Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem Chapter 1799: Despair

Quinlan led Alexios down the basement stairs, and the cold reached them before the light did.

A short corridor waited at the bottom, plain oak doors on either side, storerooms and root cellars and an iron-banded pantry. Every door matched the stone, sturdy and unremarkable.

Except one.

It was lacquered a deep, glossy red, gilded vines curling up its frame, and Alexios could swear he saw the silhouette of three furry tails embedded into the red.

Somebody had clearly loved decorating it.

Alexios slowed. He looked at the door, then at Quinlan.

"What do you keep in there?"

"What do you think?"

The king studied the crimson lacquer for a moment. A vault. A reliquary. Some indulgence of the ladies, jewelry, silks...

"A treasury," he decided. "For the women’s finery."

"What an old-school romantic man you are. Morgana is truly wasted on you."

"...I told you many times to stop badmouthing-"

"-your damned wife?" Quinlan finished for him.

Alexios’s eyes narrowed. He didn’t like being quoted like this. "What is this room then?"

"My sex dungeon."

"..." Alexios walked faster.

Then Iris’s voice reached them from the cellar proper, and every trace of humor died where they stood.

The cellar opened out past the corridor, long and low, older stone than the halls above, lit by two lanterns whose flames leaned with the draft.

In the cleared space at the center, upright on its sled of packed earth, stood the monolith of layered frost that held the last lord of the Covenant of Eternity.

And in front of it, dark iron chain wrapped twice around her fist, stood Iris.

She’d been down here since before the rest of them visited Nyxara in the soul realm.

Her voice had the fray to prove it.

"Your lords are banished to true death, creature. Your armies are ash. There’s nobody left to protect and nobody ing to dig you out, so say the name."

Gorthrax’s voice rolled out of the skull, warm and unhurried, still savoring the same conversation he’d been having with the red-eyed woman all evening.

"Child. That makes eleven. One more and we reach a dozen, and I do love a round number, so by all means, ask again. The answer remains that I do not know. No agent of ours was ever sent, never to a barony. Truth be told, I started rooting for you somewhere around question eight. Imagine if all that swearing was for nothing. Tragic. Fascinating."

The chain creaked in her grip.

Quinlan stopped where the corridor met the cellar, leaned his shoulder against the cold stone, and said nothing. Beside him, the king went equally still.

Of all the women at Quinlan’s side, the black-haired swordswoman was the one Alexios knew best.

Iris Ravenclaw. One thousand gold, alive only. He’d signed that bounty almost a year ago, after the Geim Roots went missing from the kingdom’s outpost with her being suspected of foul play as the investigation found proof of her leaving the battlefield alive and healthy.

All that was before the world ever heard the name Quinlan Elysiar, meaning he’d been hunting this girl longer than he’d been hunting the villain.

Somewhere along the way, his wanted deserter had bee the jailer of the oldest undead monster known in Iskaris.

Neither man announced himself. Iris didn’t turn. Every thread of her attention was nailed to the skull in the ice.

Iris’s voice came low and worn. "Then explain the collectors. They told my father his debt had been bought. They told him it belonged to the Covenant of Eternity now. He repeated those words until the day I killed him."

"And that is the wall your ladder has been leaning against all these years, little girl."

The light in the sockets banked, patient.

"We are researchers. We study the dark arts, we grow our hordes, and we think in spans your kind doesn’t live long enough to imagine. A moneylender’s ledger..." The rattle again, genuinely entertained. "I once misplaced an entire library for four hundred years, and noticed only when a wing of my crypt collapsed. Your family’s debt wouldn’t have bought its candles."

"Many small lands together-"

"Ah, you misunderstand me." The dry rattle that passed for his laugh scraped around the cellar. "I’m telling you there was nothing in that house we could have wanted. Land? We lived under it back then, it wasn’t yet our time to surface, and even if it had been... why raise a ruckus over a patch so tiny it couldn’t house half my horde standing shoulder to shoulder? Nonsense."

Iris’s stare didn’t move off the skull.

"Coin?" The glow in its sockets rolled, the closest a skull could e to waving a hand. "We dangle the Ritual of Immortality in front of dying old men and women with far more riches than your family ever saw, and they sign away everything they own for a chance at lichdom. And the boy. The brother you keep growling about..."

The light didn’t even flicker. That was the worst part. There was no cruelty in it at all, only the mild, bottomless indifference of a scholar doing arithmetic.

"What would my kind possibly do with a little boy? I’ve raised a few, you know. Curiosity, mostly, and one lost wager. A child that small can’t even hold a sword right once it rises. It shambles three steps, drops the blade, and rots. Worthless stock. If an agent of mine had spent gold on that, I’d have turned him into a thrall for the embarrassment alone."

For one full breath, the cellar was silent.

Then the image arrived, and Iris couldn’t stop it.

Damian. Small and grey and wrong, dragging a blade he couldn’t lift through the dark of somebody’s crypt, dropping it, picking it up, dropping it again, forever. Her brother, who had walked toward the men at the door so they wouldn’t take her instead, shambling. Rotting. A line item in a monster’s arithmetic, appraised and priced and thrown away in the same sentence.

The last thread of her control tore straight down the middle.

"You..." The word came out broken. The next ones came out screaming. "You!"

"Yes?" There was zero fear in Gorthrax’s voice.

The chain-wrapped fist hit the casing.

*CRACK!*

Frost shards sprayed, and the monolith rocked on its sled. She hit it again, and again, iron and knuckles and everything behind them. Each blow landed with the full weight of a class built from suffering. Her power ate pain and paid it back with interest, and she was feeding it with both hands.

"He was a little baby, you rotten sack of bones! He couldn’t hold a sword because he was a baby!"

*CRACK!*

"That’s... exactly my point?" the undead asked, confused.

"I butchered my way up to you!" Another blow. Blood from her split knuckles froze pink against the ice. "Every piece of scum I caught swore the next one up was Covenant, and now you tell me they were all lying?"

After deserting from the royal army, Iris wandered, searching for clues in hiding, and even after she joined the Vesper Consortium, her quest of vengeance never stopped. Even when she recently left for an adventure with Feng, Felicity, and Lyra, she kept looking.

The frost over Gorthrax’s collarbones spiderwebbed, and the skull watched her split her own knuckles against his prison with open, glowing fascination.

"Oh, marvelous. It’s feeding, isn’t it? I can hear it drinking. Your parents did a terrific job turning you into such a strong warrior. Then ’he’ enhanced you even further, correct? I dissected many Child of Agony wielders in my time, yet none had abilities quite like yours. Tell me, child, does the pain pool at the core of your class, or does it-"

"I hate this." She wasn’t talking to him anymore. The blows kept falling, wilder now, ragged, her breath tearing in and out of her. "I hate you. I hate that you put him in my head like that, I hate my whole miserable life, I hate all of it..."

A hand settled on her shoulder, steady and warm.

Iris’s head snapped around so fast her vision smeared.

Quinlan stood there, close enough that she should have heard his heartbeat. Nobody had crossed a room like this without Iris noticing since she was thirteen, the one thing the cage had built into her that never switched off. Yet he had walked down a staircase and across half a cellar, and she’d registered none of it.

Her chest heaved.

Her fist stayed cocked in the air, trembling, blood sliding down the chain, and she stared at him with her eyes blown wide, somewhere between distraught and stunned.

Quinlan didn’t say anything. He just held her shoulder and let her find the floor of herself.

Gorthrax’s voice regathered its charm, reaching past her for the audience it actually wanted. "Young lord of the dead! There you are. Your jailer and I had quite exhausted each other, I’m afraid. We should speak as fellow students of the dead, I know things worth infinitely more than one little barony’s..."

Quinlan looked at him.

That was all.

He didn’t speak, didn’t raise a hand.

But the look that crossed the cellar was the kind of thing that had no business in a living face.

The oldest recorded monster on the continent stopped talking mid-sentence.

In the sockets, the light shrank to almost nothing.

Then the frost answered its master. It climbed the monolith in silence, over the collarbones, up the vertebrae of the neck, across the jaw, and sealed shut over the skull, swallowing the ember light whole.