Primordial Villain With A Slave Harem - Chapter 1483 Come and Take It

Chapter 1483  Come and Take It

“Tell your friend about your mothers’ milk, Quin,” Feng said from somewhere in the background. Her voice was giddy.

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Quinlan replied smoothly.

“Suuure…”

“I wouldn’t.”

“You literally drank-”

“Moving on.”

Alexios’s hand had migrated from the armrest to his forehead. He pressed his fingers into his temples and breathed through his nose.

“Luminara and Mearie,” the king said. His voice trembled, and it had nothing to do with the vulgarity of the conversation. It was the tremor of a man whose understanding of reality was being restructured against his will. “The First Elf and the Shield Maiden?”

The artifact went quiet for a beat.

Luminara. The First Elf. Her name was recorded extensively in elven historical archives and treated as near-divine, or outright divine, by much of the elven population. Shrines stood in her honor across Elvardian lands. Prayers were offered in her name. To the elves, she was second only to the Goddess herself, the mother from whom all elven blood descended. Many elves even favored Luminara over the Goddess, treating her as the main divinity to pray to.

Mearie. The Shield Maiden. That name carried a different weight. It was not common knowledge. It existed in a single book, the chronicle of the First Age, passed from one Valorian monarch to the next upon coronation. Only the king had access. Only the king read its pages. Mearie was recorded as a legendary warrior who fought to protect humanity with shield and spear in hand. A guardian. A mother in the truest, most ancient sense.

Those names, alongside Thyra, the Mother of Humanity, and Malakar, the Father of Humanity, were figures of myth.

And his daughter had just described having tea with them.

“Oh, you know them?” Quinlan sounded mildly surprised. Alexios sat rigid in his chair.

He was listening. Truly listening. Because this was Felicity speaking.

Quinlan could say anything. The pest lied, exaggerated, and manipulated as naturally as breathing. Alexios had learned long ago to weigh every word that left his mouth against three possible deceptions.

But Felicity did not lie to him.

And she was describing primordials by name. By personality. By the warmth of their presence and the gruffness of their silences. She spoke of Thyra’s sternness and Hanae’s humor with the easy familiarity of a girl recounting a visit to distant relatives. She spoke of Luminara and Mearie with genuine admiration.

These were not rehearsed words. This was not a script Quinlan had fed her. She was remembering.

Alexios’s gaze drifted to the statue of the Goddess in the corner of his room.

The stone figure stood as it always had. Hands open. Eyes downcast. Unchanging.

“Quinlan Elysiar.” The king’s voice came out quieter than he intended. “Did you truly meet her.”

It wasn’t phrased as a question. The inflection was wrong for that. It was a man asking for confirmation of something he was already beginning to believe, and the believing terrified him more than the doubt.

Quinlan’s tone changed.

The giddiness dropped. The casual ease that made everything sound like a joke evaporated. When he spoke, his voice was even, carrying the weight of a man relaying something he took seriously.

“I did.”

A pause came. Then…

“You asked me to bring her a question, Alexios.”

When I am gone, will my people sleep easier?

That was the king’s question to the Goddess.

His breathing stopped.

“She answered.”

Silence filled the throne room. The cold tea on the table. The crown on the armrest. The portrait of his daughter still lying face-up beside the artifact.

“Her words were exact,” Quinlan continued. “‘No. They will not sleep easier.’ That is what she said.”

Alexios did not move.

His eyes stayed on the statue. On those carved hands, open and offering nothing. On those stone eyes, looking down at him the way they’d looked down at every king who had ever sat in this room and asked the same unanswerable questions.

But now they were answered.

They will not sleep easier.

What did it mean? That his reign, for all its compromises and many sacrifices, had been the best his people could hope for? That whoever came after him would fail where he had merely stumbled?

Or was it simpler than that? Was the Goddess saying what Alexios had suspected for decades? That the kingdom itself was the disease, and no king, good or bad, could cure what was rotten at the foundation?

His jaw tightened. His eyes burned. He blinked once. Twice.

The Goddess of Thalorind had heard his question. And she had answered through the mouth of the man he had put a bounty on.

“Are you weeping right now, old man?”

Alexios’s spine straightened. “You will address me with respect, Parasite.”

“Sure thing~”

“Stop mocking father! You two should be good friends!” Felicity chirped.

Quinlan’s tone did not change.

“Tell him to remove the bounty from my head for a start. And stop hunting the Vesper Consortium.”

“Father…”

“No.”

Alexios was firm. The old king was many things, but a coward wasn’t among the list.

Even if he were to strip away his personal feelings entirely, the calculus did not change. Alexios had sat on this throne for long enough to recognize the shape of a man like Quinlan Elysiar. He’d seen his kind before, though never at this scale. Men who asked for one concession, then two, then ten, each one framed as reasonable, each one building on the last, until the person who granted them looked up one day and realized they’d given away the house while arguing over the furniture.

Remove the bounty. That was the first demand.

The second would follow before the ink dried. It always did. Then a third. Then terms. Then conditions that bent the crown until it cracked.

Quinlan had already laid the groundwork for this. In a previous conversation, the man had stated it plainly, without an ounce of shame: the only way they could truly cooperate was if Alexios executed his own wife, Queen Morgana. Mother of his children. A Ravenshade by blood and a disaster by temperament, but his queen nonetheless. That was the kind of man Quinlan was. Not evil for the sake of it. Worse. Rational. Every demand served a purpose. Every concession he extracted would feed the next move. And the moves would never stop, because Quinlan Elysiar did not want peace. He wanted control.

If Alexios removed the bounty, the Consortium would gain breathing room. If the Consortium gained breathing room, Quinlan’s network would strengthen. If Quinlan’s network strengthened, the next demand would arrive with more leverage behind it. And the demand after that. And the one after that. Until the Valorian crown existed only at the pleasure of a man who had declared himself its enemy.

Alexios owed more than that to his ancestors. To the kings whose names lined the walls of the royal crypts. To the descendants who would inherit what he left behind. He would not be the Valorian who surrendered the kingdom one piece at a time to a parasite with bottomless ambition.

“I see,” Quinlan did not sound surprised one bit. The two men knew each other well enough to understand it would not happen. With a darker tone, he added, “I hope you haven’t gotten too fragile in my absence, old friend-”

“You were gone for three hours…”

“-because I will be taking over now.”

The words sat in the air between them.

Alexios’s hand found the hilt of his sword. Not the one on the wall, but the one leaning against his chair. The blade he carried before the crown. The sword of the Warrior King.

“Is that so?” Alexios said.

His voice carried no fear. No trembling. No resignation.

The man who sat in this chair was old. The man who gripped this sword was not.

A grin crept into his voice, the kind of grin that a millennium of war had failed to kill.

“The crown… You want it?” Steel sang faintly as his grip shifted on the hilt. “Come and pry it from my cold, dead hands.”

Quinlan chuckled darkly, sounding like a proper, evil villain of legend to the king’s ears.

The artifact went silent.

Alexios sat in the silence of his throne room.

The statue watched him. The portrait of his daughter lay on the table. The wanted poster hung on the wall.

The Warrior King looked at all three.

Then he stood, sheathed the sword at his hip, and walked toward the war room.

There was work to do.

The same was true for both men.

Quinlan, too, began making his move now that he was done catching up.