Read Novel Full Chapter 1837: Pleading Elves
Chapter 1837: Pleading Elves
Sera had both hands pressed over her mouth, and above them her eyes were shining and enormous, because the healer bought from a slave block with zero rights to her name was standing on a balcony listening to her people rename themselves after the man she loved.
Myrasyn lifted a hand and the square hushed by degrees. Her voice gentled at last, and she let it shake.
"Quinlan Elysiar. Son of Luminara." She turned fully to face him, the sunset behind her, her back to her whole people. "We are not offering you a throne. Thrones are things men take, and you are no mere man. You fed our refugees and freed our slaves and put my crown back on my head when its own council had thrown it in the mud, and you never once asked us for anything at all."
Her hands gathered her robes.
"So we are not granting. We are asking." Her eyes were bright and level. "Please. Accept us."
And the last Queen of the Elves knelt to Quinlan.
She went down slowly, in full regalia, one knee to the balcony’s living wood, head bowed, while the whole city watched. The woman who had dissolved an alliance, survived her own council’s chains, and ruled her people through four ages knelt before him alone with the sunset on her crown.
Isveth knelt to him next, silent, both knees, hands folded, the way one kneels to what one worships rather than what one serves.
Behind them, in the doorway, every maid of both shifts sank down in a whispering of silk.
Below, the square drew breath, and the pleading rose up the palace face in a hundred thousand voices at once.
"Accept us, Holy Son!"
"Accept us!"
Mothers lifted children over the crowd toward the balcony.
Old soldiers pressed fists to hearts and shouted with the young. Somewhere in the mass a district began to sing the name, "E-ly-sa-ria," and three more picked it up off-beat, joy and begging fused into one enormous sound rolling up against the palace like surf.
And then the trees answered.
Rosie had slipped forward unnoticed, a tiny figure at the balcony’s edge, and pressed both small palms flat to the living rail with her face screwed up in ferocious concentration, and the city bloomed.
It went out from the palace in a wave.
Down the great trunks, along every branch and walkway, across the canopy above upturned faces, buds swelled and split and opened by the million, small white blossoms, the deep forest’s own, out of season and out of reason, until the whole of Luminareth stood flowering in midwinter with the last of the sunset caught pink and gold in every petal.
Petals came down over the square like warm snow.
The crowd’s roar broke into a wordless, keening awe.
Elves fell to their knees mid-cheer just from the sight of it. The blossoming of the deep wood, the flower of the oldest stories, opening over a new nation on its founding night: no sign from any heaven could have said it plainer.
Rosie peeled her hands off the rail, wobbled once with the effort, and looked up at Quinlan with her whole face ablaze in triumph.
"Rosie’s roots barely managed to reach close enough... She was trying to hurry it up the whole day..." she whispered up at him.
"...Thank you, Rosie." He reached down and ruffled her curls, and the most feared man on the continent had to take one breath before his voice agreed to stay level. "It’s beautiful."
"Hehe~!!" she beamed.
Quinlan took a breath and stepped to the rail.
The square saw him move and the sound climbed. Then he raised one hand, and the noise cut off so fast the silence rang. Hundreds of thousands of faces stayed upturned in the petal-fall, Myrasyn unmoving on one knee at his side, and his mother’s people waited, from wall to root to canopy, on one man’s answer.
Quinlan wasn’t big on lengthy speeches, and he did not reach for one now.
He let her out instead.
It rose off him slow and warm, Luminara’s bloodline, the aura he had only ever loosed over battlefields, and this time there was no war in it at all.
It rolled out over the square like the first hour of spring, like a hand laid on every head at once, and every elf it touched felt her, the Progenitor, the mother of every root and ear and season of them, present and warm and unmistakably, impossibly proud.
The square wept. There was no shame in it and no exceptions to it. Hardened rangers wept. Magistrates wept. The districts that had been singing sank down all together, and this kneeling was nothing like surrender, faces up, eyes streaming, hands raised into the petal-fall as the warmth poured over them, an entire civilization folding to its knees in joy.
Elves had knelt to Quinlan before, on battlefields, weapons in the mud, dropped by shock and grief and an aura that had walked through their ranks like weather. Nobody had asked them.
Tonight they had dressed for it, rehearsed it, wanted it, begged for the right to do it, and the whole living city went down together, tier upon tier into the blossoming canopy, and stayed down, laughing and crying and holding their children up into the light, one people deciding, joyously, on its knees, to belong to him.
"I accept," Quinlan decreed, and the canopy carried it to every last leaf. "You’re my people now."
The grin arrived, slow and villainous and warmer than any oath. "And I take care of what’s mine."
The sound that rose back up off the square had no name. It shook petals from the canopy in sheets, and it startled birds off branches half a city away.
Sera was weeping openly and not bothering to hide it, and beside her Kaelira had both hands pressed over her heart, eyes streaking.
Myrasyn, still on one knee, looked up at him through the falling white with her whole reign paid off in her eyes.
And a window unfolded across Quinlan’s vision.
There was no sound to it and no light.
It simply opened, mid-kneel, mid-roar, a pane of quiet, glowing script hanging between him and his cheering nation, and Quinlan Elysiar went very still.
[The elven people of Iskaris have acknowledged your dominion.]
[Peoples of Iskaris conquered: 1/4]
[Conquer the dwarven people, the human people, and the beastkin people to claim rulership of Iskaris.]
[Reward: ???]