Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1617  End of a Legend

A legend was ending in front of them.

Quinlan stood still.

He watched without prayer or gesture, and he kept watching until the last of the robes had folded into the seat and the throne held nothing but a high mound of grey where the Archduke had been.

Then he raised his palm.

He called the earth.

A pulse of mana left his fingers and reached down through the black marble, through the foundations of the tomb, deep into the bedrock where the oldest material sat undisturbed by epochs of weight from above. He drew the finest grain upward. He went deeper, past the layered sediment of the upper strata, and pulled up the dark ore that had been pressed into existence by the world's own gravity over eons. A single fistful of it answered his call and rose to hover above his palm.

He took a full minute over what could have been a heartbeat's work.

The first layer was the body of the urn itself. He thinned the ore into a sheet, curved the sheet into the shape of a vessel, smoothed the seams until no line remained where the metal had folded onto itself. The result was a black urn the size of his forearm, lipped at the top, narrowed at the base.

He kept layering.

Across the body, he etched the Sangomar line as he had glimpsed it on the banners. He pulled fine threads of pale metal from the deeper veins and inlaid them into the etching, tracing every spiral with care. Then he added the night-flowers of Luminara's gardens, small and curling, around the lip. Mirethiel's mother had grown them, and he set them into the urn's collar so the man inside would lie beneath flowers his wife's mother had loved.

The base, he weighted. A coil of the darkest material he'd drawn up, set into the foot so no breeze would move it from where he placed it.

The lid came last.

Onto it he carved a single elven name in flowing script.

Mirethiel.

So her husband would carry her with him into whatever rest awaited.

When he was done, Quinlan called the wind.

A current rose through the room, gentle, aimed only at the high mound of grey on the throne. It coiled around the ash with the patience of a long inhale, gathered every flake, every speck that had drifted to the far corners of the marble, and carried all of it in a quiet spiral toward the open mouth of the urn.

The ash poured in.

When the last had vanished inside, the lid lifted, drifted to its place, and sealed itself with a soft click.

Quinlan lowered his head once.

"I'm sorry for getting carried away," he said quietly. "It was beyond rude of me to offer you a new wife. I didn't respect your loyalty."

The room held the moment.

No one spoke. The maidens behind him did not move. The crimson banners hung still from the walls, and the only sound was the breath of the elders, careful and small, as if loud breathing might disturb the man only just laid to rest.

Then a shaky voice broke through.

"The Holy Daughter..."

It was the staff-bearer. Her wrinkled hand had risen halfway from her sleeve, trembling, and her eyes had moved past the urn to the back of the chamber where a shadowed alcove opened.

"Her coffin-"

"You will not extract the coffin."

Quinlan's voice cut through hers without lifting in volume. The staff-bearer's mouth closed.

"They've earned eternity together. Stay here."

He turned without waiting for acknowledgement.

The shadowed alcove at the back of the hall opened into a side door. He pushed it inward, and a second room unfolded behind it, smaller than the throne hall but no less weighty in what it held.

Paintings.

Dozens of them, hung floor to ceiling along the walls, lit by the same sourceless glow that had followed him since the entrance. Quinlan stepped forward and stopped.

The faces caught him in the chest.

He had expected a treasury. Jewels. Relics. The accumulated wealth of an Archduke's long reign, laid out in tribute to the woman he had loved. That was what tombs held.

Not this.

Mirethiel was the most painted. Young in some, with her hair caught up in flowers, laughing at something off-canvas. Older in others, her elven features softened by age in the way only elves aged. The same warm brown eyes in every painting, large and curious, and Quinlan understood immediately what the Archduke had meant about her wandering into his tomb without fear.

Beside her on many canvases, a tall figure with crimson features and ivory fangs, his hand always resting on her shoulder or her waist, his posture always inclined toward her. Vasilen, before the centuries had withered him. Quinlan studied the face. Sharp, severe, ancient even when he had been whole. The painted eyes burned the same red as the corpse on the throne, but the red carried light in these portraits instead of weariness.

Other paintings held two different women.

One was younger than Mirethiel, vampire-pale, with the same severe features as Vasilen and a tilted smile that suggested she'd inherited none of her father's gravity. She appeared first as a child held in Vasilen's arms, then as a girl in court robes, then as a young woman seated on a throne carved with the same spiraling script as the doors of this tomb.

His daughter. The one who had inherited his lands when he left.

The second was an older, sharper version of the girl, the first wife.

Quinlan turned slowly through the room.

There were no 'proper' treasures. The Sangomar Archduke had carved a tomb for his mementos, and the mementos had been only this. Faces. The wife who was killed, the wife he had outlived, and the daughter he had left behind.

Quinlan's eyes lingered on a portrait of Mirethiel laughing into the painter's brush before he stepped further in.

At the back of the room, set into a deep recess of the wall, the coffin waited.

Black marble, twice the height of a tall man, carved with the spiraling script along every face and inlaid with thread that caught the silver light and threw it back gentler. Roses bloomed from the lid in carved relief, every petal cut with a precision no mortal sculptor would have attempted. Her name ran along the lid in flowing elven script, the letters embedded with what looked like crushed pearl.

He raised his palms.

The paintings lifted from the walls in slow rotation. They drifted into the air around him, every canvas suspended at the height it had hung at, none of them touching another. He pulled the coffin from its recess, the marble groaning once as it parted from the wall it had rested against for ages, and lifted it to hover beside the paintings.

"[Warp Gate]."

A ring of black light opened beside him.

Quinlan stepped through.

...

The gate closed behind him in his garden.

The light of his own land welcomed him. The paintings drifted into a quiet halt around him. The coffin and urn both remained hovering in the air.

A small body slammed into his side.

"Daddy!"

Rosie had launched herself across the garden the moment the gate's light touched the ground, and she now had both arms wrapped around his waist and her cheek pressed to the cold metal of his hip plate.

She looked up at him.

The amber eyes that usually held performed wide-eyed innocence looked different today. They had taken in the gathered paintings, the coffin, the urn on its lid. The set of her mouth was quiet. The giant smile she usually wore around him had not surfaced.

"Where do we put them?"

Her voice was soft.

Quinlan's hand came down on the top of her head.

"Let's build."

She nodded once.

They moved to the western edge of the garden, where the slope of the land rose into a wooded rise that overlooked the rest of his territory. The trees here were old, and the ground beneath them had never been disturbed. Rosie's roots had touched it but never broken through.

"Here."

She nodded again.

They worked together.

He called the earth, and the earth answered. He pulled the soil up in layered waves, opening a clean rectangle into the rise of the land. Then deeper, into the bedrock beneath, hollowing out a chamber large enough to house the coffin, the paintings, and the urn with room to breathe. He shaped the walls smooth, carved the ceiling into a low vault, and laid polished slabs of dark ore across the floor.

Rosie worked beside him.

Her roots came up through the ground in a quiet curtain around the room, weaving themselves into the walls he had shaped and threading through the bedrock above and below. Anyone who tried to dig here would meet her.

The mausoleum finished forming around them.

Quinlan led the paintings in first.

He hung each one on the smooth black walls in the order they had hung in the tomb. Every face came home to its place, and the room filled with their gentle glow.

Then the coffin.

He lifted it through the doorway and set it in the centre of the chamber, the elven script on the lid catching the light from the paintings. The carved roses bloomed in the soft glow.

Then the urn.

He placed it right next to her.

The two of them stood for a few long seconds.

Father and daughter, side by side at the entrance of the small mausoleum, looking in at the gathered record of an epoch-long love.

Quinlan crouched.

He turned Rosie to face him, his armoured hand cradling the back of her small head, and he leaned in and pressed his lips to her forehead.

"Thank you."

Her arms came up around his neck.

"Daddy…"

"Watch over them for me, please. My sister and her badass husband rest here."

Her eyes lit up. "I will! No one will interrupt their rest!"

He held her a moment longer. Then he straightened, her arms slid away, and she stepped back to let him go.

...

The tomb of Archduke Vasilen Sangomar was empty when Quinlan returned.

Isveth and the elders waited exactly where he had left them, hands folded in their sleeves, watching the throne in silence.

Quinlan looked at them.

He held the look, taking in their grief and their faith. Their lineage had kept vigil over this tomb for centuries, never knowing the truth of who sat inside.

Then [Synchra] sealed.

The visor flowed up across his face in a wash of red veins. The platinum eyes vanished behind the closing helm, and twin red infernos burned where Quinlan's gaze had been.

"Let's get to work, maidens."