Primordial Villain With A Slave Harem - Chapter 1529 Assurance

Chapter 1529  Assurance

“Long live the Sovereign!”

A cluster of families near the eastern block picked it up. Then the children, because children loved shouting and the reason mattered less than the volume. Then the craftsman’s wife, standing at her third-floor window with her palm still pressed against the warm quartz, leaned out and added her voice to the chorus.

The craftsman, standing in the workshop district below, heard his wife’s voice carrying over the rooftops. He looked down at the heated floor beneath his boots, ran his thumb across the smooth workshop wall one more time, and muttered, “Benevolent Sovereign,” as if the words tasted strange but not entirely wrong.

“Benevolent Sovereign!” someone shouted from the southern quarter, and a few people nearby looked at the shouter like he’d lost his mind, because you didn’t call the Primordial Villain benevolent, that wasn’t how any of this worked, that was the man who shattered barriers and raised the dead and conquered cities before breakfast.

But the shouter didn’t care. The man in the sky had torn his family from a city about to be crushed between two armies and given them a home with heated floors and running water and windows that caught the evening light, and that was more than the Vraven Kingdom had managed in all of its history.

“Benevolent Sovereign!”

More voices joined. The chant spread through the streets like the warmth spreading through the floors, uneven and imperfect, some voices loud and some barely audible, some enthusiastic and some grudging, but spreading all the same.

Count Aldren stood in the central square with his torn cloak and his dust-covered face and listened to his people cheer for their new sovereign, and the expression on his face was the kind that history books would later describe as “complicated.”

High above, Quinlan watched the cheering spread through the city he’d built. Jasmine was pressed against his side, her arm looped through his, the wind carrying the sound upward in waves.

<They love you,> Jasmine said softly.

<They love warm floors, running water, the severe lack of Elvardian siege engines roaring outside their walls, and undead creatures snarling beneath their streets. I just happen to be attached to all of that.>

<You should learn to take the compliment, Quin.>

He squeezed her hand and let the sound wash over them for a moment. The sun slowly began sinking toward the treeline. The sky was going gold and violet above the canopy, and the frost on the distant evergreens caught the last light like scattered glass.

<…It’s weird, being called that word.>

<Benevolent?> Jasmine giggled. <Yeah, I can imagine.>

She pressed closer against his chest and her voice dropped to a tender whisper through the link.

<But the girls and I have known this for a long time, Quin. You’re an ambitious man in a cruel world, and the people you clash with only see the ambition and the power. They can’t afford to see anything else.>

She nestled her head against his chest as she decreed,

<But to us, you’ve always been the one who lifts people up and doesn’t care where they started. Our benevolent tyrant who loves us for who we are, shortcomings and all.>

<None of you have any shortcomings.>

Jasmine looked up at him with eyes so warm they could have heated the settlement on their own, for her point had just been proven by his words.

<And you’re all amazing women who would’ve reached incredible heights with or without me.>

Jasmine laughed. A real laugh, loud enough that it shook her shoulders.

<Now you’re just talking nonsense.>

<I’m serious.>

<Quin.> She shook her head. <I was a merchant’s daughter who couldn’t sleep through the night because her father’s footsteps in the hallway made her stomach drop. My mother spent more than twenty years rotting in a cell because the man I called Papa put her there, and I couldn’t do a single thing about it. Not one thing. For my entire life.>

The warmth in her voice hadn’t left, but there was iron underneath it now.

<Then you walked into my life, and within months, my father was delivered to me in chains. My mother walked free. The merchant girl who used to count coins in a back room and flinch at loud voices went from that…>

Jasmine pulled back from his chest. She turned in his grip until she was facing outward, Quinlan’s hands steady on her waist, and she spread both arms wide.

Below them, tens of thousands of people filled the streets of a city that hadn’t existed this morning. The chanting rolled through every district, voices layered on voices, “Benevolent Sovereign” echoing off compressed earth walls and rising through the cold evening air toward the two figures floating above it all. The frosted windows caught the fading light. The heated roads glowed faintly against the winter dark. Children’s voices carried the highest, shrill and fearless, threading through the deeper chorus of soldiers and merchants and mothers who had walked through a magic gate today and found warm homes on the other side.

Jasmine took it all in with her arms open and the wind in her hair and the sound of a hundred thousand people calling for the man holding her.

“To this!” she shouted.

Quinlan’s grip tightened on her waist.

“I love you, Quinlan Elysiar.” Her voice cracked, and the frustration that followed was almost funny. “And I hate that those three words are the best I can do, because they’re not enough. They’re not even close. I love you so much that my vocabulary fails me every time I try to say it properly, and I have a very good vocabulary.”

Hearing her declaration spoken out loud, numerous ladies smiled from ear to ear. The approval and affection of a woman like Jasmine seemed to have given Quinlan more credibility in the eyes of the fairer gender than building them a city had.

The sixteen-year-old girl from earlier nodded with the grave certainty of a woman who had seen all she needed to see. Her friend stared at her and gave up. Quinlan pulled Jasmine back against him, wrapped both arms around her from behind, and rested his chin on the top of her head.

He didn’t say anything.

He didn’t need to.

The cheering rolled beneath them, and the sky bled gold across the treeline, and Quinlan held the woman who had gone from counting coins in a back room to governing his rapidly growing territory, and he knew.

Everything he was fighting for. The lovers who believed in him. The power he kept reaching for. The dominion spreading outward from a forest clearing that was now a city filled with hardy people who chanted in his honor.

All of it was worth it. He was on the right track. He was fighting to carve out the life he wanted for himself.

Jasmine leaned back into his chest, and when she tilted her face up toward him, her cheeks were wet.

She was smiling. Beaming, even. But the tears rolled anyway, the way they did when joy hit so hard that the body couldn’t hold it all and had to let some of it spill.

Quinlan looked down at her, and the gauntlet on his right hand rippled and receded. Synchra pulled back from his fingers without being asked, because she’d felt the same thing he had, and a moment later his bare hand was on Jasmine’s cheek, his thumb tracing the wet line beneath her eye.

Jasmine laughed through the tears and pressed her face into his palm.

The rest of his armor shifted. Synchra flowed from his shoulders and reshaped herself into a dark mantle that settled around Jasmine’s back, warm against the evening wind.

“The air’s too cold for you up here…” Quinlan murmured.

Jasmine pulled the mantle tighter around herself and leaned into him, and the smile on her face was the kind that made vocabulary irrelevant after all.

He held her there, one hand cupping her face, the other wrapped around her waist, the city he’d built stretching beneath them in every direction. Whatever came next, whatever armies marched toward him or alliances formed against him, whatever life threw at the Primordial Villain and the people he’d claimed as his own, he would push forward.

No hesitation, no second-guessing.

He’d come too far and built too much to stop now.

The sun hung low over the treeline, minutes from dropping behind it, and two figures hung in the sky above it all, holding each other, saying nothing.

Now, it was time to move on. The clock on his promise of delivering Whisperfield to his allies before sundown was ticking rapidly.