Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

The [Warp Gate] bloomed in the central reading hall of the Vraven royal archive, and the war of paper barely broke stride.

Quinlan stepped through with Ayame on his arm. The nearest clerk saw the light, hugged his tray to his chest, and kept walking. The hall had adapted.

Black Fang had walked through ahead of everyone, and by the time the gate closed behind them she was already deep in the stacks, in the wing where the crown kept its files on the continent’s criminals. Hers occupied most of a shelf.

She pulled her own dossier without asking anyone, opened it against one arm, and read it unhurried, grading the crown’s intelligence for accuracy. The aisle emptied of clerks in under a minute. Authorization had not been sought. The archive elected not to bring it up.

"Stop arriving like that," said Alexios from behind a desk that had annexed two of its neighbors, without looking up from what he was signing.

"You said that last time."

"Yes. And?"

"I thought you’d get used to it. It’s about time, no?"

"...You truly have an innate talent."

"For elemental magic, among many things, yes."

"Such as getting on my nerves."

Quinlan elected not to hear that, already scanning past him toward the center of the hall.

The center was missing.

Iris’s table sat stripped bare, the border maps gone, only knife holes left in the wood where their corners had been pinned.

Only the folio kept its post under the clean sheet of glass, where every runner in the hall passed it a hundred times a day. Damian Ravenclaw, in fresh dark ink, leading the record.

The riders who had taken the north road at dusk rode under Stormlord’s command, but Iris was given full permission to lead the investigation itself.

A wry smile climbed onto Quinlan’s face and settled in.

"She didn’t even tell me she left," he said. But despite the verbal complaint, the pride in it was warm and complete, the kind he never bothered to hide.

For long years the world’s paper had agreed that her family had never existed, and she had carried that silence as a powerless child and then as an outlawed adventurer.

Now she was back in Ravenshade lands as the crown’s hired investigator, tearing the true story out of the ground with both hands.

"Things are finally moving, huh, Iris?" he said to the empty table, to the name under the glass, to a red-eyed menace far away who couldn’t hear him.

Beside him, Ayame looked at the stripped table and smiled.

The cheek stayed home, and so did the tease she would have filed for later, and the whole armory she kept stocked against her rival on principle.

Her frenemy had stopped circling her wound and started hunting it, and Ayame was, from the bottom of her heart, glad.

"Good," was all she said.

"Where is she exactly?" Quinlan asked, drifting toward the desk. "I’d like to pay her a visit."

"Terrorizing my border holdings." Alexios signed another page. "She rode out the night you left and has gutted two toll stations since. The commission’s protocol prescribed a month of document review before any field work. She reinterpreted the protocol. I chose to indulge her."

"How generous."

"..." Alexios remained silent. It was evident he had a soft spot for the girl who had been wronged so thoroughly in his kingdom.

But, to save face, he quickly added, "The paper stalled, so she went to question the people who wrote it. She interviews the keepers personally. My chief archivist has requested hazard pay. In writing. Citing precedent."

"Pfft." Ayame’s grin went fond.

"And Felicity?" Quinlan asked. "I half expected an ambush at the gate."

"She rides with the commission." The pen kept moving. "The crown needs a face in the field for such a major event, and..."

’My chosen heir needs a name in the field, and Vraven has to watch her make it. A bubbly princess is not enough.’

He didn’t say that out loud.

Quinlan’s eye found a ledger table abandoned mid-column, its chair shoved back hard enough to have traveled. "And Lilith?"

"The Scarlet Lilies took a crown contract. Commission security, field wing." Alexios reached for the next stack. "Lilith called the pay insulting."

"Aren’t you like turbo rich? Pay the woman, you damned coin pincher. In fact, you should double the pay of every person who’s present."

The hall’s rhythm stumbled. Quills stopped mid-stroke, a runner froze with a crate half lowered, and every clerk in earshot performed the same maneuver: perfect outward composure, ears straining backward. Nobody spoke to their king like that. And no one, ever, had proposed doubling their pay while doing it.

Then hopeful glances began to gather on the crown from every direction, one desk at a time.

Alexios stared at his thoroughly unwelcome guest, and for a long moment the driest man in Vraven was simply, honestly appalled.

The shameless creature was courting the loyalty of the crown’s own staff, in the crown’s own archive, in front of the crown, while smiling at him.

"...Back to work," the king said, and the hall resumed at double diligence, powered by hope.

Ayame leaned into Quinlan’s shoulder, delighted. "You’re going to get your bounty raised again."

"It’s basically infinite already," Quinlan said. "They stopped offering money for me a while back. It’s a royal boon now. Ask the crown for anything."

Her grin widened. "It can always go to two royal boons~"

Quinlan decided this was the right time to move on, so he turned to Alexios and asked, "How loud is the howling?"

"Half my court believes I’ve lost my mind. No king has ever audited a great house," Alexios replied after signing a document. "The other half is quietly measuring Ravenshade’s furniture."

"So you’re in control."

"Naturally," Alexios scoffed. "My vassals are no longer powerful enough to force my hand."

Saying that one line seemed to make the man lose centuries of age.

Alexios might’ve acted nonchalant, but he was making the biggest moves of his career right now, in the middle of a paperwork flood he had signed into being himself.

He had taken the seat out from under Alastair with enough evidence and enough noble backing that nobody could call it a grab, and put it up for bidding.

He had named the Fujimori Elders traitors and sentenced every one of them to death, then gone out and taken a head himself.

And now the last dirty house in Vraven was on his desk, and the old king looked truly happy about it.

Even a certain shameless scumbag’s arrival couldn’t fully sour the mood.

Quinlan nodded and watched him work for a while after that.

For decades the old king had ruled with a deadline hanging over him, dying a little more each year, and he had kept every appointment anyway. Then a pill forged from a primordial’s blood struck him in the chest, and the deadline itself died. His aging simply stopped.

And this was what he did with forever.

Sleeves rolled before dawn, signing warrants against the mightiest house in his kingdom, hunting decades of rot through toll ink.

He could have passed that second life on a sunlit balcony, being toasted by grateful generations. He went straight back to work instead, and worked harder, because now the work would actually finish.

Quinlan had opened his own veins for this man through a whole night and drained his family’s reservoir to the floor for him. Looking at the rolled sleeves and the merciless pace of that signature, he’d do every second of it again.

Despite their constant grumbling, the two had managed to earn each other’s respect.

"You work too much, old man."

"And whose fault is that."

Neither of them smiled where the other could prove it.

...

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