My Taboo Harem!

Across from the Heavenchilds stood the Maxtons.

Harold Maxton stood nearest the front, he looked old than usual and terrible, his face deeply lined by age, calculation and the kind of patience that only ever grew around monsters who had lived long enough to see morality become a hobby for other people.

Beside him stood Grandpa Maxton, older still, thin as a sharpened reed, his eyes yellowed but viciously awake.

Near them waited a woman of the Maxton line, tall, black-dressed and iron-backed, along with seven other Maxtons positioned in a crescent. They stood silent, proud and tense, each dressed for ritual rather than battle, though anyone familiar with families such as these understood that the difference was often decorative.

The air suddenly changed and a descending scream of pressure split through the chamber, and the runes nearest the altar flared as every assembled figure lifted their eyes.

Then Danton came down:

He fell out of nowhere like a falling burning star punished for disobedience from Heavens, wrapped from head to toe in blazing golden flames. For one brilliant second, he was only a descending pillar of incandescent ruin, a human-shaped inferno knifing through the darkness above the altar and he struck the raised stone on one knee.

The impact boomed through the chamber as golden fire burst outward from him in a circular wave, racing through the carved channels of the altar. Every symbol, rune, line of script, summoning mark and binding law erupted into searing brilliance, bringing the entire structure alive beneath him in a vast sacred blaze.

Golden light surged up the altar, raced through the turning circles and leapt from symbol to symbol until the whole chamber looked as if the bones of a star had been buried beneath its floor.

The five Chained recoiled as the altar drank sharply from them. Their restraints pulled taut, and one released a broken gasp.

Danton remained kneeling for one theatrical heartbeat, his head lowered and one hand braced against the burning stone like some absurdly handsome prophet of bad decisions.

Then he rose and suddenly the flames clinging to him peeled away at a gesture and vanished into his skin.

Marcus rolled his eyes. "Subtle as ever."

Danton’s mouth twitched faintly: "Some of us were born with presence."

A gust of power swept across the altar and tore away the prisoners’ hoods, revealing five faces beneath the light.

Three men and two women.

Their ears were elongated and elegant, curving slightly backward with that unmistakable otherworldly grace no human race could counterfeit. Even starved, chained and brutalized by suppression, they were beautiful like old forests and forgotten songs.

Their features remained fine, angular and unnervingly harmonious, but captivity had hollowed them into something haunted; their cheeks were too sharp, their mouths too dry and their eyes too large within their faces.

They were all long bone and pale flesh, exhausted nobility reduced to trembling instruments beneath iron law.

They were elves.

The first male elf still wore the broken remains of a crown woven from living wood. Most of its branches had died, leaving only grey twigs pressed against his matted silver hair. Once, leaves might have grown from it according to his mood.

Now only one remained, blackened and curled!

The second bore elegant green markings across his face and neck, though iron runes had been burned over them so many times that the sacred patterns had become scars. Each mark at his throat pulsed whenever he attempted to swallow, ensuring that even silence hurt.

The third had once possessed golden hair. Enough remained to show what it had been, but most had faded into a dry, colourless white. His thin chest rose beneath torn robes, revealing the faint outlines of ritual carvings sunk between his ribs.

One of the women still had small silver flowers woven into her dark green hair. They were not dried but dead, their petals turned translucent and clinging stubbornly to her strands as though even flowers had refused to abandon her willingly, she looked innocent and once; some time back she might’ve also looked innocently cute, but now she had no hope but still begged death to come and rescue them from this hell.

The last woman possessed eyes of deep woodland blue, once bright enough, perhaps, to reflect ancient skies. Now they remained wide, wise and watchful, haunted by the terrible alertness of someone who had learned that pain often arrived immediately after hope.

They had been made for moonlit groves, sacred canopies and ancient songs beneath trees whose roots touched other worlds and now they stood chained around an altar belonging to angels and thieves, fresh from hell and still too beautiful for it.

Danton jumped lightly down from the heart of the altar to the lower ring and glanced around the chamber.

"Start."

The chains pulsed, making all five elves flinch as the altar awakened behind them.

Dark cracks opened along the five pillars, revealing faint depths filled with countless restraints stretching into nowhere. The sound that emerged from within was distant and dreadful, a low chorus of dragging metal, whispered names and things breathing behind sealed doors.

The elves did not summon separately:

Together, their powers would form a single gate; their five voices would become one command, and their five souls would anchor one passage wide enough for the eight empty throney-points arranged around the altar.

One by one, they raised their heads and began to chant.

Their voices were soft at first, clear and pure, so pure that the first notes made the chamber feel cleaner for the insult of a moment with syllables flowing like winter rivers beneath starlight. The elven language rose with grave beauty, each word impossibly precise and touched by virtue, ancient forests and moonlit rites...

["...By root before crown...

...By leaf before blade...

By first branch that parted the dark...

We call the Between...

We call the Hollow Road...

We call the Princes of Unbounded Thresholds..."]

The runes brightened, the circles turned and a low vibration filled the altar as the Eternal Prison Gates groaned open by another fraction.

The elves’ voices climbed together, the three male tones and two female tones interweaving into ritual harmony so beautiful it hurt, as though innocence itself had been enslaved and forced to sing open the door to something unclean.

["Come from the unbordered absence...

Come through the seam without seam...

Come, Void-Djinn...

Come through the spaces law forgot...

Come by covenant...

Come by chain...

Come by bound and bleeding will..."]

The dark gates of the Eternal Prison opened, not into a place, but into absence.

Power exploded from the altar.

Radiance erupted upward from the central ring in a pillar so violent that it struck the ceiling and fractured into descending rain. Every rune screamed with light, every magical circle accelerated and the eight empty points around the altar ignited with black stars.

The prisoners’ bodies arched as their chains pulled their arms outward and the Gates drank from them:

Blood ran from one elf’s nose and black-gold light leaked from another’s eyes. The silver flowers in the woman’s hair crumbled one by one as the force passed through her.

For one impossible instant, the entire chamber seemed to tilt sideways beneath the pressure of the summoning before the light died, and impenetrable darkness replaced it.

Void poured from the altar in a tidal surge and seized the entire chamber. The walls vanished, the gathered families disappeared and the floor ceased to feel like a floor:

Even sound seemed arrested, gripped by the throat and held still.

Everyone present felt that terrible inversion, the suffocating certainty that the world had not simply been darkened, but erased and replaced by something so dark and vast enough to swallow shape itself.

The void did not merely hide things but denied their right to be seen.

Marcus attempted to summon light, but nothing answered.

For the first time, a flicker of genuine alarm and fear crossed his face before the Void itself!

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