Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1619  The Beloved Son

"Do you deny the First Elf?"

The aide's mouth opened.

"I- of course not, but-"

"Then you will fetch your magistrate, and you will do it now, or I will ask my sister elders to record your hesitation at the next shrine council."

The aide sprinted for the chamber.

…

On a vine bridge between the third and fourth tiers, two elven women had stopped to watch a shrine maiden sprint past them with her tiara sliding and her robes hiked to her knees.

"Have they been eating the wrong mushrooms in the sanctuary garden again?"

"...was that a tiara?"

"That was a tiara."

"Why is she wearing a tiara?"

"And why is it so pretty?"

An elven man leaned out of a treehouse window above them with a sleeping toddler slung across his hip.

"What's happening?" he called, softly, to not wake the child.

"Nothing. Go back inside."

"Something's happening."

"Nothing you need to worry your little head about."

The man shrugged and obeyed.

…

Magistrate Aewyn Vaerlis had presided over the second district of Sylvaenor for sixteen hundred years and had in that time developed a very particular tolerance for interruption.

Religious interruption sat at the bottom of the list.

When her aide burst back into her chamber white-faced and babbling something about a shrine elder on the terrace demanding her attention, Aewyn put her inkstone aside, finished the sentence she was writing, sanded the ink, capped the bottle, and only then stood.

The elder was still on the terrace. Her wrinkled face had hardened into patient fury.

"Elder."

"Magistrate."

"What has happened?"

"The First Elf's only living son is in the root-plaza and he wishes to speak to the city. I am here to request your presence."

Aewyn held the elder's gaze for a full three seconds.

"...say that again."

"You heard me, Magistrate."

It was not the first impossible claim that had ever been shouted into Sylvaenor's air. The shrines bred fanatics the way the markets bred fruit, and every few decades some devout madwoman announced she had been visited by Luminara in a dream and now had instructions for the nation. The last one had lasted two days before her own family had dragged her back to her village.

But the shrine elders did not hoax.

Aewyn's heart began beating rapidly as she descended the spiral staircase with the elder at her heel.

She emerged onto the lowest overlook that opened onto the root-plaza, and her hand stayed on the railing because her knees had reconsidered the job of holding her up.

The plaza below was not empty.

A man sat on the smoothest root at its center. Matte-black plate with crimson veins that pulsed slow and steady. Platinum eyes. Helm drawn back so his black hair caught the afternoon light.

The Primordial Villain. Here, on her city's root-plaza.

Aewyn's hand tightened on the railing. Her first instinct was to call the guard.

Her second instinct arrived before her first had finished.

The air around him was wrong.

Where his boots rested on the wood, small pale flowers had bloomed between the grain. Moss was brightening. A pair of little birds had alighted on the root beside his armored hand and were chirping at each other across his knuckles, and as Aewyn watched, one of them hopped closer. He extended his gauntleted index finger. The bird hopped onto it.

A fawn stood at the plaza's northern edge and watched him without flinching.

He wore the armor of a slaughterer. The birds did not care.

And then the warmth reached her.

She knelt before she decided to.

Her palms pressed flat to the wood before her head followed, kowtowing perfectly. The breath went out of her in one thin line.

"It wasn't a lie..."

Tears rushed forth, against her will.

…

Behind her, more elves were arriving.

A merchant matron came up the steps with a shrine maiden still clutching her sleeve, opened her mouth to complain, and then froze. A heartbeat later she was on her knees. The maiden let go of her sleeve and started looking rather smug.

A senior healer arrived with her apprentice. The apprentice said "Mother, what-" and did not finish the sentence, because she was dragged down to the ground by a master who was already tearing up.

A house matriarch with three daughters. They kowtowed together.

A district recorder. Two warrior-women just come off patrol. A master weaver in the middle of her shift, her hands still chalked. The governor's chief aide.

Every woman who arrived at an overlook saw him, and every one of them went down.

Up through the tiers, on bridge after bridge and platform after platform, the kneeling spread outward like a slow ripple through water.

…

Time passed in silence, save for muted sobs, happy weeping, and birdsong.

The bird that had climbed onto the man's finger had hopped up to his shoulder by the time Isveth's braid reappeared on the far staircase. The Head Maiden crossed the plaza with her pace measured and her eyes forward.

She stopped before him and dipped her head.

"Holy Son. Every house of rank in Sylvaenor has been called. All are present."

He inclined his helm a fraction.

Then he stood.

The bird on his shoulder and the one on his vambrace took wing together, circled him once, and settled back on his pauldrons, one on each side, wings folding.

He raised his eyes to the tiers above the root-plaza.

Every overlook, every bridge, every platform was lined with kneeling elves.

The plaza's silence was so complete that Aewyn Vaerlis heard her own heartbeat in her throat.

Then the air around him gathered.

The wood-dust at his boots stirred. His cloak lifted. The two birds remained exactly where they were, as if nothing beneath them had changed.

He rose.

The root he had been sitting on was beneath him, then below him. Slowly, the armored figure lifted until he hovered three man-heights above the plaza floor, then higher, then higher still, until the tiers that had been looking down on him were looking level, and the ones above were looking down only barely.

He came to rest in open air between the heart-tree's great branches, suspended in the afternoon light. The pair shuffled their feet. Neither flew away.

Aewyn's breath would not move as he spoke.

"My name is Quinlan Elysiar."

His voice was not loud yet it reached her easily, and it reached the weaver three tiers above, and it reached the father in his treehouse window, at the same volume, as if he had spoken into each ear alone.

The title that had been spat at him in reports, wanted posters, and council edicts was coming next. Aewyn knew it. She had seen it inked onto scrolls that crossed her desk, read it in the proclamations of three separate nations, braced for it the moment her knees had found the wood.

"I am the man you might know as the Primordial Villain."

Aewyn's hand went white on the railing.

Then the golden warmth that had been rolling off him in slow waves grew.

It brightened until the afternoon light around him became the lesser of the two, until the heart-tree's leaves caught the glow and threw it back in green and gold, until every kneeling woman on every overlook felt the warmth settle over her like a mother's hand.

At once, all elves understood on an instinctive level:

'She loves him,' Aewyn thought.

That warmth was Luminara herself saying, 'My son is the villain, and I love him more than anything.'

Then he spoke again.

"I am the son of the First Elf, Luminara."

A sound went through the tiers. The sound of several thousand elven women taking the same breath at the same moment and not letting it out.

"And I am here to ask for your help."

The plaza broke with a wave of confusion so physical it had weight. Heads that had stayed bowed lifted. Eyes that had been pressed closed opened and searched the women beside them for confirmation, for any face that might be making sense of what had just been said.

HE needed help?

The Primordial Villain?

The one who had walked through dwarven forts the way a child walked through dry leaves?

He was hovering in the air above Sylvaenor's heart-tree, draped in their ancestor's love, with songbirds on his shoulders, and he was asking for their help.

Aewyn's mouth had fallen open.