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Chapter 1712: My Power
Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

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    CreaTorDominion
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    Another huge thanks to Despawning for the generous contributions to entertainment
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      Despawning
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      boast hokage Happy to help!
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    Despawning
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    1717 Not a Wimp

    Myrasyn's ears stilled.

    She pressed them flat against her skull by force of will alone, and when she spoke again her voice carried none of the frantic energy from before.

    "My best friend is dying and she needs my help," the queen explained. "I refuse to remain a wimp."

    Then she sank to her knees before him, her ears trembling, her hands clasped in front of her chest, and looked up at Quinlan with eyes that burned green and wet.

    "Q-Quinlan Elysiar... Son of Luminara... Will you let me touch you?"

    Hearing those words, Quinlan's gaze shifted to Sera.

    No words were uttered, just his eyes finding hers, asking the question his mouth wouldn't form in front of the queen already kneeling at his feet.

    Sera met his look and nodded once. Resolute, without a trace of hesitation. "I don't mind..."

    Then she grinned, shameless. "In fact... Having the woman who almost ruined it all for me blow my man only after getting my explicit permission to do so doesn't sound terrible... Not at all..."

    She didn't waste any time. "Elf Queen Myrasyn Ael'vyrn. You can go ahead and suck the love of my life off. I'll allow it."

    "!!" Myrasyn almost died of shame on the spot while doing her utmost to pretend she wasn't hearing anything.

    Quinlan chuckled at his lover's antics then leaned down and pressed his lips to Sera's forehead, lingering for a breath, and the healer's eyes closed beneath the kiss.

    Then he straightened and looked down at the queen.

    “I'll be in your care, Queen of all elves," Quinlan murmured, while reaching out to clean her up a second time.

    Myrasyn's whole body shuddered at the title he used and his warm water rushing through the crevices of her body.

    Her cheeks burned so hot she could feel her own pulse in them, and the shame and the wanting twisted together into something she had no name for and no defense against.

    Her trembling fingers found his waistband and pulled.

    The freed length caught her across the cheek with a weight that rocked her head sideways, and the sound it made on contact was loud enough to echo in the stone cell.

    "Hiya?!" Myrasyn recoiled with one hand on her cheek and both ears standing at full mast, staring at what had just slapped her with eyes the size of saucers.

    Quinlan cleared his throat. "The, uh... blood loss probably messed something up."

    "Mhm." Sera didn't look up from her work. "Yes, sure, my saintly husband, devout follower of the Goddess of Purity and her holy teachings. Your throbbing erection has nothing to do with holding Black Fang in your arms while she sucks your blood, with me permitting the queen to go down on you, or with the woman renowned as the most beautiful elf alive kneeling between your legs and begging for permission to blow you."

    "Right," Quinlan was in full agreement.

    Then he quickly added, "And just for the record, she can at most be equal in beauty to the most beautiful-"

    Sera wasn't having it, not here, not now.
    Her fingers came up to his lips, and with a dry look, "Shush, Quin."

    …

    Silver's mouth opened. Blood came out instead of words.

    "You always were a coward. Just a mere, lacking replica of what his aura would've been had he heard your hideous words spoken toward me... That alone was enough to freeze you up..." she whispered, and drove the steel another inch through him.

    His soldiers turned at their lord's choked scream, and what they saw was the Fox King impaled from the front on a blade held by a dark-haired foxin with five black tails fanned wide, demonic eyes burning with incredible satisfaction and cruelty.

    "LORD SILVER!"

    They rushed her from every direction, blades drawn, foxfire blazing.

    Wings erupted from Kitsara's back and she launched upward with Silver still skewered on her blade.

    Twenty meters. Thirty. Fifty.

    High enough that his soldiers looked like ants, and Silver's blood fell on them like warm rain.

    “Shoot her down!"

    Bows rose and arrows streaked upward in a volley dense enough to blot the canopy gaps.

    Every arrow curved toward Kitsara's silhouette, and struck Silver.

    His body jerked with each impact, shaft after shaft burying into his back and legs as his own soldiers' volley found the target Kitsara's illusion told them was hers.

    She hung behind him in the air, grinning as his body absorbed the friendly fire.

    "Stop! STOP SHOOTING!" A captain's voice broke through the chaos, but the second volley was already airborne, and a third of those found Silver too.

    Kitsara's laughter rolled down from above dark and sadistic, resonating with a demonic harmonic that crawled through the foxkin soldiers' spines and settled in their guts like ice water.

    The treeline to the west exploded.

    Chieftain Vargis burst through at the head of his dogkin column, his massive frame crashing through branches.

    Prince Darius ran at his flank, using the prosthetics Quinlan and Kaelira made for him.
    Both men looked up.

    "Is that..." Darius started.

    Vargis's eyes widened.

    "Daughter?!"

    "Sister?!" Darius's shout followed.

    Kitsara looked down at them, and in the span of a single blink the demonic edge vanished from her posture. Her head tilted, her ears perked, and the smile that replaced the predatory snarl was so innocent it belonged on a girl asking for seconds at dinner.

    "Quinnie and the hottest demon lady ever made me a bit stronger!" she called down, bright and cheerful.

    Then she looked at Silver.

    His mouth moved, but only wet sounds came out.

    Kitsara pulled the blade free and caught his chin with her other hand, angling his face up so the last thing he saw was her eyes.

    "Even if you managed to enslave and turn me into your wife," she whispered, soft as silk yet more poisonous than any concoction Aurora ever produced all at once. "After experiencing true womanhood by the hands of Quinlan Elysiar, you never could have made me feel a single damned thing, you pathetic, limp-dicked, spineless, howling bitch."

    The blade came across in a single clean arc, and the Fox King's head separated from his shoulders.

    …

    Myrasyn lifted both hands toward the length in front of her with the solemnity of a priestess approaching a relic, and the trembling in her fingers undermined the ceremony entirely.

    Her index finger poked it once.

    She pulled the finger back, examined it as if expecting it to be different now, then reached again with both hands.

    Two pokes this time, one on the side and one beneath, and the shaft twitched on the second contact. Her ears shot upright so fast they nearly left her skull.

    'The male organ exhibits involuntary responses to light tactile stimulation, with heightened sensitivity along the ventral ridge," she recited under her breath, quoting the forbidden text that had apparently eaten an unreasonable number of her private evenings.

    "Chapter eleven of A Good Wife's Chronicle of Marital Yarmth recommends first timers conduct a baseline assessment prior to oral ministrations to establish response thresholds."

    Her palm was sweating. Her ears knew it. The rest of her was pretending otherwise.

    She wrapped her fingers around the shaft, adjusted her grip, re-adjusted, tilted her head and narrowed her eyes with the focus of a woman grading an exam.

    "The chronicle claims the underside is more sensitive than the top. Page thirty-eight. Let me verify.."
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      Despawning
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      1718 It Twitches

      Her thumb traced the underside from base to tip in a single slow drag, and the twitch that answered was immediate.

      "It twitches!" She announced this with far too much academic triumph for a queen between the legs of a man she wasn't even the secret lover of, let alone a proper wife.

      But in this very moment, all such inhibitions had been tossed aside. "The text was accurate! What about lateral pressure? Page fifty-two mentioned a correlation between circumferential grip variance and..."

      She rotated her hand and squeezed gently from the sides, watching the reaction with the focus of a researcher cataloguing live data, and her ears swiveled forward as the tip swelled against her palm.

      "Remarkable... The elasticity alone contradicts two established theories I read in the Moonshadow Archives."

      "Elf Queen."

      Sera's voice cut across the cell, strained and clipped. Her hands pulsed golden light into the network of burst veins running Black Fang's forearm, and she did not look up.

      "I cannot stabilize her while you're conducting a doctoral thesis on my husband's cock right beneath my workspace."

      Myrasyn's ears clamped flat. "R-right! Right. Medical procedure. Focus, Myrasyn...”

      Her scholarly composure lasted exactly as long as it took her lips to touch the tip.

      The taste hit her tongue and her eyes went wide, then heavy, and the careful first lick she'd planned turned into a second that lasted twice as long.

      Her ears rose on their own, slowly, helplessly, as something thick and warm and carrying a mana density she had never encountered in four thousand years of elvenkind registered in the back of her mouth.

      She pulled back an inch, staring at the tip like it had personally rewritten her understanding of alchemy.

      "The chronicle did not mention this," she breathed.

      Then she leaned forward again, and the pretense died for good.

      Quintan looked down.

      The Queen of all elves knelt between his legs with her tongue pressing flat against the underside of his cock, her eyes looking up at him through her lashes with large pupils, and the expression on her face had left the academic campus permanently and was currently residing somewhere it would never be allowed to return from.

      She loved it.

      Those big eyes of his, looking down at her from above while she knelt for him with her lips wrapped around something no queen should ever have in her mouth.

      The warmth of his gaze hit her chest harder than any spell the dungeon had thrown at her in captivity.

      "This will be the end of me, she realized with horror, her lips tightening as she drew him deeper. If I keep this up, I will never be able to stand with my head held high before the High Court and reclaim my throne with any shred of dignity. The queen who knelt in a cell and....'

      Her tongue curled along the ridge and the sound that left her throat was involuntary, honest, and extremely unfitting for a monarch.

      ‘..I'll worry about it later’

      "You're doing it wrong."

      Black Fang's voice came from above, flat.
      Myrasyn froze with her mouth full. "Hah?!" The word came out muffled and outraged.

      "The angle." Black Fang didn't open her eyes. "You're too stiff."

      The queen pulled back with an audible pop and jabbed a finger upward at the woman draped over the man she was servicing. "What do you know?! You're a virgin just like me!"

      "I'm not a four-thousand-year-old virgin."

      "Yes, and being a four-hundred-year-old virgin makes you an unquestionable professional in the art of lovemaking!" Myrasyn fumed. "Shut your mouth before I beat your all-knowing butt up, Black Fang! At least I studied the literature!"

      Black Fang had already stopped listening. She took another bit of his blood to calm her hunger long enough to do what came next...

      Which was…

      Her hand sliding down from Quinlan's chest, past his abdomen, slow and unwilling and looking at everything except its destination, until her fingers found the base and wrapped around it.

      She didn't squeeze. She didn't stroke. She held it the way she might hold a railing she happened to be resting against, her purple irises locked on the far wall as if she was absolutely, categorically not doing what she was doing.

      Lightning shot through Quinlan's spine.

      "You'll never speak of what happened here." Her voice carried ice, her eyes still on the wall. "Got it?"

      Quinlan nodded.

      "Not a single word."

      He nodded.

      "Especially not to Vex."

      He nodded faster.

      Then her voice dropped, lighter than he had ever heard from her, lighter than anything the Venomborne Terror should have been capable of producing, so quiet he almost missed it.

      "Thank you... for rushing to me."

      Her fingers moved. A slow, careful stroke from base to midshaft, carrying a tenderness so foreign to the most feared woman on the continent that something behind Quinlan's ribs tightened in a way the hunger couldn t explain.

      Quinlan instantly knew that Black Fang had zero right backseating Myrasyn like she had, for her movements were beyond awkward and clumsy.

      Both of theirs were.

      But he was about to ascend to a new state of existence nonetheless.

      Below, Myrasyn had stopped even pretending.
      The scholarly composure was a memory.

      The forbidden literature, forgotten.

      What remained was the Queen of all elves bobbing her head with her eyes half-closed, making soft, wet, contented sounds at the back of her throat that had departed from academia entirely and arrived somewhere far more honest.

      She was savoring every inch of what the chronicle could only describe in dry text with the devotion of a woman who had found divinity in a place no scripture had ever pointed her toward.

      "I wasn't quick enough."" Quinlan's voice came quiet, his eyes on Black Fang's face.

      Her strokes didn't pause. "You were. Flat and simple. "I'm alive and free."

      "They hurt you." His voice hardened. "If I had been stronger-"

      "I am fine." The words came rough, from a voice that didn't know how to reassure. "I will be fine, when..."

      She trailed off, and her fingers stilled against him.

      Below, Myrasyn's pace had settled, her eyes fully closed now, ears limp with contentment, and the quiet sounds she made between breaths painted the portrait of a woman who had found something she would not be letting go of willingly.

      A breath left Black Fang that weighed more than blood or hunger.

      "I know I can't express myself properly. I know that I'm not normal. I know that even looking at me scares people." Her voice was low, barely a murmur, and the vulnerability in it sat so foreign against the serpent tattoos and the blood crusting her chin that the cell felt like it was eavesdropping on a confession it had no right to hear.

      "To others, I am a scary monster more than a woman."

      Her fingers moved against him again, barely, a ghost of pressure.

      "But the truth is... I liked it."

      "Liked it?" Quinlan asked.

      The purple spirals in her eyes found his, and the hunger swirling behind them was entirely her own.

      "The way you look at me when you see me... From the very first moment, when you were far, far beneath my strength. Even back then, I saw no monster gazing back at me when I looked into your eyes. Not a terrible, miserable creature.
      Just... a woman."

      Her grip tightened for a single heartbeat.

      "Your bet." Her lips curled into something too fragile to name. "I never thought it was possible, especially after you so arrogantly reduced it from a year to a month. But perhaps.."

      She leaned in until her breath touched his cheek.

      "you might just succeed."

      Every nerve in Quinlan's body fired at once.

      He pulled free of Myrasyn's mouth a breath before it happened, and the queen's eyes flew open at the sudden withdrawal as he released into the open air above them.

      "N-no... Mine.." Myrasyn stared at the space where it had been, lips still parted, tongue still extended.

      A sudden and inexplicable feeling of loss settled over her.

      Wind caught the release before gravity could, sweeping every drop into a compressed sphere of air that hovered at chest height.

      Black Fang's legs unwound from Quinlan's body and she dropped to the stone floor on her own two feet for the first time since the rescue. Her legs shook once, then held.

      "Turn away." Her voice carried command again, rough and absolute.

      They did. Quinlan turned. Sera lowered her glowing hands and turned with him, grinning slyly.

      "Hmph! Enjoy, I suppose. You're welcome!"
      Myrasyn wiped her lips with her tongue, trying to find any missed drops, and turned with an expression that still hadn't recovered.

      Silence held for three heartbeats.

      Then the cell erupted in purple.

      Light poured from every surface, blazing through cracks in the stone and painting the walls in swirling violet.

      Black Fang stood with her back to them. Her palm pressed flat against her lower belly, where something that had not been there before pulsed beneath her skin in a warmth she could not explain.

      "Quinlan Elysiar."

      Her voice came measured
      "What does it mean... that I'm your Beloved?"

      Her fingers pressed harder against her belly, where the warmth was spreading.

      "Explain yourself."

      It turned out that the cure brought with it unexpected side effects!

      But now wasn't the time to dwell, for the battlefield awaited the Primordial Villain!
      It was time to finish everything!

      Authors Note: I saw a lot of negativity and complaints, especially on my discord server. The story progresses too slowly, Black Fang still in her cell after X chapters, Vex had 6 chapters all to herself, and so on. I know that I'm more than prone to getting bogged down. I don't have to look farther than the fact that we're still in Iskaris after 2 million words written...

      But I hope you know l'm not trying to drag things out for money or things like that. If the story ever feels like it's dragging, that's just sheer incompetence on my part.

      The truth is, Primordial Villain is my first real attempt at writing, so despite all my chapters released, I'm still a novice in some areas. Big saga ending finales are certainly one of those areas.

      I have to keep so many details in mind that sometimes I feel my head splitting apart just from trying to remember everything that I must not forget. It's a really tall order and I fear l'm failing at least in some aspects.

      Having to push out content every single day certainly doesn't help with any of this.

      But it is what it is. As always, I can only try my best.

      I hope I didn’t ruin your enjoyment, even though I know some will not like this Black Fang development. I tried my best to make it as enjoyable as possible.

      Thank you for reading.
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    Despawning
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    1715 No Excuses

    A full kowtow. Palms flat in the blood, brow against the floor, the deepest submission an elven queen could offer.

    "I do not desire to make light of my actions." Myrasyn spoke into the blood, and every trace of the bubbly queen who'd been bouncing in her chains was gone. "I am guilty, and I deserve the fate I would have received in these dungeons if not for you two."

    Sera's hands stopped glowing.

    This was the Queen.

    The living legend whose name even low-born nobodies sang with utmost praise and admiration.

    And she was pressing her face into dead people's blood on a dungeon floor for a low-noble girl like her.

    "What are you... You're a sovereign-"

    "A sovereign who made horrible decisions behind the excuse of the greater good." Myrasyn's kowtow deepened, her forehead grinding against the wet stone. "I sentenced innocent young girls like you to fates worse than death because of my greed."

    "Greed? But you-"

    "'But I did what I had to do?" Myrasyn cut her off, and the bitterness was directed entirely inward.

    "No. That's not true at all. We are not waging a war of defense. We spent centuries forging alliances, preparing for an invasion of the human lands, because we believed we could take Ravenshade. I told myself it was for our future, that if the dwarven forts and the undead minions held the new border then elven lives would be spared against the humans, that we would only have to worry about the beastkin to the south."

    Her nails scraped against the bloody stone.

    "But really, I was a weak-willed woman who did what the council and the high nobility wanted of her, and used the greater good as a blanket to sleep at night while girls like you were dragged from their homes to die for my ambition."

    The cell was quiet except for the slow drip of blood from the ceiling.

    Sera stared at the queen on the floor and couldn't find a single word.

    Her mouth opened, closed, and the rehearsed monologue she'd carried since she started daydreaming about this exact beyond unlikely scenario - confronting the evil creature who threw her life away - had no answer for a woman who wasn't even trying to defend herself.

    Then she felt warmth.

    Quinlan's gaze, resting on her from where he stood on the stone with his shoulder still bleeding, quiet and steady and carrying nothing that told her what to do.

    Just warmth, and trust that she'd figure it out herself.

    Sera exhaled through her nose.

    "Stop groveling in the blood." The words left her softer than she wanted. "Quin just cleaned you up."

    Myrasyn didn't rise. "I appreciate the gesture. Truly, I do."

    Her voice was muffled against the floor. "But compared to the real blood on my hands, this is nothing. I'm afraid no amount of the Holy Son's water will be able to wash me clean."

    Sera's expression went cold all of a sudden, and when she spoke, there was not a single trace of patience in her voice. "Get up."

    Myrasyn's ears trembled.

    She lifted her face from the blood and found the young healer looking down at her with eyes that held no warmth and no pity.

    "I'm not the Goddess nor the First Elf. I'm not even an Arch Priestess or a shrine maiden. I'm just a nobody from the outskirts, and I don't do absolution."

    Sera's voice cut clean through the cell. "I have broken bodies to fix and I won't be playing nanny to your guilt on top of it. So either get up and come here so ! can tend to you alongside Black Fang, or stay on that floor and drown in it. But I have work to do."

    Myrasyn stared up at her from the blood.

    Then the guilt behind the queen's eyes shifted, rearranging past the shame and everything she couldn't take back.

    She looked at the young elf standing over her with golden light still on her hands and healer's fury still on her face, and the words that came out of her carried none of the drama or the theatrics or the bouncing energy.

    "You call yourself a nobody from the outskirts." Myrasyn rose from the floor slowly, blood running down her forehead and dripping from her chin. "But to me, you are a wonderful young woman with a proper head on your shoulders.
    Your ancestors have every right to be proud of you."

    Sera's ears twitched.

    It was involuntary and brief, the tips flicking once before she caught herself, but the praise had come from the most famous and revered elf alive and no amount of composure training could stop the reflex entirely.

    "Okay, okay." She turned back to Black Fang, golden light already pouring again. "Now let me work."

    Myrasyn wiped blood from her brow with the back of her hand and crossed the cell before raising her hand to her forehead in a crisp salute directed at Sera.

    "If there is anything I can help with, just say the word!"

    The jade cloak caught wind as Alastair Greenvale crested the ridge with the Consortium's banners snapping at his flanks, and the battlefield that opened below him was worse than anything his imagination had prepared him for.

    It stretched for miles.

    Fire, steel, magic, and the dead carpeting the earth in numbers that made individual engagements meaningless from this height.

    Kaede's tear still hung in the sky to the north, vomiting fresh columns of bodies into a war that was already choking on sheer mass, and the undead horde that crawled across the eastern front moved like a dark tide with no visible end.

    His eyes found Alexios before anything else.

    The King of Vraven fought three hundred meters ahead with a golden longsword that caught the light.

    "Fu#k me sideways... Why is he here?!"

    Alastair's grip tightened on his reins.

    A duke riding beside criminals in foreign lands where he should not be, rushing to back up the most wanted man in the country.

    It wasn't a great outlook, to put it gently.

    The Primordial Villain had a talent for arranging indignities.

    Quinlan had ordered the duke to rush to his position and back him up, giving Alastair not much of a choice in the matter.

    "My lord." His lieutenant pulled alongside him, face pale beneath his helm. "The horizon."

    Elvardian banners moved through the treeline to the southeast in columns too organized to be stragglers, loyalist reinforcements marching toward the battle under their own power.

    Behind them, further out, the dark mass of a second undead host crept across the plains from the northeast, too far to make out individual shapes but close enough that the scope of it flattened whatever optimism their arrival was supposed to carry.

    Alastair drew his blade and pointed it forward.

    "For humanity! Charge!"

    The jade cloaks surged down the ridge.

    …

    "If there is anything I can help with, just say the word!"

    "Okay." Black Fang was quick to take up the queen on her offer. "Extract his seed."

    Her voice came flat from where she hung in Quinlan's arm, her mouth pulling back from his shoulder wound with blood on her lips and purple spirals still churning in her irises.

    Myrasyn's ears shot straight up.

    Sera's hands froze mid-heal.

    Quinlan looked down at the woman in his arms with raised eyebrows.

    Myrasyn blinked at Black Fang, then at Quinian, then back at Black Fang. "I’m sorry, could you repeat that?"
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      1716 Black Fang's Big Request

      "The blood is helping, but it's not enough." Black Fang's eyes hadn't left Quinlan's, and the hunger swirling in them had nothing apologetic in it. "His [Blessed Seed] will work better. I think."

      Myrasyn's ears cycled through five different angles in two seconds, none of them dignified. "You think??! Also, what are you, my pimp?! You do it!"

      "I can't." Black Fang's hand pressed harder against Quinlan's chest, and the strain in it was real. "I'm not joking. I truly need your help."

      The queen's ears flattened, then perked, then flattened again as the implications of that statement fought the implications of the request.

      Contempt and disbelief at the outrageous request she was hearing mixed with worry, knowing that the only good friend she made in the last thousand years was really struggling to contain the hunger spell.

      But the worst of it was... That beneath it all, she realized a fourth emotion.

      Overwhelming curiosity.

      "N-no! I can't be doing such a-"

      "He's your progenitor's beloved child, Black Fang spoke with a unique edge in her voice. It was as if she knew something even Myrasyn didn't. "You spent half our captivity praising him. Isn't this the highest honor for a devout follower of the First Elf?"

      Myrasyn's face turned a shade of red that four thousand years of royal composure could not prevent. "My heart is not ready for this! I just finished being tortured! Why are you not asking his actual lover who is standing right there?!"

      "She's occupied." Black Fang tilted her head toward Sera, whose hands were wrist-deep in golden light trying to keep Black Fang's channels from collapsing.

      "Look at this shameless creature!" Myrasyn's ears went through a full revolution. "Since when does the most badass woman I've ever known need this many people tending to her?!"

      "Since her spell tried to eat her alive for days straight," Sera muttered without looking up. "And she's not wrong about the seed. [Blessed Seed] is literally a primordial's unique ability. The mana concentration would be..."

      She trailed off and cleared her throat. "But I don't like it. The pills should do the trick."

      She presented one from her pouch and flicked it toward Black Fang, who caught it.

      Black Fang didn't swallow it immediately.

      She held the pill between her fingers and brought it close to her face, studying the surface the way she studied opponents before deciding how to kill them.

      Her nostrils flared once, catching the scent, and the purple spirals in her irises slowed.

      This was it. [Blessed Seed] in alchemie form, the source of the unaging effect she d watched Quinlan's women carry while she held to the terms of their deal.

      He had one month to seduce her the traditional way, of which weeks remained.

      She popped the pill into her mouth and swallowed.

      Her eyes blazed purple for a single heartbeat, bright enough to light the cell, and the notification arrived with it.

      [Experience gain tripled and aging ceased. Duration: 12 hours.]

      Then nothing.

      [Eternal Hunger] screamed on, untouched, clawing through channels that the pill hadn't reached. The blessing sat in her system alongside the hunger like two currents in the same river, one calm and one feral, and the feral one didn't care about the calm one at all.

      "As I thought... It's not working," Black Fang murmured.

      Quinlan, already in discussions with Aurora, relayed her thoughts on the matter. The alchemic process preserved the blessing but burned the raw mana properties. Aurora believes that the hunger needs the potency, not the effect."

      Sera closed her eyes and exhaled through her nose. "Alright. Then you can suck him off, I guess."

      She however quickly opened one eye toward the queen. "But don't think about going all the way."
      "I wasn't thinking about going any way!!"

      Myrasyn yelped, her ears shooting bolt upright as her face caught fire.

      Then the words registered a second time. "Suck him off'.. What vulgar language you have, young lady! I just praised you!"

      "Will you do it or not, perpetually yapping granny?"

      "H-hah?!"

      "I can do it myself"" Seraphiel sighed, her voice strained. "But it'll slow down the healing."

      "Um, ladies." Quinlan raised his free hand. "I can also just do it mys-"

      'Suck him off," Myrasyn repeated over him, her ears twitching in a way that had nothing to do with indignation and everything to do with something she was refusing to name. Her voice dropped to a murmur. "Does that mean... lick it?"

      The cell went quiet.

      Sera's healing hands paused while Quinlan looked at the four-thousand-year-old queen as if seeing her for the first time.

      Myrasyn's ears were twitching incessantly and she didn't seem to realize it, her blush spreading down her neck and past her collarbone as her fingers curled and uncurled at her sides.

      She wanted to do it.

      The realization crashed through her with enough force to flatten her ears, and the horror that hit her had nothing to do with the act itself. She was horrified at how little horror she actually felt.

      Quinlan spoke up again, gentler this time. "Seriously. I can handle it myself.
      There's no need to-“

      "The forbidden texts were very clear!" Myrasyn's voice came out louder than she intended, her ears snapping upright as she seized on something she'd clearly spent far too many private evenings studying.

      "A woman's touch is far more effective than self-administration! 'A Good Wife's Chronicle of Marital Warmth, page forty-seven, states that the author's husband released ten times faster under her ministrations than when left to his own devices, and-"

      She caught herself citing page numbers and clamped her mouth shut with an audible click of teeth.

      …

      Silver's eyes burned cold as he tore free of the last Raelor copy's grip and scattered it with a pulse of mana that turned the air white.

      But the fourth one was already reforming, its choker knitting back together around a throat that shouldn't have existed.

      "He broke me so easily, in a single punch. the half-formed copy purred, one stocking-clad leg already solidifying beneath it. "Maybe the weakness is hereditary? A family trait..?"

      Silver closed the distance with his guard high and his tail fanned in a defensive spread, because he knew better than to underestimate what these things could do now.

      While honing in on the newest mockery of his son, "FIND HER!" he snarled over his shoulder at his soldiers. "I want the whore dead!"

      Suddenly, the body before him shifted. It was instantaneous, a mask ripped away.

      The proportions stretched, the feminine frame broadening, turning taller, darker, heavier.

      The choker dissolved. The ribbons burned away. The simpering expression vanished beneath a face Silver had only seen once across a battlefield he'd fled from rather than fight on.

      Quinlan Elysiar looked down at him, and the pressure that rolled off the man hit Silver like a physical wall.

      The dread. The primordial authority that had made every instinct in Silver's body scream 'run!"

      Silver's body went slack for just one single heartbeat.

      The blade came through his abdomen, driven through the gap his fear had made.

      The Quinlan in front of him smiled, and from his lips, a voice pressed warm against Silver's ear, feminine, low, dripping with a cruelty that the bubbly foxkin princess had no business producing.

      "My husband isn't here to put a disgusting wife-rapist wannabe in his proper place," Kitsara purred as she twisted the blade and pushed it deeper, "so I'll do it for him myself."

      …

      Myrasyn's ears stilled.
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  4. Online Offline
    Despawning
    + 1 ⋅ 0 -
    1713 Hunger

    Black Fang hit Quinlan before his arms could rise.

    The manacles still swung from her wrists with chunks of stone trailing behind them, and she slammed into his chest with a force that drove every wisp of air from his lungs and sent him backward off his feet.

    Sera surged forward with golden light blazing on her palms, and on the wall Myrasyn's chains rattled violently as the queen pressed back against the stone, ears flat, eyes huge.

    But Quinlan didn't even try to dodge.

    He'd watched her come, tracked every fraction of the lunge, and his legs hadn't moved.

    A certainty quieter than instinct told him the woman throwing herself at his chest was not going to kill him, and he believed it without understanding why.

    Wind erupted beneath his back an inch before the gore would have caught him, a compressed cushion of air that turned his fall into a glide, and Black Fang's weight drove him across the cell on the current until he settled horizontal above the blood-soaked stone, floating, with not a drop of it touching his skin.

    Her hands landed flat on his bare chest. Her thighs clamped around his lower abdomen, and the woman who had been chained to a wall for days towered above the man who'd torn the dungeon apart to reach her.

    He raised an open palm toward Sera without taking his eyes off the ones above him.

    The purple irises that had burned with defiance since he'd walked into this cell were swirling now, the color moving in slow spirals that deepened with each rotation, mesmerizing and violent, and every channel in Black Fang's body was screaming toward the man beneath her.

    She leaned down until her face hovered just above his, matted hair falling around them. "Why didn't you listen?"

    His hand rose from his side to find her cheek, his thumb tracing the bruised skin beneath her eye with a gentleness that had no place in a cell painted with blood.

    "I didn't feel threatened." His brow creased, as if the admission surprised him as much as it surprised her. "I don't know why."

    Black Fang's jaw worked. The pull surging through her ribs reached for the warmth of his palm, and the trembling in her shoulders worsened as the spirals in her eyes wound tighter.

    "Then it's time you start listening to logic instead of instincts."

    Quinlan's grin arrived slow and sure. “I refuse."

    Her eyes narrowed. "Leave already."

    The command came hard, but her body betrayed it the moment it left her lips, her fingers pressing flat against his chest instead of pushing off, and the hunger that [Eternal Hunger] had been feeding through her channels for hours refused to release the only source of relief it had found in days.

    She understood fully now. The spell had gone rogue.

    It had been running too long, eating through her tissue, grinding against the collar's binding runes, burning through every poison and debuff the dungeon threw at it until it was the only thing left moving through her body.

    Now the collar was gone and a primordial with a unique constitution lay beneath her, and [Eternal Hunger] threw itself toward him with a pull she could not override.

    "I can't pull it back." Her voice cracked. "I don't want to kill you. You must leave."

    Quinlan looked at the woman struggling above him, and the grin sharpened even further, turning sly.

    "I refuse~"

    "This is not the time-"

    "You're hungry, right?" His voice came low and steady. "I know your spell, Vex and the others told me about it. [Eternal Hunger]. It wants blood."

    Wind gathered at his fingertips, thin blades of compressed air so precise they hummed, and he drew them across his own shoulder just below the junction of his neck in a single clean motion.

    The cut opened shallow and bright, and blood welled in a line that ran warm down his collarbone.

    Black Fang went still.

    The swirling in her irises accelerated past anything resembling control, purple bleeding outward from her pupils in rings that swallowed the whites, and every serpent tattoo on her body pulsed in unison as the scent reached her.

    Quinlan's thumb stroked her cheek one last time before his hand slid into her hair, fingers threading through the matted strands to cradle the back of her skull.

    "Quench your hunger."

    "That's not how it works. I'm not a vampire-"

    "It doesn't function as it should, no? Why not give it a try? What's the worst that can happen?"

    "Quinlan..." The protest was barely a whisper, every muscle in her body trembling with the effort of holding still while her instincts screamed at her to close the gap between her mouth and the blood running down his skin. "Why won't you listen to me?"

    'Because I refuse to leave you behind.'

    He didn't need to say a third time, the truth ringing in the Venomborne Terror's head as soon as the words left her lips.

    His hand in her hair pulled her down, gentle and firm, and the last of her resistance fell apart.

    She lunged at the wound.

    Her tongue pressed flat against the cut in a long, trembling drag that gathered the blood pooling along his collarbone, and her eyes snapped wide as ine taste flooded her mouth.

    Rich and warm and carrying a mana so dense it hit [Eternal Hunger]'s starving channels like water on cracked earth, and the small sound that left Black Fang's throat was involuntary and entirely too honest for the most feared woman on the continent.

    She licked again, harder, tongue pressing into the wound as she chased every last drop, and her fingers curled against his chest with a grip that would have pulverized a lesser man's ribs.

    Quinlan's free hand came to rest between her shoulder blades and pulled her further into him. "I thought you were hungry? Don't be shy."

    The trembling stopped.

    Her mouth opened wider against his shoulder, and the teeth that found the edges of the wound carried a care that lasted exactly one heartbeat before she bit down properly and drank with the earnest, undignified need of someone who had finally stopped pretending she didn't want this.

    Long seconds passed.

    Then Black Fang pulled back.

    Her eyes were still swirling, the purple spirals slower than before but no less deep, and fresh blood ran down her chin in a line she didn't bother wiping.

    "This isn't." Her voice came hoarse and unsteady, and the fingers still resting on his chest curled. "The hunger. it's not receding."
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    1. Online Offline
      Despawning
      + 1 ⋅ 0 -
      Chapter 1714 Hatred

      "This isn't..." Her voice came hoarse and unsteady, and the fingers still resting on his chest curled. "The hunger... it's not receding."

      "What idiocy are you two doing?!"

      Sera's voice hit them both from behind like a whip crack, golden light blazing on her palms as she marched across the gore-slicked stone toward the two of them with fury that had nothing to do with the battlefield outside.

      The gorgeous elven healer was fuming at her own lover. "You lost a lot of blood yet here you are, cutting your own arteries open?! To make a buffet?!?!”

      Then she pointed at the woman sitting on top of him.

      "Her channels are fried as her spell has been eating herself alive for days, and you think what she needs right now is your blood?!" She shoved between them with her hands already reaching for Black Fang's shoulders, trying to pry the larger woman off Quinlan's chest.

      Black Fang's grip tightened on his skin. "Stop making a scene."

      "Excuse me?!" The elf stomped in a puddle of blood.

      "The blood did help. It just wasn't enough." Black Fang spoke without looking away from Quinlan.

      "Sera." Quinlan spoke calmly beneath the woman straddling him. "She's not hurting me. You know my physique isn't normal... I have a lot of blood to offer."

      Sera bit her lower lip, the fury deflating out of her as quickly as it had arrived.

      Her hands lowered to her sides and the golden light on them dimmed, and what remained on her face when the anger left was far more honest.

      "Sorry. She looked at the wound on his shoulder, then at the blood on Black Fang's chin, then at her own hands.

      "I... I just get really agitated when you're injured. Also... This really isn't the time to be experimenting with blood transfusions, but..."

      Her gaze lingered on the color returning to Black Fang's skin where the blood had touched her lips. "If it actually helps, then I shouldn't have..."

      Quinian smiled at her, soft and warm, and the elf who'd been fuming at him three seconds ago went quiet.

      Wind gathered beneath him in a cushion that lifted them both off the stone.

      He rose with her wrapped around him, one arm hooking beneath her thighs to hold her weight against his chest as the air carried them upright.

      "Take more if it helps, he told her quietly, and Black Fang's mouth found the wound on his shoulder again.

      His free hand reached for Sera, fingers threading through her golden hair and cradling the back of her head with the same gentleness he'd used on Black Fang a minute ago. "Don't worry about me. Focus on healing her, and see if you can help dispel whatever the hunger is doing to her channels."

      Sera leaned into his palm for one breath, then pulled back and turned to Black Fang's arm with light already blooming fresh on her hands.

      "Excuse me!" Myrasyn's voice rang from the wall with an indignation that had been building for several minutes. "Not to interrupt this deeply touching reunion and family drama, but I am still chained to a wall with a slave collar around my neck!"

      Her ears were bolt upright, swiveling between the three of them and the dwarven smiths who stood trembling in the corner of the cell where they'd retreated after removing Black Fang's collar.

      "You three!" She fixed the dwarves with the full weight of a four-thousand-year-old sovereign's command. "Remove this collar at once!"

      The smiths didn’t move.

      They looked at each other, then at the floor, then at the compressed knot of charred flesh and steel that used to be their colleagues, and then very carefully at nothing at all.

      Myrasyn's ears went flat. "I said remove it!"

      Nothing. One of them swallowed audibly.

      "They're Quinlan's subjects now," Sera explained without looking up from her work. "They won't answer to you anymore."

      The sound that left the elven queen was closer to a teakettle than a monarch.

      Sera sighed, her hands still glowing against Black Fang's ruined veins. "Free the woman."

      The dwarves moved toward Myrasyn immediately, and the queen's ears perked with relief.

      Then she paused.

      Her gaze shifted to the smiths approaching her throat, and a memory surfaced with uncomfortable clarity.

      When they'd freed Black Fang, Quinlan had been careful. Very careful. "Take it off her cleanly, without causing any harm. If you aren't sure you can take it off without failure, stop!”

      Every word chosen to prevent sabotage, every loophole sealed before the dwarves could exploit it.

      Sera had just said 'free the woman’

      "Um." Myrasyn's ears drooped as the first smith's fingers found her collar. "Don't you think you should add a few... conditions? Like he did for Black Fang? He was very specific about not causing harm, and stopping if they weren't sure, and-"

      "No, not really." Sera's voice came flat, and her eyes stayed on her work as she shrugged dismissively. "I think you will be just fine."

      She didn't sound convincing.

      A chill ran through the queen that had nothing to do with the dungeon air.

      Her ears went still for the first time since Quinian had walked through the door, and the bubbly energy that had carried her through captivity drained out of her face as she studied the elven healer's profile.

      "You hate me."

      Sera's fingers pressed deeper into Black Fang's forearm, the glow beneath her hands intensifying. She didn't look up.

      "You actually hate me," Myrasyn repeated, and the discovery sat heavier than the chains.

      Sera's hands paused for a fraction of a second. Then she murmured without turning, Fine. Ensure you make no mistake on her collar as well. Remove it cleanly, without causing any manner of harm to her."

      The dwarves did their work, and the locking runes clicked apart beneath their fingers.

      The collar dropped from Myrasyn's throat and hit the stone with a dull clang.

      Sera still hadn't looked at her.

      "You and your council conscripted me on the exact date I became of legal age."

      She kept her tone quiet, almost conversational, her hands never stopping their work on Black Fang's veins.

      •You dragged me from my home, my family, my friends, because the army was lacking in Healers. You sent me on a sacrificial probe attack into human territory where my entire unit was slaughtered. I was captured, enslaved, and sold in belly dancer attire."

      The healing pulsed steadily from her palms. Her tone didn't waver.

      "So I'm sorry if I don't have the most favorable opinion of you, Your Majesty."

      Myrasyn's freshly freed hands hung at her sides.

      Sera kept working, her voice settling into a rehearsed cadence, like she'd had this conversation with herself a hundred times in a hundred different cells.

      "Yeah, yeah, I know. You work together with the council, not all of it is on you.
      And I know you have to play your game of thrones on a national scale where disposable pawns like me are just numbers in a ledger. The greater good demands sacrifice and all that."

      She smoothed the glow across a cluster of burst capillaries in Black Fang's wrist. "I understand. You don't have to defend yourself."

      But instead of what Sera expected to hear, either the indignant scoff of a Monarch who was spoken to by a lowly citizen in this manner, or a queen of many excuses..

      A wet sound echoed in the dungeon.
      Sera looked to the side.

      The four-thousand-year-old Queen of all elves was on her knees in the blood of her captors with her forehead pressed to the gore-slicked stone.
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