same expression.
They knew who he was.
The reports had reached them. They knew the dark armor with the crimson veins, the red eyes, the man who had turned the Greymount into a volcano and walked away while dwarven cities fell behind him in a line across the continent.
They formed a wide arc around him across the flagstones, and none came closer than twenty paces.
One figure stepped through the line.
She walked with the slow, measured pace of a woman who had spent her life in processions. Silver hair fell in a single heavy braid past her waist, pale enough to catch the afternoon light and throw it back softer.
She reminded Quinlan a bit of Sylvaris, though the way she looked at him was a lot less friendly.
Her hands stayed perfectly still in a way that only came from training. This one was a fighter.
She stopped ten paces from him.
"You will leave."
Her voice was low and even.
Quinlan tilted his head. "Morning."
"You will leave this holy ground, Primordial Villain, and you will not return. The Tomb is not yours to desecrate."
"Why would I desecrate my sister's resting place?"
The courtyard cracked open.
"You dare?!" The elder with the polished staff stepped forward before anyone else could speak. Her voice shook with a fury that had not been in her chest for a long time. "You dare imply that you are a son of Luminara?!"
"I'm not implying anything," Quinlan spoke up. "She is my mother."
"Lies!" another elder shouted from the arc. "Lies from a devil's mouth! We have seen your wanted poster, butcher of life. You are no elf but human!"
"She's my adoptive mother," Quinlan clarified.
A wave of sound broke through the younger maidens. Gasps. A girl in the front row covered her mouth with both hands. Another sank halfway to her knees before a sister caught her under the arm and held her upright.
The elders did not sink or gasp, however.
"Head Maiden Isveth." The staff-bearer's voice was low and hard. "Let us answer the blasphemy ourselves. We do not need your blade for this."
"Please," another elder said. "He speaks filth on her daughter's ground. He cannot be allowed the breath."
"Head Maiden!"
"Enough."
Isveth did not raise her voice. The single word cut cleanly across the arc and the elders fell silent, though their knuckles did not loosen on their staffs.
She kept her eyes on Quinlan.
"The First Elf's teaching says to guard what we love and to lift no blade beyond that duty. I will not entertain your lunacy, Primordial Villain. You are free to believe what you wish but you are not free to stand on this ground and say it."
Her blade had not yet emerged from the sash. It did not need to.
"Leave. Now."
Quinlan did not move.
"I'll leave when you tell me what I want."
"No, you will leave right now."
"I came for an artifact my mother gave to her youngest daughter before she died. A Mother's Weeping Requiem. Her tears, sealed in a vessel."
The courtyard erupted before Isveth could speak.
An elder staggered backward as if struck. Another pressed both hands flat to her heart and folded forward as though the sentence had bypassed her ears entirely and struck the organ itself.
A young maiden made a sound that was not quite a word and the woman beside her clamped a hand over her mouth to muffle it before it could spread.
Isveth's face had drained of every color her anger had given it.
"You will leave now!"
Her voice broke on the edges.
"Or we will bury you."
Quinlan exhaled through his nose.
"I'll get my answers one way or another, maiden."
Mana poured off him.
It came off his armor in slow coiling ribbons that drifted across the courtyard and sank into the stone, and where it touched the shrine maidens' skin, every one of them felt it.
Bloodlust.
The fury that had turned seventeen thousand dwarves into souls that morning was still in him, coiled down small enough to carry, and for the benefit of the women who had refused him he unfolded it.
The youngest maidens broke first. A girl in the second rank dropped her prayer beads and the beads skittered across the flagstones, their pale fire guttering out. Two more began to weep from the sheer pressure of a feeling they had never experienced.
The elders' hands shook on their staffs. The staff-bearer who had demanded the first blow now stood with her teeth clenched and her old body trembling, her mouth a thin white line.
Isveth held her ground.
She held it because she was the Head Maiden of the Untouched Tomb.
The man in front of her had not moved, yet the world around him had begun to remember what he was.
"Come inside."
The voice came from the tomb.