Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1808: The Lorien Apothecary

Her mother.

That was her mother.

The threads of magma found Lucille’s axe, winding up the haft and sinking into the blade until the whole edge burned molten orange, and the glow of it reached every face in the common room.

Then the rest of the water rose.

It came up in columns around the figure and built as it climbed: a troll five times her height with fists like boulders, a second one at its shoulder, a serpent thick as a barrel coiling around the whole arrangement, horned brutes filling the gaps, until a full warband of liquid monsters stood in silent ranks around one small woman.

”Quin!!” Lucille’s voice came out smaller than it had been all evening, an adorable little squeal, her fingers finding his sleeve. ”This is too much... An entire warband of monsters against just me? It looks like bragging...”

”No.” Aurora propped her chin on her laced fingers, amber eyes gleaming. ”It’s perfect.”

The first troll’s club came down, and the little Lucille walked into the swing rather than away from it. The blazing axe rose to meet the club, went through it, through the arm behind it, through the shoulder behind that, and half the troll burst into steam that made Cela yelp.

She never stopped walking. The serpent struck at her back, and she split it along its whole length without turning. A horned pair rushed her from both sides and died on a single looping figure-eight of molten light. Every stroke rolled into the next, seamless, unhurried, and wherever that edge traveled, water became fog.

Mavena had abandoned her teacup somewhere around the first troll. She was leaning halfway across the table with her lips parted and magma light swimming in her eyes, and every bit of carefully maintained wariness had burned off her face along with the steam.

Her mother was amazing. The thought arrived uninvited, and she let it stay, because the little warrior on the villain’s palm made looking away impossible.

”Most fighters, even those with higher levels and centuries more training, would take a group like this apart with careful strategy,” Quinlan narrated. ”But your mother walks straight through the middle. And the whole time...”

The tiny figure stood tall, axe raised, surrounded by dissolving enemies.

”...she smiles. Isn’t your mother far too beautiful?”

”Q-Quinlan Elysiar!!!” Lucille’s mortified squeak came, far too embarrassed.

”She is...” Mavena whispered under her breath.

”!!” Lucille’s cheeks turned tomato red.

The last troll collapsed into spray around her final swing. The little figure straightened amid the ruin, then snapped her axe out to one side in a single flat swish, and the water clinging to the blade left it in one clean fan of droplets, the way blood leaves steel.

On his palm she stood alone in the thinning fog, small and bright under the inn’s lamps, chest heaving, and the glow of her axe dimmed and cooled before she came apart into mist, and was gone.

Nobody in the common room made a sound.

”Mom.”

Lucille turned. Mavena had lowered the hand from her mouth.

”Will you show me? Sometime.” She swallowed. ”The real thing. Not... ” she gestured at Quinlan’s empty palm, ”...the puppet show.”

Lucille froze. The half of herself she had hidden away for so long, so sure her daughter would flinch from it, and Mavena was reaching for it with both hands. The dread went out of her like a held breath, and her whole face lit with something too large to hold still.

”Any time you want...”

Robert, at the counter, elected to begin drying the same mug again.

Cela had both hands pressed over her heart.

Aurora, eyes soft, turned to Quinlan. ”So there’s something for me to do?”

”Right,” he nodded. ”Time for business.”

Quinlan rested a hand on Lucille’s head. ”Aurora and I have somewhere to be. Why don’t you bond with your daughter without hiding yourself?” Lucille barely heard him, her eyes still on Mavena.

But she replied nonetheless, whispering, ”O-okay... Love you so much...”

”Love you too. Now then, my beloved alchemist.” He flicked his fingers and the [Warp Gate] appeared.

”It’s time to cook.”

...

The [Warp Gate] opened onto an empty, sleeping street, directly in front of the Lorien apothecary: a tall, narrow building with a freshly painted sign and light burning stubbornly in the back workroom, exactly as Aurora had predicted.

”Cauldron hours,” she confirmed fondly, and knocked on the recently built home’s entrance.

Naomi, Aurora’s mom, proposed that they relocate here from Quinlan’s home, saying Miri Town needed proper alchemists.

But everyone understood that she mostly desired to give her daughter proper space to build her own life without her parents always being just around the corner.

The door opened on Gideon Lorien, monocle already in place at midnight, sleeves rolled for work. He found Aurora in the lamplight and blinked.

His brow furrowed with paternal bookkeeping. ”Back already? You said you’d be helping Jasmine, then going to the inn with Lucille. Did the schedule...”

The darkness behind her chose that moment to resolve into people: the Primordial Villain, a hooded old soldier built like a fortress, and a black-haired swordswoman radiating the desire to be elsewhere.

”We need your help, Dad.” Aurora was grinning the way she usually did over unstable compounds. ”Tonight. Will you and Mom be my assistants?”

For a moment, Gideon’s monocle was in genuine danger. ”Assistants? To you?” He looked her up and down as though checking her for fever. ”Young lady, you are far too green-”

”Stop barring the entry, Gideon.” Naomi Lorien appeared behind her husband, took him by the elbow, and relocated him from the doorway.

Her eyes went straight to Quinlan, and her smile arrived whole. ”Quinlan. Thank you for always taking such good care of our daughter.”

”No thanks needed.” Quinlan’s answer came without a beat of hesitation. ”It’s my honor to protect the girl I love.”

Gideon, still mid-outrage, nodded along to that as though it were the single uncontested fact of the evening. Naomi positively beamed. And Aurora, who handled explosive reagents without flinching, went quietly pink between her parents.

”Quin... Not in front of my parents...” she mumbled.

Naomi chuckled for a long moment, then her gaze traveled past Aurora and brightened all over again. ”Iris! What a pleasant surprise. Where did you leave your friend?”

”...” Iris raised an eyebrow. ”Friend?”

”Ayame, that gorgeous samurai friend of yours.” Naomi said it as though it explained everything. ”Whenever I see you two together, I get to imagine what having two daughters would’ve been like.”

”???” Iris was struck right in the soul with existential damage.

Naomi turned a long, scrutinizing look on her husband. ”We messed up, Gideon.”

”The shop would not have survived two,” he answered with conviction.

”Hey!” Aurora stomped.

Meanwhile, Iris’s mouth opened. Nothing came out. Her, and that slit-eyed cunt? Friends? The sentence tried to assemble itself several different ways behind her red eyes and failed every time, so she closed her mouth, turned on her heel, and started walking into the night.

”Where are you going?” Quinlan called after her.

”Far.”

”Come on...”

”No.”

While the bickering unspooled behind them, Naomi’s attention settled on the last guest, the hooded soldier who had stood in perfect, disciplined silence through all of it. ”And who might you be, mister?”

Alexios remained silent, hood and the night’s dark covering his face.

”You know him, Mom...” Aurora whispered, already feeling conflicted and worried.

”Do I, now.” Naomi mused and began sorting aloud. ”You can’t be Blackjack. You’re far too composed. A soldier from the Vraven Kingdom? No... too much spine. Hmm...”

Beside her, Gideon had gone very still. He leaned in for a second, much longer look, and the name came out flat and certain.

”Alexios Valorian.”

Naomi’s smile closed like a shop shutter. The King of Vraven, on her doorstep. The same crown that had dragged the two of them from their homes in Braedon, branded them bandit financiers, and buried them in a cell so deep that their own daughter couldn’t learn whether they were still breathing.

”...Why are you here?” The warmth was gone from her voice, all of it. ”This land isn’t part of your wretched nation.”

Alexios held her stare in silence.

Technically it was, as Quinlan’s cities were in the northern part of Greenvale. Close to Ravenshade and the other two nations, just deep in the forests, far enough from everything to not be found.

However, instead of arguing, he inclined his head to her and to Gideon both, unhurried and deep. ”I apologize for bothering you this late at night.” He turned back toward the dark. ”Thank you for being kind to Felicity.”

Alexios did not apologize for capturing them, for he felt fully justified in that. They committed a crime by hiring thugs to invade his outpost.

But that mattered little now.

”Mom.” Aurora caught her mother’s hand. ”I know, and I’m sorry for bringing him here, but...”

”But?” Naomi’s eyes were narrowed into slits.

”Tonight, in your workroom, we might make alchemical history. The kind that gets cited for centuries. And he’s needed for it.”

Naomi held her daughter’s gaze a beat longer, then her shoulders dropped and she stepped out of the doorway.

”Inside, all of you, before the street wakes up.”

...

The workroom smelled of a hundred herbs and one long argument with entropy. Copper stills lined one wall, cauldrons in three sizes sat over banked burners, and Naomi took up station at the center bench, tying her apron strings tight.

”Well then.” Her eyes, keen and pleased despite everything, found Quinlan. ”History, was it? Talk.”

Quinlan stepped into the lamplight. ”I need a brew that has never been brewed. The recipe doesn’t exist, and it might not be possible at all. I just have a hunch.”