Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1836: Their Truth

Myrasyn led them down the processional hall with Rosie enthroned back on her shoulders, and the palace had dressed itself the way its people had: garlands of white blossom wound the pillars, lamps burned low and warm, and staff in ceremonial white lined both walls, each of them bowing to the Holy Son as he passed, deep and held.

Nobody spoke. A palace that housed thousands made no sound but their footsteps, and above the queen’s crown Rosie hummed a tiny tune and vibrated with the effort of containment, both hands clamped over her own mouth for safety so she wouldn’t spoil anything.

The great doors stood shut at the end of the hall, and from beyond them came a sound like the sea, if the sea wore silk.

Voices. Thousands on thousands of voices, held low, waiting, a pressure of presence that leaned on the doors from the far side.

Myrasyn stilled for a breath, melancholy plain on her face.

Then she turned toward the doors, and everything else fell away from her by degrees. Her shoulders set, her hands folded, and whatever had been rehearsed all day rose up in her and stood ready.

"Isveth."

"My Queen."

Myrasyn lifted Rosie down from her shoulders and set her at Quinlan’s side. Then the two women walked ahead, alone, the queen and the Head Maiden, matched step for step down the last length of the hall, and laid their hands on the great doors together, one leaf each.

"Quinlan Elysiar, Son of Luminara," Myrasyn said, without turning around. Her voice had changed. This was the voice from the sky above a battlefield, the one that had ended a nation. "Please face your people."

The doors parted, and the evening poured in.

High on the palace’s living face the balcony ran wide as a courtyard, and beyond its rail lay the heart of Luminareth, and the heart of Luminareth was full.

The square below was packed to its edges, wall to root to tree-line, and it did not end at the square: elves filled the terraces above it, the walkways, the great branches themselves, tier upon tier rising with the canopy until faces became points of pale gold in the leaves. Hundreds of thousands. All in ceremonial garb, whites and greens and golds, entire districts dressed like festival day, and all of them silent.

Sunset came in level across the canopy, lighting the whole gathering from the side, and the horns of shaped heartwood sang out over the city, one long note from every quarter at once.

No one cheered. Quinlan noted that the way he noted a drawn blade. Hundreds of thousands of elves watched him step out onto the balcony without a single voice rising, because whatever this was, it had not happened yet, and every soul in the square knew it.

"Oh," Sera breathed at his left, all the theater gone out of her.

Kaelira said nothing at all. Her hand found the back of his sleeve.

Myrasyn stepped to the rail.

When she spoke, the canopy itself seemed to carry her, the living acoustics of the city bearing her voice out and down until it reached the farthest branch without her ever seeming to raise it.

"Elves of Luminareth. Elves of every wood, every den, every hollow of Iskaris. You know me."

A movement through the crowd like wind over wheat.

"I was Queen of the Elves under the Elvardian Alliance. I ruled you under its law, I sent your daughters to its wars, and when its council found me inconvenient, it named me traitor and chained me in the dark, and not one clause of all that fine law lifted a finger for me."

Her voice held a flat, carrying calm, somewhere far past wavering.

"You have heard what I declared above the battlefield. I will say it again tonight, on holy ground, so there is no elf alive who doubts it. Elvardia is dead. I killed it."

The square did not cheer that either. It exhaled, thousands of chests at once, the sound of a people letting a dead thing finally hit the ground.

"And I do not come to resurrect it under a new coat of paint." Her hands settled on the rail.

She turned toward him, though her voice still reached every leaf.

"Elvardia made criminals of its finest smiths." Kaelira’s breath stopped.

"It sold its healers to slavers with contracts and called it conscription." Sera’s chin came up.

"It chained its own queen and voted itself righteous while it waited for the strong to come and eat it. That was what we built, the last time we built a nation on law and council and crown. Law can be rewritten by whoever holds the pen. Councils can rot. Crowns," and her mouth curved, rueful, "can be inconvenient."

Myrasyn’s eyes returned to the square.

"So we asked ourselves, Isveth and I, and every magistrate and matron and mother we spoke to through these long hours of quiet work: what does an elf actually kneel to? Not a document. Not a chair. We are an old people. We remember. In the deepest memory of our race, we were not founded by a law."

Her voice dropped, and the acoustics carried the drop like thunder rolling away. "We were founded by a person. We grew from her hand. We are, all of us, one family’s garden, and the family came home."

Beside her, Isveth stepped forward, and the Head Maiden’s voice rose clear and unshaking, in the register she reserved for scripture, because tonight it was.

"For time immemorial, my order kept faith with a memory," Isveth said. "We tended it the way you tend a grave: with love, and no expectation of an answer. And then the memory came back to us with a voice, and a face, and a family. It fought for this land while its council hid. It wept the Progenitor’s own light over a battlefield of her children."

Her hands rose, palms open, toward Quinlan.

"Tonight, we are admitting what is already true. The faith did not need a nation. The nation walked in the door."

"Hear the decision of the last Queen of the Elves," Myrasyn said, "made with the full assembly of magistrates, ratified by every surviving house, entered into the record by my own hand as the final act of the old law and the first act of the new."

The whole city leaned in. Quinlan felt it, the intake of one enormous breath.

"The crown is dissolved. The council is dissolved. The elven people rise tonight as a holy nation, one nation under one faith, and its founding truth is no document. The only truth we respect is one man."

She let it stand for a heartbeat. "Its law will be written in his name. Its courts will judge in his name. Its borders begin and end at his word. From this night, until the last tree falls, we are the Holy Dominion of Elysaria."

The name went off across the square like a struck bell.

"Elysaria."

Quinlan heard it travel.

He heard the crowd seize it and turn it over, heard the exact rolling instant when hundreds of thousands of elves worked out what the name was carved from.

The sound that tore through their sections then was half sob and half cheer, and it did not settle, it built, voices crashing into voices, his family name sung through elven vowels, a country baptized out of the House of Elysiar.