Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1879: Child No Longer

”I now know what I want from this world. What I’ll do after my vengeance is complete.”

Her eyes stayed on Quinlan’s face while she condemned everything beyond him.

”Every man who puts a price on a child.”

The light climbed her back as she spoke, and a second voice had come up under hers, far down, level, bottomless. Nobody along those walls dared look at the man holding her.

”Every hand that carries the box. Every lord who signs the deed. Every clerk who leaves a dead boy’s name out of the book. I am coming for every single one of them. Anywhere they run, however long it takes, I’ll find them. One by one, I will cleanse this rotten world of its filth.”

The smoke in the rafters had begun to turn, slowly, all of it, one great wheel above their heads.

”I’ll not stop until no child has to wait for help that never comes. That is what I want to do.”

Quinlan looked at her for a long second before his eyes began flashing, brighter than the sun itself. ”I hear your creed, Iris Ravenclaw. Let’s scrub this world clean together.” The ritualistic words were spoken.

Somewhere above the world, the Soul Records began to write.

And somewhere far beneath it, in the deepest dark of the villain’s soul realm, where a careful little warden kept it sleeping, the Seed of Corruption opened.

It did not erupt. It tipped a single drop of itself into the ink, authority no mortal woman was ever meant to hold, and then it settled back down under its warden’s care, satisfied.

[The one designated ’Child of Reckoning’ is a child no longer.]

[Witnessed and countersigned: Bloodfather.]

[Class Evolved: Demon of Vengeance.]

[Shield of the Innocent. Scourge of the Vile.]

What the hall saw was a man standing in the middle of a burned record-house, holding a woman whose back had become a line of rising light between his hands.

What the hall felt arrive was a demon.

It rolled out from the two of them in one slow wave, heat off an opened furnace door. Where the ember-light threw them against the far wall there was one shadow, tall as the iron doors, and it belonged to neither body casting it.

Soldiers who had held their ground through the count’s whole confession found the wall at their backs without deciding to move. Felicity grabbed Stormlord’s vambrace and held on.

Ayame’s hand pressed flat and low over her stomach, and Black Fang’s did the same where she stood, two marks pulsing in time with a sister’s.

The red of Iris’s eyes lit from far inside, and the tears still standing on her cheeks burned off her skin as fine mist, mid-fall.

Nobody would ever watch Iris Ravenclaw cry again.

Quinlan felt the pride come up through him, pride and something even fiercer under it, because he had just watched the girl from that basement become the thing that would make the world pay for it. His arms stayed exactly where they were, the stillest thing in the hall.

Then it banked. The glow along her back dimmed and went out under the cloth, the one shadow on the far wall folded back into two, and the hall remembered how to breathe.

Her eyes left Quinlan’s face and found the count.

She stepped back out of his arms.

The fragile thing had gone into the forging, all of it, and the heat that rose off her in its place reached the walls.

She was the Demon of Vengeance.

Every torn-open year of what had just been done to her had to go somewhere, and she had spent her whole life learning where.

The killing intent poured out of her, steady and total, filling the hall as it had over the ledger page an hour before, except this time it had no bottom.

”You’ll pay.”

She said it flat enough to walk on, and loud enough for every soul in the hall to carry it home.

”You’ll know no mercy. You’ll know no sleep. And, for as long as I live, you’ll know no death.”

Her red eyes never left the count. ”You’re mine. For the rest of your infinite misery.”

[New Ability Acquired!]

Her class had heard every word, and it had already begun keeping them.

Ayame’s thumb came off her blade’s guard, relinquishing the claim without a word.

Quinlan said nothing at all.

Count Corvane found his voice first.

”No.” It came out of his ruined mouth as a croak and climbed with every word. ”No. There is due process! I am a peer of the realm! I have rights! I answer to the capital, to the crown, to a court...”

His chains thrashed against the stones as he twisted toward Stormlord. ”STORMLORD! You serve the law! Tell them what the law says!”

Iris started walking.

She crossed the burned floor one slow step after another, unhurried and gentle, and the fire leaned toward her as she passed.

Quinlan turned to Stormlord.

”What does your king’s law do with him?”

Stormlord did not look at the count. He answered the villain, level and complete, without one wasted word.

”Treason against the crown’s roads. Records burned under royal seal. And what he confessed tonight, before a royal commission.”

He let one heartbeat pass. ”He’d be taken to the capital, tried before the king, stripped of his title, and hanged.”

”Hanged,” Quinlan repeated.

The word came out of him quietly, and the record-house changed.

The torches simply burned smaller.

The winter reached in through the broken doors and settled along every spine at once. The ash stopped drifting and hung in the air, as though the hall itself had decided not to move.

Then, together, the Primordial Villain and the Demon of Vengeance decreed:

”That cannot stand.”

Quinlan smiled. ”Guess I’ll fail the old man’s task after all.”

”No.”

Stormlord’s voice.

The commander of the Aegis Vanguard stepped forward from Felicity’s shoulder, the only man in the hall whose spine had not bent a single degree.

He was looking at Quinlan with flat, settled calm. He had made his peace with dying where the law told him to stand long ago.

”You’ll fail nothing,” he said.

He turned to Felicity, named her formally, and the iron in his voice laid itself down in front of her like a drawbridge.

”Your Highness. The law asks a court for one thing, to establish what was done, beyond doubt, before the crown’s witnesses. It was established here tonight, before a royal commission and a princess of Vraven carrying the king’s seal.

”A court in the capital would spend a month reading back what this hall already knows.”

He drew one breath. ”Judgment belongs to the crown, and the crown is standing on these stones. You may render it.”

Felicity stared up at him.

”Render judgment... Me?” she said.

”You, Your Highness.”

She looked at Iris, at her friend’s receding back, for a long moment, tears still cutting through the ash.

One look was enough.

Felicity Valorian turned to face the count, drew herself up, and passed sentence in the smoke of his own burned records, in the plain words of a fourteen-year-old.

”Count Corvane. You’re guilty of terrible crimes against not just Vraven but humanity itself.” Her voice shook and did not stop. ”The crown takes your lands, your title, your name. And the crown takes your life.”

She swallowed.

”The execution belongs to Iris Ravenclaw.”