Chapter 1777: Joyous Return |
"I owe you one more thing. Shall we?"
Elisabeth looked up at him, still flushed, still rattled, and the confusion that crept across her features was genuine. "...What?"
Quinlan answered Elisabeth’s question by tearing a hole in Velara’s cathedral.
Wind gathered beneath the group in a single compressed column and lifted every person off the stone floor at once, smooth and effortless.
By the time Elisabeth realized her feet were no longer touching ground, the vaulted ceiling was already rushing toward them.
Quinlan raised one hand and the stone parted, folding outward in a clean circle to reveal winter sky.
The group floated through the opening into cold air above the city.
Velara, robes billowing around her ankles, watched her cathedral’s roof peel apart and turned a look on Quinlan so dry it could have started a brushfire. "Are you doing this on purpose?"
She exhaled tiredly before he could respond. "Don’t even answer. I know you are."
"Doing what on purpose?" Quinlan asked, the picture of innocence.
Velara’s expression somehow found a way to go even drier.
She said nothing.
"I won’t know what you mean if you don’t tell me." The grin splitting Quinlan’s face was the most satisfied expression he’d worn all day, and it told Velara everything his words denied.
Yes, he was doing all of this on purpose and he was having a great time while doing so.
"Villain!" Elisabeth’s voice rose, but the heat cracked at the edges before it could truly build. The screeching that would’ve followed minutes ago came as uncertain and weak.
"To desecrate a holy sanctuary by..." She trailed off. The priestess who’d been hurling accusations all day had taken too many hits to her worldview to swing another, and she closed her mouth, visibly swallowing the lecture she’d been about to deliver.
The wind shifted and they shot across the rooftops fast enough that anyone on the streets below would’ve caught only a flicker against the winter clouds. Within seconds he set them down on a flat roof overlooking the city’s main gate and the wide avenue leading up to it.
"[Warp Gate]." He flicked two fingers and the dimensional doorway bloomed open thirty meters past the city gate, its shimmering surface facing the settlement.
A soldier on the gatehouse wall spotted it first.
His spear tilted as he leaned forward, squinting, and then recognition hit and his whole face brightened.
"They’re here!"
He grinned, grabbed the iron horn bolted to the wall, and blew three sharp notes into it. The signal rang across the district and bounced off heated stone.
After the first horn blow, the citizens froze.
"Invaders?!"
A woman clutching a bread basket stopped mid-step, a carpenter lowered his hammer, children paused their game to stare toward the gate, and for a breath the entire district held still because a horn from the walls meant visitors, and in a city this young, visitors could mean anything.
Then two more horn blows arrived, signaling a vastly different event than hostile invasion.
Just as the first figure stepped through the shimmer, a cry went up from the front of the crowd that had nothing to do with fear. "They’re coming home!!" Children bolted toward the gate screaming for papa and mama, wives and husbands shoved past each other to get closer, and the street shattered into a stampede of joy.
The soldier who’d stepped through was blue-skinned, a man in his thirties, pale ghostly fire tracing his form, marking him as a creature no longer alive.
But his smile was.
"PAPA!!" A boy of five launched from the crowd and hit his legs so hard he stumbled, and the laugh that tore out of him as he scooped the boy up had nothing rehearsed in it.
More poured through.
Two boys sprinted past everyone and tackled a dead woman in partial armor who dropped to her knees and pulled them both in tight.
An elderly couple waited at the edge, unhurried, until their son walked to them and his mother pressed her forehead to his chest without a word.
A woman in an apron broke into a sprint and slammed into her dead husband hard enough to send them both staggering. "You’re late," she managed with her face buried in his chest, voice cracking on the second word.
"The boss was ambushed by Elvardia. Had a lot to clean up."
"Hmph! Continental wars should know their place. You were helping me set the garden up and then you disappeared!"
"As I said-"
"I know, but I don’t have to approve!"
"Let’s go back to the garden, dear?"
"No, it’s late now..." the woman pouted. Then she bit her lips. "Instead let’s go to bed..."
"Say no more." The man lifted his wife and began hauling her back toward their new home.
The avenue filled with reunions too private to watch and too warm to look away from, laughter and crying tangled together in the winter air.
On the rooftop, Jasmine watched with quiet eyes and a smile she didn’t need to brighten. Felicity stood beside her with both hands clasped at her chest, soft and warm, and Velara pressed her lips together and said nothing, all three quiet, because they’d seen this before and it still hadn’t gotten old.
Alexios stood with his arms crossed, his expression giving away nothing, but his eyes tracked every reunion below. Beside him, Myrasyn’s hand found Isveth’s, and tears slipped down both elven faces in unison.
Morgana looked at her nails.
Elisabeth hadn’t moved a single inch since the gate materialized.
"I promised I’d show you how my soldiers get to go home after being dismissed from duty." Quinlan’s voice was low, meant for her alone. "I know you will argue it’s staged. Smiles on puppets following my orders."
He tilted his head toward the avenue below. "So what do you propose? Should I have Kitsara disguise you tonight to help sneak into their homes and let you listen in to see how they live when they think nobody’s watching? Or will that also not suffice?"
Elisabeth didn’t answer.
Her gaze was on the avenue, where the dead were being hauled into homes by impatient wives and swarmed by children who refused to let go. They moved like people who’d been away too long.
Elisabeth’s heart hammered against her ribs.
Her face cycled through a dozen expressions in the space of a few seconds, disbelief crumbling into confusion, confusion crumbling into nothing she had a word for, and her lips parted without producing sound.
Everything she’d been taught about the desecration of the dead, every sermon she’d delivered about the abomination of necromancy, was walking down the street below her being scolded about gardening.
Her hands trembled at her sides.
Elisabeth’s knees hit the stone.
The Arch Priestess sank where she stood with her hands clasped before her chest, and the prayer that left her lips was so quiet it barely carried over the wind.
Tears streaked down her cheeks without ceremony, the thin silent kind that came when the truth of what she’d seen finally settled into place and there was nothing left to fight.
She prayed for a long time, and no one interrupted her.
When she finally looked up at Quinlan, her eyes were red-rimmed but clear.
Then...
Elisabeth bowed her head toward Quinlan from her knees.
"I apologize for my behavior." Her voice was thin and fragile, yet the sincerity in it was clear for all to hear.
"Your Fujimori woman was right." She raised her eyes again to meet his. "You’re not a necromancer but the Necromancer. I understand now why the Goddess doesn’t wish to eradicate your existence."
Felicity’s smile could have lit the entire city.
Quinlan looked at the kneeling priestess for a long moment, and the surprise on his face gave way to real warmth. "Apology accepted."
Elisabeth smiled at that, soft and real. "Did my terrible behavior affect your opinion of the church?" she asked, worried.
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