Read Novel Full Chapter 1611 Sangomar
Chapter 1611 Sangomar
"I am Archduke Vasilen Sangomar."
The voice was dry as paper and smooth as silk, ancient in a way that made centuries feel like hours.
It came from a throat that should not have been able to produce sound and filled the chamber without effort, each syllable pronounced with the careful precision of someone who had been speaking when language itself was young.
The living corpse's skeletal hand lifted from the armrest, one finger extending toward the dwarf.
"And you, Primordial, will cease this graceless skulking through borrowed eyes."
The red eyes burned brighter.
"Come before me as you are, or do not come at all."
Isveth's gaze jumped from the dwarf to the throne and back again.
"What are you? What happened to the Holy Daughter? This is her resting place! Where is she?"
The Archduke did not look at her.
His red gaze remained fixed on the dwarf's visor, on the borrowed vision behind it, and Isveth might as well have been furniture for all the acknowledgment she received. The elders clutched each other behind her. One of them tried to speak and produced only a thin wheeze.
Silence.
The Archduke waited.
In the courtyard above, Quinlan's mind was turning.
He had seen ancient menace before. The undead lords of the Covenant were old. Dangerous. Steeped in the kind of malice that came from existing too long with nothing but hatred and an eternal and unquenchable thirst for 'more'.
This was different. Layer upon layer of accumulated existence pressed down on everyone in that chamber like sediment turning to stone.
The creature on the throne radiated weight. The weight of a being that had been powerful when the world was young and had simply never stopped existing.
It felt less like facing an undead lord and more like what Quinlan imagined staring at a god would feel like.
If said god wasn't a naive hypocrite.
In fact, the presence reminded him most of the primordials.
<Nyxara?>
<No comment, my adorable Ruin~>
The demon in his soul was having a wonderful time. He could hear it in her voice alone, that lilting amusement she got when she knew what he didn't and had no intention of sharing.
She'd already made her position clear. His life to explore, not hers to narrate.
Helpful as always.
Quinlan exhaled.
"Are you a vampire?"
The chamber detonated.
"VAMPIRE?!"
"They're legends! Children's tales!"
"Evil blood-drinking monsters from the old stories!"
"Did he- did that thing drain the Holy Daughter?! Is that what happened to her?!"
The elders were screaming over each other, their voices cracking against the vaulted ceiling in overlapping waves of horror.
Isveth had gone pale as bone. Her blade was still raised but her arms had locked in place, fixed on the figure on the dais with the look of someone watching a myth climb off the page.
The Archduke closed his eyes.
He did not answer. He did not acknowledge the screaming women or the accusations or the blade pointed at his chest.
He simply lowered his hand back to the armrest and let his head rest against the high back, and the gesture carried more contempt than any words could have managed.
If the Primordial was not coming, then this audience was over.
"Leave, then."
The doors began to swing shut.
"Wait."
The dwarf spoke again, and the doors slowed but did not stop.
"If I come in there, do you intend to harm me?"
The Archduke's lids parted.
"Do not presume..."
The air in the chamber collapsed.
Bloodlust erupted from the shriveled corpse like a pressure wave, so vast and so sudden that Isveth's knees buckled and the elders went down together.
The killing intent of a being that had ended so many lives it no longer remembered them as individual deaths, only as a single continuous act stretched across epochs.
The Archduke's fangs caught the sourceless light, long and sharp and ivory-white against the desiccated ruin of his face. His red gaze blazed with power that spilled from it like smoke, curling through the air, and when he spoke again his voice filled the chamber like a funeral hymn.
"...that I would require a trap to harm you."
Then the pressure vanished.
The bloodlust cut off as cleanly as it had arrived, leaving Isveth gasping on her hands and knees and the elders sobbing against the black marble floor.
Quinlan held the Archduke's gaze through the dwarf's eyes.
A long second passed. Then another.
His instincts were quiet. No alarm, no coiling tension in his gut. The creature on the dais had just demonstrated he could flatten everyone in this chamber without rising from his seat. If he wanted Quinlan dead, the threat would have come with the demonstration.
"Fine."
...
In the courtyard, Quinlan abruptly stood.
The young shrine maidens were still in their ring around him, their ears pinned flat and their wide stares enormous. They had felt an echo of it, a ripple that had passed through the stone and touched the air above.
"My lord?"
The copper-haired girl was closest. She was looking up at him with her wet-leaf gaze and her freckled face pale, her hands clasped together so tightly the knuckles had gone white.
"Is everything... is everything all right?"
Quinlan's gauntlet came down on her head.
He ruffled her hair once, gently, his palm passing over the copper strands and brushing against one of her long ears in a way that made it twitch violently.
"Thanks for taking care of me."
She made a small yelp.
The other maidens erupted in whispered chaos behind her, but Quinlan was already moving, the gray pilgrim's robe still draped over his pauldrons, and his hand came up.
"[Warp Gate]."
The portal opened where he had last seen through the dwarf, and Quinlan stepped through.
...
Isveth was still on her hands and knees, her blade flat against the marble where it had fallen. The elders lay where the bloodlust had dropped them, tear-streaked and shaking. None of them had risen.
Quinlan emerged three paces from the dais and looked at the vampire with his head held high.
"So," the Archduke spoke, words coming out rusty from a throat that wasn't used in a very, very long time. "The Primordial does have manners after all."
"Who are you exactly and what do you want from me?" Quinlan demanded, receiving a dismissive sigh.
"The impatience of the young. You have not even greeted me properly, and already you demand purpose."
Quinlan's eye twitched behind his helm.
He'd felt this before. The primordials spoke to him the same way, that particular cadence reserved for children who had wandered into rooms meant for adults. In Iskaris, he was a walking calamity. Kings and dukes plotted his death. Queens allied with or chased after him. Entire nations changed their modus operandi when he stepped into their borders. And this corpse looked at him like he was a boy who'd tracked mud into the parlor.
Then the ancient features shifted. The weariness remained, but beneath it surfaced a flicker of genuine interest, a crack in the mask of indifference he had worn since his eyes opened.
"Not even a blink's worth of time ago, I cast my lure into the abyss, expecting to count eons before it caught. If it caught at all…" The red gaze held him, observing Quinlan from head to toe. "Yet the throw landed before I could close my eyes. Perhaps fortune decided to grace me at long last."