Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1899: Humiliating a Haughty Cunt

"The gravity of the improvement stifles me."

"...Well, she’s on the right path."

"The temper is in her veins," Alexios said. "Ask her brother or sister."

Somewhere in another world entirely, her brother declined to comment. Lilith, meanwhile, sneezed.

"Don’t look so betrayed, rabid dog," Quinlan told her, warm as anything. "This is generosity. I’m playing marriage counselor for two people who wanted to kill me not long ago."

"I still want to kill you!" Morgana clarified with a guttural shout. Then, for good measure, she added, "And I do not want to be reunited with this wrinkly piece of shit!"

Quinlan leaned back in his stolen chair and considered the deadlock.

Words had failed. Bribery had failed. Devotion had failed.

Time for art.

A pinch of mortar peeled off the fireplace masonry, crossed the study in a lazy spiral, and settled on the desk between the two men, where it became a pair of small clay figures.

One wore a tiny crown. The other held a tiny staff.

And the two figures held each other’s hands, like a perfect husband and wife.

"Look at them, old friend," Quinlan said warmly. "Isn’t this what you want?"

Alexios set down the stamp and gave the sculpture his full administrative attention.

"He looks miserable."

"Come on. At your age, you need a nice, tender woman to take care of you..."

"You just made me stop aging. Stop treating me like a dying man."

"Damn. What a blunder," Quinlan scoffed.

"..." Alexios examined him for a long second with a perfect poker face. Then he sighed. "The likeness isn’t there."

"Hmm..." Quinlan merely glanced at the sculpture, and the staff-bearer gained a scowl and a twitching left eye. "Better?"

"Now it’s accurate." The stamp resumed.

"It could be like this every evening." Quinlan made the little couple wave at the former king. "Tea. Companionship. She might be the continent’s biggest bitch, but she’s still the mother of your children."

"Some relationships just aren’t meant to continue. And I take my tea alone, unless one of my children has time to spare."

"Hm." Quinlan looked down at his figurines with great disappointment, then back up. "Are you sure?"

"Yes-"

The male figure bent the female figure over and positioned himself behind her.

Then...

*Slam!*

Clay began slapping against clay on the royal desk in a smooth, practiced rhythm.

The young clerk set down the agenda, bowed to no one in particular, and evacuated the study at a dignified sprint.

"Quinlan Elysiar!" Jasmine was on her feet with the big ledger raised overhead. "We are in the royal palace! Put those away this instant!"

At the window, Ayame made a sound like a punctured bellows and pitched sideways, catching the frame at the last instant with one flailing hand.

"You... you depraved, shameless...!" Morgana had gone scarlet from collar to hairline. "Destroy them! Destroy them at once!"

Alexios looked at the tiny figures fucking on the desk in front of him.

He kept looking at them.

Jasmine scolded, Ayame wheezed, Morgana shrieked, and the former king of Vraven studied the performance through all of it with wry, unhurried interest.

"Her form was never that enthusiastic," he finally said.

Morgana’s scream cracked one of the study’s windows.

Her staff was in her hand before she finished deciding to draw it.

She braced for the leash.

The subjugation ruled her absolutely. She could not raise a hand against her master. In a real battle she could not so much as jostle his spellwork; the bond would seize her mid-gesture and hold her like a doll until the danger passed.

The bond did not stir.

Her master lounged in his chair, entirely undefended, and the puppets fornicating on the desk registered to the almighty subjugation as exactly what they were to him. Toys. Nothing she did to them would count as an attack on anything.

She was not being permitted. She was beneath preventing.

"You insufferable...!" The Elemental Sovereign aimed her staff at two clay figurines and began to chant.

Runes wheeled around the staff’s head in three rings, her voice shook the inkwells, and the strongest human mage on the continent brought her full ceremony down upon the royal desk.

"[Infernal Gale]!"

A lance of white fire needled across the study and struck the lovers at the exact moment of the downstroke. Clay detonated into powder.

The ash never reached the desk. Quinlan’s mana flared around it, lazy and vast, and her own flames soaked into the powder mid-fall until it landed as two magma figures, cheerfully molten, the female riding the male at a triumphant angle, tiny arms thrown skyward in victory.

Quinlan had not looked away from Alexios. The magic happened around him anyway, obedient to nothing but intent.

"Are you suresure?" he asked, smug in a way that deserved criminal charges.

The crimson swirl of Morgana’s eyes spun into a blur. She chanted again, and a torrent of conjured water drowned the desk, quenching the couple in a shriek of steam.

The steam curled toward the glint in Quinlan’s eyes, condensed, and became two translucent water figures, the female folded fully in half with her ankles hooked behind her own neck, bent in a way only a liquid could survive.

"Stop improving them!" The hearthstones had begun to crack beneath her boots.

Her next verse froze the desk solid. The ice pair simply continued, joints grinding on with tiny, dignified squeaks.

"Are you sure sure sure?" Quinlan asked, undisturbed.

She shattered them with a hammer of compressed air, and the sound that came with it was not a word. The shards whirled up into a wind pair, barely visible at all, their indecency carried entirely by motion, and imagination did far crueler work than clay ever had.

By then, Ayame had both sleeves stuffed against her mouth, shaking hard enough to creak the window frame. Jasmine had stopped scolding by the time the ice arrived, and the big ledger now stood open in front of her face like a privacy screen.

They went through lightning at some point. Nobody in the room ever spoke of it again.

By the end of it, Morgana Ravenshade stood in a nimbus of unspent fury, hair drifting in a wind that did not exist, her staff smoking, five spells of continental grade wasted on pornographic figurines. Every flawless counterspell had supplied the material for the next act.

Quinlan sat unmoved, one hand draped over the armrest. His mana flared where it pleased, and the world rearranged itself to match his mood.

Five hundred years of study had gone into her mastery. He played seven elements like finger puppets, bored, zero-handed, to needle her husband. Watching him do it frayed the edges of her sanity. It always did.

"The desk was my great-grandfather’s," Alexios noted into the quiet, initialing a margin that had survived. "This rabid female rode the poor male figure so hard the desk was damaged."

"I will burn this palace to the ground!"

At last the Primordial Villain leaned back and conceded the field.

"We’re deadlocked, old friend."

"So we are."

"A matter this delicate shouldn’t be rushed." His grin gained ceremony. "We’ll sleep on it."

"Agreed." Alexios set the stamp down at last and folded his hands, matching him gravity for gravity. "A decision of this weight deserves rested minds. A week, at minimum."

"A month," Quinlan countered solemnly. "Statecraft."

"A season. There are precedents to consult."

"Years, if we must. The realm asks patience of us all."

Morgana Ravenshade stood beside the fireplace of a palace she was still formally banished from and understood, with perfect clarity, what had just been done to her.

It had never mattered which of them won. Both of them had been fighting to lose.

The strongest human mage alive, and the argument had been over who had to keep her.

Her husband had refused her without lifting his eyes from the paperwork. Her master had spent minutes desperately trying to give her away for free, throwing in granaries to sweeten the deal.

And now the two men had adjourned, cheerfully, on the question of who must suffer her, with every intention of extending the deliberations into the next century.

On tonight’s agenda, she had ranked below the stable fees.

The stamp came down one final time.

"The item is tabled," said Alexios. "Session adjourned."

Morgana looked from one man to the other. Both had already returned to their papers.

The twitch had long since spread from her eye to her entire frame. A sound left her with no letters in it.

"May both of you scum die a dog’s death," she snarled on her way to the door, robes snapping behind her. "ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!"

The study door boomed shut behind her hard enough to wake clerks two corridors away.

The hallway outside stood dark and empty, the palace finally asleep around it.

Morgana made it two steps before she stopped.

Through the heavy door behind her, muffled, came the sound of both men snickering together.

She could just make out the words.

Something about the stable fees.

The Elemental Sovereign of Vraven stood alone in the dark of the palace her teenage daughter ruled, robes trembling at the hem, and began tearing up.

"What have I done to deserve this...?"

The fact that she treated her husband of nearly five centuries as absolute trash, and that she hunted her now-master with the intention of strapping him to a table and studying what’s inside him, had not quite crossed her mind.

With the paperwork of Vraven done, Quinlan Elysiar owned half of Iskaris.

Now, it was time to see to the other half.