Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1783: The Villain’s Home

Quinlan’s [Warp Gate] opened onto packed earth and the scent of pine, and the group stepped through into a wide courtyard framed by tall buildings and old-growth forest on every side.

He and Jasmine emerged first with the ease of people coming home, the guests following a step behind, and the gate collapsed with a soft rush of displaced air.

Their eyes turned toward the structure ahead.

A three-story, luxury mansion sat at the courtyard’s center, ivy climbing one wall in a line that suggested a gardener’s hand rather than neglect.

Flanking it were smaller structures: a smithy with tools racked outside its open doors, a long barracks-style residence, a bathhouse whose copper vent trailed lazy steam into the winter air.

Heated cobblestones ran between them, and the grounds were clean, lived-in, and maintained with the kind of care that only came from people who planned to stay.

Alexios scanned the compound in one slow arc, and a grunt left him, already annoyed despite having just arrived. "All this in the middle of nowhere. Someone certainly knows how to live."

"Well," Quinlan mused, "when your enemy who wields infinitely more power than you posts a bounty on your head with a royal boon as the reward, you learn to live away from his cities."

Alexios’s eye twitched.

He remembered signing that decree.

The first and only time the Vraven crown had offered a royal boon for a fugitive’s capture instead of gold, a personal favor from the king redeemable without condition.

It told the continent that Alexios considered this man the most dangerous threat alive.

And the target of that bounty had spent his fugitive months living in a mansion with heated floors and a bathhouse, deep in unmapped forest no hunter had ever trekked, funded by robbing Alexios’s subjects - and the man himself - blind.

In this moment, it felt as though the bastard’s entire existence was an insult to the long life the king led.

"Hie?!"

Two gasps cut his thoughts short.

They came from behind him, soft and involuntary, and when Alexios turned he found both elves frozen where they stood.

Myrasyn’s ears were moving on their own. But these were not the controlled shifts he’d grown accustomed to over the tour nor the performative twitches he believed were more or less involuntary mating calls for a certain infuriating scum.

Though he had no proof.

Instead of those, these ear movements were rapid and uncontrolled, swiveling toward the space behind the group with the urgency of a compass finding north.

Her toes had curled into the earth, her fingers hung loose at her sides, and the color had left her face.

Isveth stood beside her queen with her lips parted and her eyes huge, trembling.

"Q-Quinlan..." Myrasyn’s voice barely carried. "What is standing behind us?"

"Never..." Isveth’s hand found her queen’s arm and gripped. "In all my years, I have never sensed a presence like this. How majestic..."

Quinlan looked at the two elves, and the grin that spread across his face was the slow, satisfied kind that answered nothing.

Alexios frowned, searching for whatever had driven both elves into that state.

It didn’t take him more than a single second.

’Oh...’

Roots. Massive roots wound through the earth like frozen rivers, twisting and braiding across the ground before plunging deep.

They were too large for any tree Alexios had seen in his thousand years of living, and the bark that covered them pulsed with veins of liquid gold that traveled in slow, visible currents beneath the surface.

’What the...’

His eyes climbed.

The trunk rose from those roots like a pillar bracing the sky itself, wider at its base than the mansion’s front wall, its pale silver bark threaded with the same golden veins in branching patterns that shifted as he watched.

It climbed past the mansion’s third floor and kept going, past the treeline of the surrounding forest and kept going, through the canopy overhead that he had mistaken for natural woodland when they arrived and kept going, until the crown spread against the winter sky in a vast iridescent dome of crystalline leaves that shimmered green and gold in rapid, excited pulses, throwing dancing light across the entire compound like sunlight scattered through a prism.

The tree was impossibly, unnaturally tall. It dwarfed the mansion. It dwarfed the forest. It stood like a living monument that had no business existing on a continent where nothing of its kind had been seen in recorded history.

And on one of its highest branches, silhouetted against the vast, empty sky, a very small figure stood with her hands planted firmly on her hips.

"Daddy!! You’re LATE!!" The voice traveled down from the heights with a clarity that defied the distance. "Rosie has been standing here for a FULL hour, waiting! What do you have to say for yourself?!"

Her chest was puffed out so far that Alexios was mildly concerned she might topple from the branch.

Myrasyn and Isveth finally braced themselves enough to turn around.

The motion was identical and simultaneous, as if someone had wound their spines with the same key. Their heads turned with mechanical stiffness, looking more like decorated golems than elves.

Their eyes found the roots first.

Then they climbed. Slowly.

Up the golden veins.

Up the silver trunk that widened past the canopy.

Past the first spreading branches where crystalline leaves began to cluster in shimmering layers of green and gold.

Higher, through the iridescent crown that caught the light in patterns no jeweler could replicate.

Higher still, to the branch at the very top, where a tiny green-skinned girl with vine-like auburn hair stood with her fists on her hips, looking extremely displeased with her father’s punctuality.

Both elves blinked.

Once.

Twice.

Then their eyes rolled back and their bodies went limp.

Quinlan was already moving. He stepped between them, catching Myrasyn against his left side and Isveth against his right before either woman hit the ground.

Their eyes had gone hazy and unfocused, and both women sagged against him like sleepwalkers.

"You could have just joined us for the tour," he called up to the branch, holding both elves upright without effort.

"Hmph!" Rosie scoffed and looked away, chin lifted. "Rosie had very important business! She wanted to impress the pretty elven ladies, and this was the best way to do it!"

Against his sides, both elves shuddered.

It wasn’t just the words. The words were adorable enough on their own, but combined with ’everything’ else...

For elves, beings whose senses were threaded into the living world in ways no other race could comprehend, standing in the presence of a being that was so much more than the fabled Geims from legends...

It was like being submerged. The sensory load was overbearing because Rosie - and the tree, which was a part of her existence - were standing right in front of them in all their glory.

Every golden vein pulsing through the bark sang along their nerve endings.

Every crystalline leaf shimmering above pressed against their perception the way sunlight pressed against closed eyelids.

The warmth, the vitality, the ancient thrumming life of the tree and the small creature bonded to it flooded through them in waves that all their combined years of existence had never encountered.

And the creature responsible for this sensory paradise was a very small, very pouty child who was scolding her father for being late.

The overload hit from both directions at once, and neither elf had the constitution to handle the combination.

Myrasyn’s head lolled against Quinlan’s shoulder. Isveth’s knees buckled fully, and only Quinlan’s arm around her waist kept her from sliding to the ground.

Quinlan chuckled as he looked up at the perch. "Will you forgive me?"

"No!" Rosie scoffed, arms crossed, pouting up at him from the branch. "Rosie’s feet hurt from standing so long!!"

She held the pose for three heartbeats, then peeked over her shoulder. "..."

"!!!" Her gaze caught his face, and she squeezed her eyes shut before whipping her head away.

A few seconds passed.

She peeked again. "..."

Longer this time.

Her lower lip pushed out, trembling between righteous fury and the overwhelming urge to abandon it.

Elisabeth pressed both hands to her sigil and felt her knees soften. "So cute..."

As the Dawn Breaker, whose job description included hunting down terrible monstrosities, the discovery of a being with unknown origins should’ve made her stand at attention.

Instead, she was watching a child try to stay angry at her father and failing spectacularly.

Combativeness never even crossed her mind.

Rosie peeked a third time and didn’t look away.

Her resistance crumbled from the bottom up, the pout dissolving into a wobble, the wobble melting into a helpless smile, and then the smile broke into a grin so wide and so full of joy that the crystalline leaves above her erupted in a frenzy of golden light.

Rosie jumped. "Daddy!!!"

"The child!" Myrasyn’s eyes flew open and she lunged forward, every trace of her daze incinerated by the sight of a small body dropping from such a brutal height.

"She’ll hurt herself!!" Isveth screamed, throwing herself out of Quinlan’s hold, because whatever sensory overload had put her out of commission meant absolutely nothing when a child was plummeting from the sky.

Both women were brimming with a mother’s protective instinct.

But then Quinlan stepped forward. He stood beneath the tree with his hands raised and his palms open, watching the tiny green figure plummet toward him without a flicker of concern.

Rosie hit his palms with a soft thump and a burst of giggles, and Quinlan swept her into his arms and spun on his heel, lifting her high as her laughter rose through the courtyard in the bright, unrestrained way that only a child reuniting with her father could produce.

"Hehehe!! Again! Again!!"