Read Novel Full Chapter 1609 You Dare!
Chapter 1609 You Dare!
"Come inside."
The voice came from the tomb.
Ancient and worn thin, dry as paper folded a thousand times, and yet it carried through the courtyard without effort. Every shrine maiden within earshot froze where she stood.
The bloodlust cut off as if someone had closed a valve.
Quinlan's helmet tilted toward the mausoleum.
Isveth's hand had not yet left her sash, but her eyes had jumped past him toward the tomb and stayed there.
"What was that?"
"You-" An elder found her voice first, cracked and trembling. "You dare! You throw your filthy tricks at us to shake our faith!"
"Cheap theatrics from a cheap villain!" another spat.
Then the tomb's doors parted.
...
They parted slowly, in the way that doors which had not moved in epochs were bound to. Stone ground against stone with a sound like a mountain clearing its throat.
Every shrine maiden in the courtyard made a sharp sound, a breath that went out and forgot how to come back in.
The staff-bearing elder dropped her staff.
It clattered against the stone and rolled a half-turn before lying still, and she did not bend to pick it up, because she was no longer entirely inside her body.
"The doors," Isveth breathed.
"Closed," another elder finished for her. "Since she decreed it."
"The scripture is clear-"
"Not once in all the epochs-"
They were speaking at the air, each woman reciting the same impossibility in her own words because none of them could hold it alone.
Quinlan took a step forward.
Isveth's blade cleared the sash in a single motion. "Stop."
He ignored her.
He walked until the mausoleum's shadow touched his boots, crouched, and pressed his gauntleted palm flat against the stone.
"I said stop!"
A pulse of mana left his hand and poured into the ground.
He called upon earth manipulation. The pulse spread in a slow expanding web, every grain of rock and packed soil reporting back to him.
The courtyard, the foundations beneath the sanctuaries, the old bones of the sanctuaries themselves laid so long ago the mortar had become indistinguishable from what it held.
Then the tomb.
And it stopped.
It hit a wall at the threshold and slid off like his mana had walked into sheet glass.
Quinlan's brow twitched behind the helmet.
He tried again.
This time the reach drove down, a thousand meters straight into the earth's guts, through bedrock and cold hollow pockets that had never felt sunlight, and from there it climbed. Up through strata, old water tables, then toward the tomb from below.
It stopped a clean hundred meters beneath the floor.
'Hmm…'
Isveth was shouting something at him. The elders were shouting louder. The noise rolled off the back of his helmet without sticking.
He straightened and lifted his palm. "[Warp Gate]."
A ring of black light opened in the air beside him and a body dropped out of it and hit the flagstones with the dull weight of something very heavy and not quite awake.
Thordak Ironfold, formerly Lord of Kharn Moldur, currently subjugated and unconscious, lay on his side in the courtyard of the holiest elven site on the continent.
The courtyard broke open a second time.
"A dwarf?!"
"A DWARF on her ground!"
"HE DARES BRING A DWARF TO HER TOMB?!"
"They're very sturdy," Quinlan explained.
Isveth's blade was suddenly at his throat.
"What is this?" she hissed.
"My sacrifice."
"You will NOT-"
"I'm a little paranoid of what's inside. Sending my dwarf in first."
"You will not defile-"
"You go too."
The blade trembled.
Isveth's pale brow creased beneath her silver braid, and for one whole second the courtyard was quiet enough to hear the cold air still rolling out across the stones.
"…What?"
"Let's unearth this mystery together, shrine maiden." Quinlan's voice came out almost lazy. "Are you not curious?"
He tilted his helmet.
"We've been invited inside. Let's see what's going on."
"A PLOY!!!"
"Head Maiden, do not listen, he-"
"Technically," Isveth interrupted.
The elders went silent so fast it was almost an audible noise.
"…Technically," she said again, slower, as if trying the word on. "Nothing in the scriptures forbids entry. It was never forbidden. It was only… not done. Out of respect. The decree was that she not be disturbed. Not that we could not go inside... If we're very quiet, her rest will not be disturbed..."
"BLASPHEMY!"
"SHE IS CORRUPTED BY HIS WORDS!!"
"Shrine maiden," Quinlan's cold voice came. "Quiet the screeching hags or I will."
"You impatient, crude-"
He shrugged and flicked two fingers.
Thordak's unconscious body lifted a hand's width off the flagstones and began to drift, slow and steady, toward the open doors.
"Wait!"
Isveth's voice cracked on the word.
Quinlan paused the float. The dwarf hung in the air halfway across the courtyard.
"I-" She swallowed. Her braid had slid over her shoulder. "I will go."
The elders lost their minds.
Several of them reached for her at once. Her shoulders stiffened under their hands, her jaw set. Then the staff-bearing elder who had dropped her staff bent, picked it up again, and said, quietly:
"Then we go with her."
Despite their previous reluctance, the elders did not need much convincing, their wrinkled faces far too curious.
...
Not everyone had gone inside, however.
Quinlan, for one, stayed outside, together with the younger shrine maidens who had been left in the courtyard by the elders' decision, too young for whatever was about to happen.
They stood in a loose scatter where the arc had been, prayer beads clutched too tight, robes not quite retied from their sprint out of the dormitories, ears sticking up through silver and gold and copper hair in little twitches that tracked the silence.
Every one of them was looking at him.
They were looking at him with enormous eyes.
Quinlan looked at these sheltered, innocent-looking youngsters and with a serious tone, said,
"Please take care of me."
Every pair of ears twitched at once.
A girl near the front, copper-haired with a constellation of freckles across the bridge of her nose and eyes the color of wet leaves, opened her mouth and closed it and opened it again.
"…W-what do you mean, my lord?"
"My lord?!" another hissed beside her, scandalized.
"He is not your lord!"
"I don't know what else to call him!"
"He's the villain!"
"But he asked us to take care of him…"
"What villain does that?"
As the young maidens chittered and hissed at each other, Quinlan lowered himself onto the flagstones and crossed his legs. His lips parted.
"[Overlord's Eyes]."
The afternoon light of the courtyard folded away and the inside of the tomb bloomed behind his vision instead, seen through a dwarf's half-cracked eyelid as Thordak drifted along at ankle-height through a corridor.
Isveth's boots moved ahead of the dwarf's floating carcass. The elders' staffs tapped behind.
In the courtyard, Quinlan's body went still.
The young maidens went still with it.
The copper-haired one's ears gave a long, slow twitch. She looked at the girl beside her. The girl beside her looked back.
Another further along the arc glanced at both of them, then at the seated armored figure with the helmet tilted down and the faint red glow leaking from the visor seam, and chewed her lip until it went pale.
"…He asked us to take care of him," the copper one whispered.
"So?! The Head Maiden did not order us to do anything."
"Exactly! We have no orders. I don't know what to do…"
"Let's just do what we feel like doing!"
"Yeah, everyone's free to do as they want!"
Despite the freedom, the young maidens seemed to have reached a consensus.
Five of them, then seven, then nine, drifted in around him in a loose protective ring on the stones.
The copper girl ended up closest. She settled onto her heels about an arm's length from his knee, peeking at the helmet and then away, then back again, ears flicking every time her eyes caught the red glow.
"Are you there…?"
No response.
"Do you think he can hear us?" another whispered.
"He's right there."
"He cast a strange spell…"
"I don't know what to think anymore..."
A small maiden at the back, barely sixty years old if that, with pale yellow hair that had come half loose from its braid, slipped out of the ring entirely and ran for the dormitories with her bare feet slapping against the stone.
She came back a short bit later with a long gray pilgrim's robe bundled against her chest, a thick wool that the shrine kept stacked for travelers who arrived in winter without cloaks, and she stood behind him and hesitated.
"It is cold," she whispered to nobody in particular.
She draped the wool around his pauldrons. The yellow-haired girl sat down beside the copper one, hugging her knees as her heart tried to jump out of her chest.
None of them spoke for a while after that.
Quinlan watched through the dwarf's visor.
A grand surprise was awaiting him.