Chapter 1764: Huh? |
Alexios’s voice arrived from the side, unhurried, carrying nothing that resembled obedience.
It was a calculated choice of words, and everyone present heard it.
Quinlan said everyone had to accept his proposal, but Alexios was only willing to entertain it.
The king hadn’t bowed to the Primordial Villain’s decree, hadn’t flinched at his threat, hadn’t even acknowledged the "or else" that was still hanging in the air.
He was simply considering the offer on its own merits.
Even after everything, Alexios refused to bend the knee to the anomaly that had turned his 1000th year into such a chaotic one.
"However." The king’s hand left his beard. His posture shifted.
The wry old man vanished, and the king who had fought five elders at once stood in his place. "Should the beastkin lords not be willing to do the same, the Vraven Kingdom will take it as an endorsement of the farming of humans like cattle."
A chuckle rolled out of him, dark and low.
"You’ve been throwing quite the pity party, crying about how devastated your lands are." His flat gaze swept the beastkin lords with what they all recognized on sheer instinct:
A predator mocking his prey after realizing the gap in strength between them.
Then his head tilted, and madness crept into his expression, old and unhinged.
"Well... Vraven isn’t in a bad spot. Especially if the elves and dwarves will do as the Villain said."
Myrasyn’s ears twitched, and a grin spread across the elven queen’s face as she quickly announced: "We will! We will pull out of Ravenshade by the end of the day!"
Hearing those words, Alexios’s menace climbed.
The grin that split his weathered face was the kind that made soldiers check if the exits were still open, a psychotic old bastard who had spent the entire exchange stroking his beard and had apparently decided he was done pretending to be reasonable.
"Well then..." His voice dropped, intimate and terrible. "I might as well end my rule on a single positive note and eradicate you savages who treat humans as food."
The snarling that erupted from the beastkin lords could have been heard across the field, Skarn’s howl and Rajah’s roar crashing into each other while Gorruk’s rumble shook the frost beneath their feet.
But in the ranks behind them, the reaction was different.
Soldiers who had been standing with weapons and claws ready exchanged glances.
They had fought today. They had bled. But the man who honored their dead had also promised something else, something that hit closer than rebuilding or even not dying today.
He’d said the slaves would be freed.
A dogkin soldier pressed her fist to her mouth.
Her brother had been taken in a border raid three years ago and based on the investigation she conducted on the scene, he didn’t die there but was taken away.
A wolfkin beside her lowered his head, eyes shut, and the name that crossed his lips was barely a breath.
Across the beastkin ranks, soldiers broke in quiet, scattered places.
Hope.
Skarn heard it. Rajah heard it.
The wolfkin lord’s snarl deepened to a guttural rumble as he turned back to Quinlan, and the fury in his gaze had gained a new edge, because the Primordial Villain hadn’t just threatened his authority.
He’d reached past the lords and spoken directly to their soldiers’ hearts, and the whimpering behind him was proof that it had worked.
"You..." Skarn’s growl shook with barely leashed violence.
Skarn’s stare swept Quinlan’s forces, searching for ammunition, and found it standing thirty paces to the left.
Blossom was bouncing on her heels beside Aurora, her blonde ears perked and her fluffy tail swishing as she watched the negotiations with the cheerful attention of someone following a particularly engaging street performance.
The dog collar around her neck caught the light every time she moved, and when Aurora murmured something to her, the dogkin’s response carried on the wind with perfect clarity:
"Master is amazing!"
Skarn pointed at her.
"You demand we free our slaves while that girl wears a collar and calls you Master in front of the entire continent?"
The wolfkin lord’s voice dripped with the satisfaction of a wolf who had just found the kill shot. "I will not entertain a single word of your proposal until you free-"
"Huh?"
For one heartbeat Blossom stood frozen, her blue eyes wide and locked on the wolfkin lord.
In that single second of stillness every person who knew Blossom held their breath because they had never seen that expression on her face before.
Then she erupted like a furious volcano, screaming gutturally from the depths of her soul.
"BLOSSOM WILL RIP YOUR THROAT OUT!"
The shriek tore across the flat ground with extreme violence.
Her claw gauntlets materialized on her fists, wicked curved metal extending past her knuckles.
"BLOSSOM’S COLLAR IS BLOSSOM’S!"
The air around her body flickered as the Void Stalker’s power surged unbidden, her outline blurring and snapping back like reality itself couldn’t decide if she was still standing there or already at Skarn’s neck.
"MASTER GAVE IT TO BLOSSOM AND BLOSSOM WILL KILL ANYONE WHO TRIES TO TAKE IT!"
Skarn’s ears twitched.
Behind him, in the dogkin section of the beastkin ranks, a low rumble started in the front row, barely audible beneath the screaming but growing.
Blossom took a step forward and the sigil on her womb blazed through her clothes, the Bloodfather’s mark burning hot enough to cast red light across her stomach.
Lightning crackled up her gauntlets and arced between her claws in jagged white lines, the channel Quinlan’s bond had grafted into her blood answering the fury pouring out of her with raw, indiscriminate power.
"BLOSSOM SWORE AN OATH!"
Another step.
The void flickered harder, her body phasing for a fraction of a second, and when she snapped back into visibility her pupils had spread to fill her irises.
"BLOSSOM CHOSE MASTER! BLOSSOM CHOSE THIS LIFE! AND SOME MANGY WOLF WHO CAN’T STOP MOANING LIKE A BITCH IN HEAT ABOUT HIS INSECURITIES THINKS HE CAN TELL BLOSSOM TO GIVE IT UP?!"
Skarn flinched.
His weight shifted backward, a fraction of a step he caught before it became a full retreat, and the satisfaction that had been on his face when he’d pointed at the collar was gone.
The dogkin growl behind him had spread to the second row, then the third, rising with every word she screamed.
The sound coming out of Blossom’s throat wasn’t mere anger, he could easily take that.
This... This was the howl of a creature whose entire world had been threatened, and every predatory instinct in Skarn’s body recognized it for what it was.
She wasn’t finished just yet.
"BLOSSOM WOULD DIE BEFORE BLOSSOM LETS GO OF MASTER!"
The lightning on her claws climbed past her wrists and up her forearms, her blonde hair rising as static charge built around her in a visible halo.
She stomped hard, caving the ground in and creating a blazing fissure beneath.
"BLOSSOM WOULD KILL THE ENTIRE WORLD BEFORE BLOSSOM LETS ANYONE TAKE HER COLLAR!"
Skarn’s jaw locked.
The growling behind him had become a continuous wall of sound, tens of thousands of dogkin voices drowning out his own soldiers, and the wolfkin lord’s grey eyes darted sideways for the first time since the negotiations began as the full scope of his blunder landed.
He hadn’t just insulted a weird woman but spat on the most sacred bond in dogkin culture in front of every dogkin soldier on the field, and they were letting him know.
Blossom’s chest heaved.
Her tail had gone rigid, bristled to twice its size, and the void around her pulsed with each ragged breath, darkness bleeding from her outline like smoke from a fire that hadn’t decided how big it wanted to get.
"Is that understood?" she growled, voice dropping dangerously low.
Vargis, lord of the dogkin, stood to the side of the other beastkin lords with a grin so wide it split his face in half.
The old dogkin lord nodded along with every word Blossom screamed, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes bright with a fierce approval that said the girl had just done something his entire tribe would sing about for years to come.
Quinlan watched his amazing lover shout the wolf’s head off with an outrage not even he himself had seen before.
’That’s my girl.’
He let Blossom have every second of it, until she calmed and the lightning on her claws sputtered then died.
The growls quieted in tandem and the field settled into a silence that felt like the ground after a storm, still wet, still charged, waiting to see if there would be another.
Then Elisabeth spoke up, looking Quinlan right in the eyes with a nasty glare.
"Before any agreement is reached," the Arch Priestess announced, her stare fixed on the armored figure at the center, "you must release the dead you’ve stolen, Necromancer."
Comments 5