"A peerless existence, isn’t she?"
He’d sent Rosie after them, of course, and received detailed reports for the entire trip. But that information... The king did not receive it.
"That is not the word I..." Alexios gave up halfway through the sentence. He wasn’t one to badmouth other men’s wives.
But he did not take another step backward.
Because the math had changed, and Alexios Valorian had never once refused to run new numbers just because he hated them.
Dying on schedule meant leaving Felicity to a guardian who called ’that’ parenting. It meant leaving his life’s work, the political plays, the succession, all of it half-built in hands he could no longer correct.
Set against all of that stood one disgusting, scheming, pearl-colored insult in a primordial’s hand.
It was the best option among the terrible ones. That, too, was math.
Alexios straightened his spine, crossed the ground he had spent the last minute surrendering, and held his open hand out to Quinlan. "I’ll take it."
Quinlan, beaming like a fiend, placed the pill in the royal palm with full ceremony.
Alexios looked at it. Then he fixed Quinlan with a long, flat, wry stare and let it say everything his dignity wouldn’t.
He raised the pill to his mouth.
"By the way," Quinlan said conversationally, "it has a name. [Blessed Seed]."
The pearl stopped a finger’s width from the king’s lips.
"...What."
"Mm. It’s made from my bodily fluids. My primordial essence."
The cellar went very, very quiet. Somewhere behind the casks, thaw-water ticked on and on against the stone.
Alexios’s arm lowered with geological slowness. He looked at the pill, then at Quinlan, then back at the pill, and the color quietly drained out of him.
"Essence," he said.
Quinlan spread his hands, warm with pride. "All my girls take it. Triple experience gain, stopped aging, and I also theorize it moisturizes their skin, though that might just be my bias."
The king’s mind worked through that. Then it arrived somewhere far worse, and his head snapped up in naked horror.
"Felicity."
"Hey." Quinlan looked genuinely offended. "I’m not a freak. Of course not. She’s a child."
"Not a freak?" Alexios repeated tonelessly. "You were feeding it to me."
"You’re a dying old fucker. pletely different situation."
Alexios’s hands turned into trembling fists, only a moment from getting into the brawl of his life.
"So?" Quinlan gestured at the pearl sitting in the royal palm, supremely unbothered. "What will it be?"
"..." Alexios stared at the pill. His breath left him slowly. Then a thought crossed his face, and he turned, very slowly, toward the cask in the corner. Toward Iris.
Both of her middle fingers were up before his head finished the turn.
She said nothing. The fingers stayed up for the entire time it took him to look away.
Alexios, wisely, filed the entire subject under matters no king should investigate, and turned back to the pill.
The war that followed played out in the open on his face.
Swallowing the villain’s... he refused to finish the thought, even privately. It was beyond disgusting.
It was, without petition, the most degrading proposition ever placed before the Vravenian crown, and that was saying everything considering who his vassals were.
And on the other side of the scale sat everything else.
Staying alive. Watching Felicity grow into whoever she was being instead of guessing at it. Seeing the warrant through with his own eyes, the rot dug out of his kingdom root by root, instead of bequeathing the shovel to children who had never held one.
Then, without permission, a third thing arrived.
His heart rate picked up.
A single hard beat out of rhythm, then another, and the feeling it dragged in behind it took him a moment to even recognize, it had been away so long.
Adventure.
The barrier ing down. The maps ending, and then the maps being wrong, and then no maps at all.
Whatever waited beyond Iskaris that no living soul had seen.
And his own status screen, that fossil, that tombstone, the level that had sat frozen at its cap for centuries... it would move again. It would climb.
His breath went deeper. His shoulders came back and down, and the grey, beaten stillness that had sat on him since the soul realm peeled away layer by layer.
The change was stark enough that Iris’s boot stopped swinging mid-arc. The King of Vraven looked younger than he had a minute ago, and younger again by the time the breath finished, life pouring back into his tired eyes from somewhere that had been sealed far longer than this cellar.
He had never been a frail old man, but there was a world of difference between a strong man enduring his last season and one with somewhere to be. The room watched him cross from one to the other in the span of three heartbeats.
Alexios closed his fist around the pearl, looked up at Quinlan with his decision made, and opened his mouth.
A thread of wind slipped between his fingers and stole the pill clean out of them, and by the time the king’s eyes finished widening, it had already sailed across the cellar into Quinlan’s waiting palm.
The demonic air was gone. All of it, at once, swept out of the cellar between one heartbeat and the next, and what remained was just Quinlan, standing there with the pearl in his open hand.
"No," he said.
Alexios blinked at him. "...No?"
"I have too much respect for you to make you take this." The pill vanished back into his pocket ring.
Across the cellar, iron creaked.
Iris’s fist had closed around her chain without consulting her, and inside her skull the tirade was already at full sprint.
Respect. RESPECT?!
He’d branded her skin with his demon tattoo. He’d wired his voice directly into her head through enslaving her. And if she had ever reached for that pill, he would have watched her swallow it with the biggest, happiest grin of his miserable eternal life, and not one syllable about respect would have survived the moment.
’I’m not angry. Why the fuck would I be angry?’ Iris informed herself. Then her eyes narrowed. ’I want to beat the ever living shit out of him.’
The chain settled against the cask. She aimed her glare at the sealed pillar to demonstrate how little she cared, and the pillar wisely kept its silence.
"...Then what," Alexios asked at last, with tremendous care, "was all of that?" His gesture took in the length of the cellar, the whole hunt, every step of the retreat and the advance and the horror.
"A test to see if you were as much of a badass as I thought," Quinlan said, then grinned. "You are. Any man who’d rather die and leave behind his family than swallow his pride deserves nothing from me."
The king closed his eyes and pressed two fingers against the bridge of his nose. "I have an overwhelming urge to strangle you."
"It’s okay, you’ll get over it," Quinlan waved off the only man he could ever call his friend in this life. "Felicity having a dad instead of a grave to cry over depends on it."
Then the teasing left Quinlan’s voice between one sentence and the next.
"Let me try something else before you swallow my cum pill."
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