Primordial Villain With A Slave Harem - Chapter 1576 Golden Age
Chapter 1576 Golden Age
“Ragnar!”
Myrasyn’s voice hit the field like a whip crack.
The elf queen stood with her staff blazing, full of gathered mana. The fury on her face needed no explanation.
“Have you lost your mind?! What are you doing?!”
Ragnar released his grip on Quinlan’s neck as the collar clasped shut.
“What I had to, for the future of my people.”
“For the future of your people?! You just doomed them! Quinlan is the future of this continent! Everything we’ve been working toward is now ruined! You are destroying it with your own hands!”
Ragnar scoffed.
“Listen to yourself. Everything we’ve been working toward, ruined? We marched here to conquer the Vraven Kingdom, Myrasyn. To break Alexios and claim the continent for Elvardia. That is what we’ve been working toward.” His hand swept toward the collared Primordial Villain bleeding in the dirt. “Not this. Not whatever you’ve been doing with him.”
“Whatever I’ve been-” Myrasyn’s staff cracked against the ground and light split the air around her. “I have been strategically positioning our nation alongside the single most important entity on this continent! He is an emerging force that will reshape Iskaris whether we like it or not, and I chose to ensure that when that reshaping happens, the Alliance of Elvardia stands beside him rather than against him!”
“No. You chose to chase a man and dress it up as foreign policy.”
“I chose to be a sovereign thinking of the future of my people!”
“You chose to be a weak-willed woman.”
The silence that followed was worse than the screaming.
“Do you know why I was late?” Ragnar’s voice dropped. “You asked me where I’d been. I stopped at Whisperfield on the march here.”
Myrasyn’s expression shifted.
“The city of one hundred thousand people is empty. Every last person, gone. Vanished into thin air.”
He pointed at Quinlan.
“That is the man you want to bet Elvardia’s future on. He’s a self-serving leech who’s using us. Now let me ask what he’ll do once he deems us no longer useful.”
Myrasyn’s staff dimmed for a fraction of a second. She clearly hadn’t expected this revelation. She looked at Quinlan for a moment, then her features hardened.
“I understand your frustrations, but this is not how you settle issues with an ally whose help has been paramount to our swift invasion! He took some civilians who were no more than afterthoughts for us, but in exchange, he’s saved tens of thousands of Elvardian men and women by his war contributions! He alone conquered the city for crying out loud! He would’ve handed it over to us with literally zero soldiers lost!”
The fury in the elven queen grew with every word coming out of her lips. “We marched here for the land, for the territory, for the strategic resources, and you’re throwing a tantrum over scraps against the man who single-handedly tipped the scale of a continental war in our favor!”
“You’re truly compromised.” Ragnar shook his head.
Myrasyn’s green eyes burned. Her mana spiked hard enough to bend the smoke around her.
“King Ragnar of the Dwarven Seat.” Her voice dropped into the register of a queen issuing a formal decree. “By the authority vested in me as co-sovereign of the Alliance of Elvardia, I declare you a traitor to the state. You have acted without the sanction of the Joint Council, violated the sovereignty of our alliance, and attacked a foreign dignitary under our protection. You will stand down immediately or-”
“No, Myrasyn.”
Ragnar’s voice came out cold.
“The Council has already voted. You are the one who has been declared unfit. You are the traitor, not me.”
Myrasyn’s staff froze mid-glow.
“That’s… that’s impossible. The Council would never-”
“They voted already. The motion was Aelindra’s.”
The blade entered her back.
Aelindra’s curved sword punched into the gap between Myrasyn’s shoulder blades, angled to avoid the spine and the heart but deep enough to drop her. Myrasyn’s mouth opened and nothing came out. The glow at her staff’s tip flickered and died, and her green eyes went round with a shock so total it overwrote the pain.
The collar came next.
Aelindra’s free hand brought the iron band around from behind and pressed it against Myrasyn’s throat, and the mechanism began to close.
Myrasyn had one moment. One heartbeat between the collar touching her skin and the binding spell activating, and the elf queen spent it on the only thing that could save her.
She cast inward.
“[Sanctified Radiance]!”
Her own magic flooded every pathway in her body with purified mana, turning her entire system into an environment so hostile to foreign influence that any binding spell trying to write itself into her channels would have to burn through a wall of radiance to reach her soul.
The collar clamped shut.
The binding magic hit her channels and met the brilliance already occupying every inch of space it needed to reach. The foreign mana pushed. The radiance pushed back. Both forces ground against each other inside her body, and Myrasyn collapsed to her knees with blood running from her nose and her teeth bared in a snarl that had nothing elegant about it.
Myrasyn’s head turned. She looked up at the sister standing over her with a blade wet with her blood and a collar’s key in her hand.
“Damn it! She got the spell off in time!” Aelindra cursed. “We’ll need to break her focus.”
“Aelindra…” Myrasyn’s voice shook. “Why?”
Aelindra pulled the blade free and stepped back. Her purple eyes were cold and her twin blades hung at her sides, one of them still dripping red.
“Because you and your weak, self-degrading mindset have been poisoning our people for millennia.” Aelindra’s voice carried across the elven ranks, and the women who heard it went still.
“Commander!”
Nearly half of Myrasyn’s royal guard broke from the elven line and charged.
Then the rest attacked them from behind.
Myrasyn watched her own guard cut each other apart and the shock on her face cracked into grief.
“You…” She stared at Aelindra. “How many?”
“Enough.” Aelindra didn’t look at the bodies. “The ones who still believed in your vision are outnumbered by the ones who grew sick of it. Your own rhetoric did most of the work. Every time you lamented what our race lacked, every time you sighed about the tragedy of elven womanhood, you told them they were less. Seeing you flirt with a man of another race, acting like he’s exactly what the elven people have been missing, was a blow to us all. They simply decided to agree with someone who told them they were enough.”
She looked down at Myrasyn with cold eyes of contempt.
“This idea that we are fragile women. That our race is tragic because we lack what other races have. That we need men to complete us.” Her grip tightened on her blade. “You’ve taught generations of elven girls and women that they are insufficient. It ends today because I’m taking over.”
Myrasyn’s bloody lips parted.
“Bullshit.” Myrasyn’s voice was full of contempt. “You expect me to believe that my royal guard, women I’ve trained and led for thousands of years, turned against me because they were offended by my view on the weakness of elves?”
Aelindra’s cold expression cracked into a smile. A small one. Almost amused.
“You caught me. You only really bothered me with that. Most of your guards couldn’t care less about the weakness of womanhood and all that. Many even agree with you.” She shrugged. “Gold bought some. Blackmail bought more. A few I simply promised to promote into nobility.”
At that, an ugly sound left the elven queen’s mouth.
“This is the worst mistake you’ve made in your life, sister.”
Then she looked at her guards, busy killing their best friends, some with greed in their eyes, others sheer terror, tears running down their faces.
“And you as well… What a disappointment.”
Many elves winced, some even stopped.
“Continue! Anyone who stops may join the old queen in her fate!” Aelindra shouted, then looked back at Myrasyn. Her lips curved upward. “Worst mistake of my life? For you, yes. But for me and the elven race? No, it was the best. Our golden age begins today.”
Myrasyn broke into laughter at that.
It started low, a wet, broken sound that bubbled up from the blood in her throat. The elf queen lay in the dirt with a sword wound in her back and a high-tier slave collar of a dwarven master smith’s making grinding against her will, and she laughed so hard her shoulders shook.
The sound of it made Aelindra’s expression flicker for the first time.
“Golden age,” Myrasyn repeated, and blood sprayed from her lips with the words. “You pitiful, pitiful woman.”
Aelindra kicked her sister in the face and spat.
…
On the other side of the divide, the fighting had erupted the moment Alexios saw Ragnar’s betrayal for the opportunity it was.
