Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1828: Majestic Forest

Seraphiel came through the [Warp Gate] first, walking backward, conducting the royal smithy happenings with both hands and a mesmerizing grin.

"...and old Dain was crying hehe! Kaeli, did you see him? The most venerable master under the mountain, weeping into a hammer you made out of cart parts. The one with the calipers had to sit down on the stairs. And the First Hammer’s face when you left Everwright on the anvil, I thought she was going to propose. To you, to the hammer, unclear, but there was marriage in her eyes somewhere..."

Her bare feet sank to the ankle in snow, and the rest of the sentence went out like a lamp.

Sera had never owned a pair of boots. They suffocated her outright, pinched closed the contact between her soles and the ground that she needed open, and her Vitality was high enough that a little winter had never been a convincing argument.

Winter held the continent of Iskaris. The gate had opened onto a white field before a treeline, fat unhurried flakes drifting down through the grey, her breath blooming silver in front of her face. And past the field stood the forest.

Even from outside, it refused to fit in her eyes. The trees rose like the roots of the sky, trunks wider than watchtowers, climbing until the snowfall blurred them into the white above.

Whole fields of snow rode the canopy’s shoulders the way a mountain range carried them, a second white country hanging overhead, and beneath that impossible roof the spaces between the trunks glowed faintly green.

Green. In midwinter.

Sera stood in the snow with her arms loose at her sides and let the legend look back at her. She had been born in Elvardia and conscripted out of it on her hundredth year, marched from a barracks to a slave block without once being shown her own country’s heart.

The deep forests surrounding Luminareth, the deepest parts of the elven heritage, had reached her anyway. They did so in fragments, in the homesick rambling of older conscripts, in songs that got the details wrong. None of the songs had mentioned that it was this big.

"Kaeli," she breathed. "Kaeli, look. It’s really here... It’s actually..."

Behind her, somebody moaned. It was not a moan of scenic appreciation.

Sera turned around.

Quinlan had Kaelira against a snowbank, or Kaelira had dragged him down into one, the order of operations had stopped mattering several seconds ago. The shy smith of the family was kissing her man with both fists in his collar, steam curling off the two of them where the snow gave up on their skin, and the sound she was making into his mouth, low and starving, belonged to some other elf entirely. Some elf who had definitely never blushed at hand-holding.

*Smooch.*

Sera’s left eye twitched.

The oldest, most culturally significant forest of elvenkind stood twenty steps away, ancient beyond every song she’d ever been sung, and her best friend was devouring their lover in a roadside snowdrift.

"You two are UNBELIEVABLE!" The first elf of the harem descended on the pair and got a fistful of collar in each hand. "The forest is right there! Have at least this much decency, you animals! Up!"

She hauled. They came up still attached at the mouth, which she chose not to dignify. She marched the conjoined disgrace across the white field and under the eaves of the oldest living thing on the continent, scolding the whole way and not slowing down.

Then the forest happened to all three of them at once.

The cold stopped dead at the treeline, the way noise stopped when a door closed, and warmth rose from the earth underfoot like the breath of a banked hearth. The snow stayed outside.

Miles overhead the canopy held its white country against the sky, and what slipped through the gaps came down as light instead: a soft, silvered snow-light that drifted between the trunks in slow columns and laid itself over the moss like frost that had forgotten how to be cold. The air belonged to another season entirely, green and sweet and so dense with the smell of living things that breathing it felt like a meal.

Somewhere far above, a bird sang, and another answered it, unbothered, as if nobody had told the forest what season it was.

Kaelira surfaced from the kiss because the air had changed.

"It’s warm." She blinked at the green around her.

"It is." Quinlan had his head tilted toward the nearest trunk, the same way he’d listened to the dwarves’ flue. "The old trees run their own hearth of sorts. How curious."

Sera wasn’t listening to either of them.

She was already deeper in.

She stepped into a bank of deep moss and her whole body stopped. Warm. The earth of her homeland’s heart was warm under her naked soles in the dead of winter, alive the way a sleeping animal was alive, and the mana of the place rose up through her arches like a tide finding a channel it had been missing.

Her eyes drifted shut. Her arms floated out from her sides, palms open. Pollen, actual pollen, drifted gold through the silver light-columns around her.

"Oh..." she whispered, and her ears trembled.

For a long moment the cheeky grin was nowhere on her, and the first elf of the Villain’s family simply stood in the middle of her homeland’s heart with her toes curled into the warm earth, breathing it in until her breath ran out of room.

"This is what I mean, Kaeli." Her voice had gone soft and drunk. "Feel it with your feet. You have to feel it with your feet. Isn’t nature amazing? You poor thing, you spent your whole life in cellars and forges, and I love you, but a smithy simply can’t compare to..."

*Smooch.*

She opened her eyes and turned around, holding the moment out to her best friend with both hands.

Round two had started without an intermission. Her fingers were buried in his hair, one of his hands had already hiked her thigh up over his hip, and her ears, blazing red, were angled forward the way they angled at a promising billet.

"I don’t believe you two!" Sera’s scoff sent a choir of birds off a branch. "In the holy elven forest! That’s the soul of our people!"

Kaelira broke the kiss by a centimeter. Her eyes had gone dark, and her voice came out in the blunt register she used for load tolerances.

"The soul of our people is warm and soft." She looked pointedly at the moss underfoot. "Good ground. It’ll hold."

"In the name of..." Sera pressed both hands to her face. Between her fingers, a grin was already winning. "Unbelievable. Simply unbelievable."

But from one moment to the next, her expression changed. "Okay, I’m done pretending I care so much about all this nonsense. I sound like Mom. Ugh."

The fight went out of Sera all at once, because it had never really been in her. She looked at her best friend, pinned and glowing and shameless, ears broadcasting on every frequency at once, and the pout melted into the warm, wicked thing that lived at the bottom of all her performances.

"Leave some of him for me, you greedy girl!"