Read Novel Full Chapter 1647 Woman to Women
Chapter 1647 Woman to Women
<My ruin...>
A pause.
<Let me speak with them. Send them to me.>
A meter above the moss, Quinlan's brow ticked up a hair. His Lust Demon did not generally ask for things. She just was, content to observe from his soul realm and chime in here and there, often just amused commentary like a proper backseat gamer.
But now, her voice was serious.
Quinlan didn't know why that was the case, but he trusted her. Thus, he mentally shrugged.
'Sure.'
His hand turned palm up and pulled a seam open in front of his hovering body without lowering himself out of the float. The threshold of his soul realm lit dim at its edges.
"Step through here, ladies. Nyxara wants a word."
The seam stayed open.
Sylvaris was the first to move toward it.
The Vaelorith matron crossed the moss in the long graceful walk her clan had been training their daughters in for thousands of years, and her path took her past the patch of greenery where her own daughter was currently curled tight around her stomach and producing words Sylvaris decided did not exist. It was just the wind cursing like a crude, drunken dwarf, not her little baby, her beautiful, golden-haired, graceful daughter. Sera's blue eyes dragged open against the agony.
She blinked up at her mother through wet lashes.
"...Mom?"
Her voice cracked on it.
"Are... are you really... leaving me... right now?"
Sylvaris lowered into a crouch in a single fluid motion. Her hand settled on the side of her daughter's head, and her fingers eased into the blonde hair at Sera's temple and combed it back behind one long elven ear, slow and patient. The matron's mouth softened.
"Hang in there, sweetling."
Her voice was warm and low.
"Mom is going to be back very soon."
Her thumb brushed the curve of Sera's cheekbone once.
"You can do it."
Sera's lower lip trembled.
"...I can't believe you!!"
The healer hissed it through her teeth at the moss in front of her face. Her mother's hand stayed in her hair. Sylvaris combed once more, the stroke not quite enough to soothe the agony beneath the bones of Sera's skull, and then the matron rose smoothly to her full height again.
She turned toward the seam.
She paused before crossing it, lifted her chin slightly, and turned toward Quinlan. She inclined her body forward in a precise ceremonial bow toward him.
The seam swallowed her.
On the moss, Sera's cheek stayed pressed to the greenery. Her eyes held on the place her mother had just stood. Her brain took a long beat to reach the obvious conclusion and another beat to be visibly outraged about it.
A whimper rolled up out of her throat.
"...She just left me here to suffer..?"
It came out small and indignant. The Dawnbringer's blue eyes were wide and wet and aimed at the empty air her mother had vacated. Her hands remained clamped over her stomach.
"Why is she petting me like a needy kid," she rasped to the moss in front of her face, "and bowing respectfully to my lover...?!"
A pause to gasp.
"...What kind of sense does that make...?!"
Then Lyra, Ria, Shallan, Liora, Orianna, and Raika crossed the threshold one after the other, and the seam closed behind them.
A meter above the moss, Quinlan's awareness drifted a hair past his own chest, curious about what his succubus wanted from the women.
A low purr arrived at the back of his thoughts, just for him.
<No peeking~>
A pause.
<Let me talk to the ladies in private, please. Woman to women.>
His mouth tilted up at the corner inside the trance.
'...Fine.'
He mentally shrugged in her direction a second time and let his attention slide back to the eleven bodies on the moss.
"Keep it up, girls~" he sang and was answered by a fresh chorus of curses and whimpers.
...
The soul realm answered them as they crossed.
The seven women stepped out of the seam onto soft black soil that gave the way old loam gives at the foot of a sacred tree. The air came in through their lungs warm and heavy, like breathing inside a temple at twilight, and it carried the faint sweet undertone of crushed petals turning slowly toward decay.
Above them, the sky was the deep dark of wine at the bottom of an old decanter, packed with stars closer and denser than any constellation Sylvaris's archives had on file, and a red moon held court at the horizon's edge.
Mimi's tree rose at the center of it all, grown larger since the realm had last shown itself to any of them. Heavy demonic vines wrapped its trunk from the soil to the lowest branch and pulsed with a steady pink the color of a heartbeat, then ran outward across the moss in great pulsing veins that traveled all the way to the edges of where the realm could be seen.
Where the veins ran, black roses had bloomed in their wake, petals the deep dark crimson of the script the Bloodfather had been authoring on his own skin a few minutes earlier.
The realm was the lord's house. Or at least, it should've been.
However, something was strange.
Every woman in the line felt it land in her chest at the same moment.
Then the throne came into view at the foot of Mimi's tree, rooted into the soil where the heaviest of the demonic vines converged. Braided vine and dark bark and a high back the carving of which had grown since the seat had last answered to a single lord. Pink heart-light pulsed dim across its arms.
A woman was sitting on it.
She had her elbow on one armrest and her cheek propped against her knuckles. Her long dark hair fell straight down the curve of her body and pooled black against the bark. Her demonic markings glowed faintly across her collarbones and the tops of her arms, steady and rhythmic, pulsing in time with the heartbeat of the realm itself. Her glowing pink eyes had been waiting since before the women crossed.
Her shoulders sat square against the bark. Her body was still. Whatever silly provocation usually lived at the corner of her mouth had been folded away. The succubus the line had come to know was a lovesick demon who pouted when Quinlan ignored her for five minutes and openly drooled when he flexed his biceps...
That demon was not in the throne.
The thing in the throne was older and worse than anything they could comprehend.
The pressure arrived before her voice did. It rolled outward from the seat in a patient wave and pressed down against them from every direction at once. The roses tilted toward her without any wind. Each woman in the line felt her own heart become aware of itself for the first time, every individual beat suddenly a thing she could feel landing inside her ribs.
The Primordial Demon of Lust was looking at them.
Lyra got her voice working first.
The shieldmaiden's throat had gone dry under the weight that had landed on the realm, and the words she pushed out came thin, formal and careful and measured.
"...Lord Quinlan said you wanted to speak to us... But first..."
A pause.
Then the shieldmaiden's pink head turned a careful inch, taking in the wine-dark sky, the crimson roses along the soil, the carved throne. The realm she was looking at was not the realm she had crossed the threshold expecting to see.
"...Lord Quinlan's soul realm has always been pure and serene," she added, the words flattening further against the air. "This is... wrong."