Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1610  Into the Depths

The dwarf's body made for a rather unorthodox camera.

Through Thordak's eyes, Quinlan watched the interior of the tomb.

The corridor ran long with pale, smooth stone underfoot.

Isveth led the procession with her blade drawn and her braid swinging behind her in rhythm with her steps, refusing to let a dwarf walk first into the sacred grounds. It had to be an elf.

The elders followed in a tight knot, their staffs tapping against the silver-veined floor in a pattern that might have been ceremonial once but now sounded a lot like nerves.

They were a weeping mess.

Quietly, at first. The staff-bearer who had demanded Quinlan's blood was the first to crack. Her shoulders began to shake three minutes into the descent, and she pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth as if she could push the sound back in. It didn't work. Another elder followed. Then a third.

"Control yourselves," Isveth said without turning.

"Forgive us, Head Maiden." The staff-bearer's voice came out wet. "We are not... We have spent our lives outside these walls. Our mothers spent their lives outside. Their mothers before them. A hundred generations of women who loved this place more than they loved their own breath, and none of them ever..."

She couldn't finish.

Isveth said nothing.

She kept walking, and her silence was the only answer she could give because the same pressure was bearing down on her throat, the same impossible weight of finally crossing a threshold her entire lineage had only ever dreamed of.

This was sacrilege, and every one of them privately knew it was also the most extraordinary hour they had ever lived.

In the courtyard, beneath a draped wool robe and surrounded by nine pairs of flicking ears, Quinlan's brow twitched behind his helm.

This was a dungeon, not a labyrinth, which were the unique constructs with dozens of levels, full of respawning monsters he and Ayame cleared in the beginning of their journey.

Unlike labyrinths, dungeons were manmade constructs. Technically a goblin lair counted as a dungeon too, no matter how crude.

But despite that, he had expected wards, barriers, mechanisms, something. A tomb sealed for epochs should have been layered with defenses that made the Greymount look like a children's puzzle box.

He had been ready for them. The dwarf's body would absorb whatever the tomb threw at it, a pressure plate, a sigil that fired when the wrong blood crossed it, a corridor that collapsed onto the unworthy.

There were a hundred ways an ancient site could murder its trespassers, and he had picked Thordak as canary precisely because the dwarf was sturdy enough to survive a few of them and expendable enough that it didn't matter if he didn't.

But instead, the path was open — clear and almost inviting.

'Hm.'

His unease grew with every step.

A descending staircase appeared at the four-hundred-meter mark, wide enough for ten people to walk abreast, the stairs carved from the same pale stone and spiraling downward into darkness. The elders clustered together at the top, their staffs scraping the stone like blind women testing the ground ahead.

Isveth went first.

The staircase was long. Hundreds of steps cut into the tomb's guts, each one worn smooth by nothing but time. There were no torches, no crystals, no light sources of any kind, and yet the stairs were visible in the same sourceless silver glow that had followed them since the entrance.

At the bottom, a door.

Double doors, black iron, thirty meters tall. They were covered in script that Quinlan didn't recognize. Symbols etched into the metal in spiraling patterns that might have been a language or might have been something older.

They parted as the procession approached.

Stone ground against stone with the sound of a mountain clearing its throat, and the doors swung inward slowly, revealing what lay beyond.

The chamber was built for something that did not like the sun.

That was Quinlan's first impression as the dwarf crossed the threshold. The ceiling vaulted upward into shadow, and the air that rolled out to meet them carried the cold of a place that had been sealed long enough to forget what warmth felt like.

Crimson banners hung from the walls, ancient silk faded to the color of dried blood, their edges frayed into threads that swayed in a wind that didn't exist. Candelabras stood in alcoves, unlit and cobwebbed.

The floor was black marble veined with red, and Quinlan could see his own reflection in its surface, distorted by centuries of dust.

At the far end of the chamber, a throne became visible.

It sat on a raised dais, carved from the same black marble as the floor, high-backed and severe. The armrests ended in clawed grips. The seat was wide enough for a giant.

In it sat a corpse.

Shriveled. Desiccated. The skin had long since pulled tight over the bones, leaving a gaunt shell draped in robes of black and crimson.

The robes were rich, fine fabric that had survived where the flesh had not, embroidered with silver thread in patterns that matched the script on the doors. A high collar framed the skull-like face. Hands like bundles of dry sticks rested on the armrests.

The shrine maidens screamed. The sound ripped through the chamber and bounced off the vaulted ceiling and came back twisted, and the elders stumbled backward as one, their staffs clattering to the ground.

"Holy Mother preserve us!"

"The daughter did not rest here alone?!"

"What IS that?!"

"That's not the corpse of a female elf…!!"

They surged forward.

"Stop."

Quinlan's words tore out of the dwarf's throat.

"Use your damned eyes."

Isveth froze three paces from the dais. The elders froze behind her. Every shrine maiden in the procession went still as if nailed to the floor by the sound of it.

"That thing… is alive."

The corpse's eyes opened.

They were deep red. Dark enough to swallow light, bright enough to burn. Tired, impossibly tired, and yet what moved behind them was power so vast and so ancient that the air in the chamber pressed down on everyone present like a physical weight.

Isveth's blade came up. The steel trembled in her grip.

The elders stumbled backward. One of them fell. Another made a sound that wasn't quite a word and kept making it, a low keening noise that she couldn't seem to stop.

The menace rolling off the figure on the throne was nothing like Quinlan's.

His bloodlust in the courtyard had been wrath. Hot, immediate, a promise of pain that would arrive in the next heartbeat if provoked. A predator baring its teeth.

This was different.

This was something that had been powerful when the mountains were young and had never stopped being powerful since.

Refined over epochs.

Compressed into a shell that barely contained it. The pressure didn't threaten violence, it simply existed, as natural and as terrible as gravity, and every living thing in the room knew instinctively that they were standing in the presence of something that had eaten civilizations and forgotten their names.

Those red eyes swept the chamber.

They passed over Isveth without interest. They passed over the shocked elders. They lingered on the dwarf at the center of the room, and then they looked through him.

Directly at Quinlan.

In the courtyard above, Quinlan's body went rigid.

The young shrine maidens noticed immediately. They had been sitting in their protective ring for nearly ten minutes, watching his armored form with nervous attention.

"Something's wrong!"

"Form up! Form up around him!"

They didn't know what they were doing. They were young, untrained, armed with nothing but prayer beads and the kind of courage that came from not knowing any better.

But they threw themselves into a ring around him anyway, their slender bodies facing outward, their long ears pinned flat with fear, and if whatever was attacking him came through that door, they would be the first things it met.

...

Inside the tomb, the corpse spoke.

"I am Archduke Vasilen Sangomar."