Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1910: The Villain’s Vision

The thunder of a hundred thousand dwarves took a long time to die, and Quinlan Elysiar stood in the middle of it with a foxgirl attached to his arm.

"Quinnie, promise me!! My dad-"

"I can’t possibly lie to my beloved woman."

"!!" Kitsara’s eyes widened, her cheeks going a soft pink. "N-no, I won’t be bought with a few words spoken with such charming macho confidence..."

"Foxy, use your brain for a moment. He doesn’t need to kill your father," Serika placed an arm around the worried foxkin’s neck, laughing.

"I-I know!! But father... He isn’t the type to kneel..."

"I’m sure he can be reasoned with," Vex smiled, tender. Then her red eyes flared and she licked her blade, long and sadistic. "And if not..."

"Noo! Bad Vexie!!"

"If you get aids like this, Sera will die of laughter," Lucille snickered.

"!! My class prevents it!" Vex stomped. Getting a sexual disease from a random dwarf corpse sounded plain wrong to the yandere witch’s brain, as if she was unfaithful.

Past their little knot of chaos, the council hall of the dwarven capital was still learning how to be something other than a battlefield.

The hymn had risen again through the open doors with the war gone out of it, tens of thousands of voices settling into a slower, warmer register that rolled up the great shaft like the mountain humming to itself.

Smiths embraced strangers. Tunnel-wardens sat down right there on the bloody tiles, laughing at nothing, too spent to stand and too happy to care.

And along the walls, disarmed and dazed, knelt the personal guard of the high clans.

The tunnel-wardens had herded them up out of the killing corridor and left them there, helms off, watching the celebration of the people they had been killing an hour ago.

Captain Torvek knelt at their head, bare knuckles still split from the oath he had hammered into the flagstones for the Villain.

His eyes had not left the shaft-side arches since the light died.

"He let King Ragnar go to the Goddess." Torvek said it to nobody in particular.

The guardsman beside him wiped at his beard with the back of a shaking hand. "I was at the war, Captain. I saw what the king did to earn that monster’s..."

He stopped, tried again. "If anyone alive had cause to feed Ragnar to his own ritual an inch at a time..."

Torvek nodded slowly at the dark arches. "He had cause. He had cause for... for anything he wanted, and nothing in this mountain could have stopped him taking it."

The Villain had fought the whole night with their king held in front of him as a shield.

Every man kneeling on that wall had watched it, had wept through it, and had braced for the ending such a night deserved: the last king of the dwarves kept as a trophy, or worse, kept as a toy.

Torture measured in years.

That was what villains did with allies who betrayed them.

Instead, the monster had said greet the Goddess for me, and let their king depart without any added mockery.

"A merciful death," an old guardsman managed.

Torvek kept his eyes on the dark where the light had been, and the truth of the life ahead of him settled into place piece by piece.

’Did he...’ the thought arrived. ’Did he do this on purpose?’

Because of how Quinlan showed mercy after victory, the loyalist dwarves could at least end the era knowing their final king had been granted the honor of death.

There would be no years of swallowed bile for any of them, no sons raised on whispered revenge, no shame in wearing his conqueror’s colors.

’I don’t know if it was on purpose. But if yes...’ he gulped. ’You’re a truly frightening creature, Villain.’

His thought process was interrupted,

"Captain." The young guardsman’s whisper wobbled. "What... what happens to us now?"

"..." Torvek exhaled, long and hard. "We’ll enter the new era with our heads held high. If our conqueror permits."

"Captain..."

Across the hall, wind gathered under Quinlan’s boots, lifted him off the flagstones, and set him down on the council table.

He stood among the maps of a mountain that was now his, dark armor drinking the forge-light. The same wind ran out ahead of him through the hall’s open doors and down the galleries, tier by tier, bending banners and forge-smoke outward as it went.

Every face it passed turned up to find out what had moved.

The hymn thinned and died as the word went down the tiers ahead of him, mouth to mouth: the Villain was going to speak.

A hundred thousand dwarves leaned in toward the hall, and the mountain gave its whole attention to the man it had just crowned with stone and fists.

Then he put wind under his voice, so that the whole city got him at once.

"Dwarves of the mountain!" The words filled the hall to the vault and landed in the lowest warren in the same breath, warm and enormous. "Before we speak of tomorrow, let me tell you what I already know about your people."

"Hah? Tomorrow? Our people?" came a ripple of shock. This was not how they expected him to open.

"In my lands sits a settlement called Miri Town, the first city I ever built. Humans founded it, but while I assisted the Elvardian Alliance’s invasion of Ravenshade, I liberated and relocated many dwarves, beastkin, and elves into it."

"By now the dwarves who settled there have built half of everything in it worth looking at. Humans, elves, dwarves and beastkin all live on the same streets."

He let the impossible picture hang for a breath.

"But it is the dwarven industrial spots that are the loudest and warmest parts of the town. They’re where everyone carries anything broken, because it comes back better than it was bought. Nobody planned any of that. I believe it’s simply what happens when dwarves are allowed to work."

Murmurs rolled through the galleries. The mountain had never heard of Miri Town, yet all of it understood the last sentence.

"So believe me when I say I value your craft. Your engines, your stonework, your runework, and..." The Villain paused, savoring it. "...your liquor. Now that is craftsmanship."

"He just said that?!"

"What?!"

"Haha!"

Startled laughter cracked along the tiers, and somewhere below a miner bellowed that he’d drink to that.

"You crowned me just now, and I know what’s sitting underneath the cheering." The warmth in his voice stayed, but the play went out of it. "You’ve traded a council of lords for the Villain, and nobody has told you what your future will look like."

"My dream for Iskaris is a simple one: every race doing what it was born to do best."

His gauntlet swept across the lit shaft below.

"Your dead lords treated those forges of yours as their properties to tax, and when their resources ran short, the mountain itself went cold. That ends tonight."

"In my domain, a smith’s furnace will be the last light to go out. We will rebuild this mountain properly, gallery by gallery, and then begin work on the whole of Iskaris!"

"The whole of Iskaris?!"

The roar that answered him shook dust from the vault.

He raised one hand, and a coil of his wind went down into the crowd and came back up with a passenger.

Kaelira arrived on the council table with a startled "Wha-!", set down beside him as gently as a finished piece. His arm hooked around her waist before she could plan an escape.

"Q-Quin!" The scarlet reached the tips of her long ears instantly. "A hundred thousand people are watching!"

"I noticed."

Her eyes narrowed.

He faced the hall with his flustered smith reeled in against his side.

"But let me make one thing very clear. Just because you’re born a dwarf doesn’t mean you must be a craftsman. Forcing the races into a few jobs would be a pure disservice to what you all are. Just take a look at this wonderful woman," he grinned, pulling her closer.

"The elves punished my Kaelira for the crime of crafting. Their law decided what an elf was allowed to be, and it nearly killed the finest crafting partner I’ve ever had."

"Punished?! For crafting?!"

"Stone above, they outlawed making things?!"

The growl that went up the tiers had nothing to do with the Villain at all.

"Our new nation is in the business of tearing down cages, not of building new ones. A dwarf can be more than a smith, a brewer, or an architect, just as an elf can be more than a forest-dwelling ranger."

"I desire to give all my people the opportunity to become the version of themselves they were meant to be."

The crime she had been exiled for had just become the founding principle of a nation, announced to a hundred thousand people by the man holding her.

Kaelira, scarlet to the shoulders, stared at the map table with tremendous focus and made not one attempt to leave the arm around her waist.

The cheering was still building when a blonde streak came up the processional stair, through the great doors, and landed on the council table in a three-point crouch, tail high.

"Master!!" Blossom’s ears stood at full alert. "Blossom found the treasury!!"

The noise died mid-throat.

"It’s this deep-" her arms stretched their widest, which was not a unit of measurement anyone could use, "-and it’s full!! Gold to the ceiling!! And liquor, whole rooms of just liquor!!" Her nose scrunched into a full accordion. "Blossom sniffed one barrel to check for poison and her nose is still recovering. Too strong!!"

For one heartbeat, the hall did the sum in silence.

"The treasury," a smith near the table said slowly. "The lords swore to us the vaults were empty."

"Empty!" A tunnel-warden’s voice cracked off the colonnade. "They cut our coal over empty vaults!"

"We froze all winter while they sat on a lake of gold?!"