Chapter 1722: No Villain |
"Most important?!" Serelis heard someone scream from the ranks.
The queen had just dissolved the alliance every living elf grew up knowing as the norm and beheaded her own sister in front of every elf alive, and she was saying there was something bigger yet to come?
The shouts and cries that had been tearing through the battlefield since the execution choked into silence, because Myrasyn’s face made it clear she meant every word.
"The man standing beside me rushed to my aid when I was imprisoned. The council and the dwarven crown conspired against him just as they conspired against me, and when he found me, the ruler of the nation who betrayed him, chained and broken in a dungeon cell, he did not see an enemy. He did not see the failure of a queen who had let it happen."
Her voice softened, and the battlefield heard it. "He saw a woman who needed help, and he gave it without asking for anything in return."
She turned toward him, and the warmth in her eyes was not the queen’s.
"His name is Quinlan Elysiar." .
A murmur tore through the ranks.
Nobody on the battlefield needed that name explained, or the accusations attached to it.
"Many call him the Primordial Villain, but do not let that title deceive you. He is called a villain because he stands against the corrupt and the powerful, regardless of what it costs him."
Serelis’s grip tightened on her weapon. Around her, soldiers exchanged glances that ranged from confusion to fury.
"To the council and the dwarven crown, he is the threat they must destroy to keep their power and their wealth. But to us, to every elf who has ever looked at this world and known in their heart that we deserved better, he is anything but a villain."
She turned toward the man in black armor, and her voice rang with a tone that went beyond duty.
"He is the rightful heir of Luminara. The only living child of the First Elf. He is..." She paused for a moment.
"The Holy Son."
The battlefield erupted.
Screams of denial crashed against cries of joy from Isveth’s column on the ridge, and the sound of it was so raw and so split that the war itself seemed small beneath it.
Myrasyn stepped up to the man and knelt in the air, one knee down, her robes pooling around her, and raised the Staff of the First Court toward him in both hands, palms turned upward.
"Quinlan Elysiar... I, Myrasyn Ael’vyrn, rightful Queen of all elves, proclaim the elven race your loyal followers. Our arrows are your arrows. Our lands are your lands. Our future is in your hands, should you bestow upon us the privilege of serving you."
"BLASPHEMY!" The scream tore from the coalition’s elven ranks before the last word had settled. "The matriarchs warned us! He brainwashed the shrine maidens and corrupted the rebels! Now he brainwashed you as well! The council was right!"
"She murdered her own sister and now she gives our throne to a man who isn’t even an elf?!"
"SHAME! SHAME ON THE ROTTEN QUEEN!"
The shouts spread through the coalition like fire, elven soldiers who had been loyal to the council screaming accusations upward at the woman kneeling in the sky, and Serelis felt her own ranks waver as soldiers around her looked at each other with faces caught between the fury in the crowd and the conviction in their queen’s voice.
Quinlan looked down at the queen kneeling before him.
He reached down and closed his hand over hers where she gripped the staff, and pulled her to her feet in one smooth motion that turned the ceremony into something quiet in the middle of the chaos.
"This is not the time to kneel, Elf Queen."
Myrasyn’s ears went scarlet to the tips so fast Serelis could see the color change from the ground, and the blush that hit the queen’s face made no sense given she’d just been addressed in front of her entire race.
Quinlan turned toward the screaming battlefield, many usually noble and serene long-eared ladies slinging ugly slurs at him and Myrasyn.
His eyes focused on the matriarch who accused him of not even being an elf.
"You are correct. I do not carry the blood of Luminara in me," he said, his voice cutting through all the noise.
The matriarch gasped at being singled out, then puffed her chest out, proud at being proven right.
She was ready to resume her screeching, when Quinlan added, "But the bond that exists between your progenitor and me transcends mere blood ties."
The battlefield went quiet.
Even the screaming stopped, because every living being felt that something big was coming.
He stopped holding back.
The aura he’d been suppressing since he stepped onto this battlefield dropped in a single breath, and what poured out of him hit every elf on the field like a fist driven through the chest.
Golden light erupted from his body in a wave that dwarfed anything the shrine maidens in the Untouched Tomb had felt, because the man who’d fumbled through his first taste of Luminara’s tears understood what he was carrying now, and the wave that crashed outward was concentrated, refined, and aimed at every drop of elven blood within reach.
It hit the marrow.
The place beneath instinct where the thing that made an elf an elf had sat coiled around the spine since birth, silent for lifetimes, ripped to life across hundreds of thousands of bodies in a single coordinated instant, and Serelis dropped as if something had reached inside her chest and pulled.
The warmth carried her mother’s voice and her grandmother’s hands and something far older than both, roaring through her blood with a message so absolute her body obeyed before her mind could form the thought: the First Elf endorses this man.
She does so absolutely, without question.
And beyond that, beneath the endorsement, Serelis felt something that brought tears to her eyes before she understood what it was.
Incredible, overwhelming motherly warmth, all of it aimed at the man in the sky, pouring through every elf’s blood as if Luminara herself were reaching through the generations to hold him.
The First Elf loved him.
She loved him so completely that the devotion was embedded in the bloodline she’d left behind and waiting in every elf ever born for the moment it would be needed.
Serelis’s blade slipped from her fingers and hit the dirt.
Tears came without permission or explanation, and around her, across the entire battlefield, elven soldiers on both sides dropped to their knees with weapons falling from hands that could no longer hold them, some weeping openly, some pressing palms to their chests where the warmth was spreading, some staring up at the golden figure in the sky with faces that had left the language of war behind.
"They lied to us..." The matriarch who had been screaming blasphemy hit her knees with her mouth still open and no sound coming out, tears streaking down a face that had forgotten how to make them. Then her voice hardened, eyes searching for the councillor who’d told her. "You dare...?"
"WHERE IS KING RAGNAR?!" A dwarven commander’s scream tore across the battlefield all of a sudden. "He was fighting the Villain! WHERE IS OUR KING?!"
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