Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

The name rang off the iron doors, spoken in a crown sentence and under seal: a house restored in the same breath that fed its destroyer to it.

"She can do it however she wants," the princess finished.

For the space of three heartbeats, the hall was perfectly quiet.

Then the count began to scream.

"HANG me!" He fought his knees under him at last, his ruined voice climbing through what was left of its range. "Do you hear me?! Take me to your father and HANG ME! I am a peer of the realm and I DEMAND MY ROPE!"

Nobody answered him.

"STORMLORD!" he shrieked. "You served the LAW, the law says the ROPE, you KNOW the law, MAKE THEM..."

Stormlord looked at him, said nothing at all, and stepped back to his princess’s shoulder.

"HANG ME!" the count screamed at Felicity, at the Mediator, at the soldiers along the walls, at anyone, his voice shredding on the gaps in his teeth. "HANG ME! HANG ME! PLEASE!"

So a peer of Vraven begged for his own hanging as a mercy, and the whole commission heard him do it.

Nobody came to him.

That was the first thing Corvane understood, down on the stones with his screams dying in the smoke: no one in that hall was ever going to come to him again.

The soldiers had turned their shoulders, and the princess had turned her back.

Then the hall began to empty, though not truly, and he knew it, distantly, with the last reasoning part of him.

The soldiers still stood along the walls. The princess still stood by her commander.

But the light pulled in on itself, the sounds of the living furled up like paper in a fire, and the great burned cavern of his record-house drew down long, dark, and narrow. All of creation held three people, and two of them were looking at him.

The tall man stood motionless in the ember-light. The small woman was coming for Corvane, step by step, and there was nothing human left in either one.

Corvane’s breath stopped working.

He tried to push himself backward across the flagstones, away, anywhere, and his body would not answer him. The arms that had signed a thousand deaths lay where they were and refused him, and that refusal frightened him worse than any grip could have.

The villain’s head tilted.

That was all it did.

It tilted, unhurried and considering, and it reached into Corvane’s chest and closed a hand around his heart.

He had seen the villain angry and had had the villain’s boot on his teeth. That had been weather.

This was the sky coming down, patient and bottomless, resting its eyes on him like something that had eaten kingdoms, found them small, and meant to keep him now for a very long time.

His bladder let go.

He felt the warmth spread under him across his own cracked flagstones, distant and shameful, and no shame came to meet it, because shame needs a future to live in and he no longer had one.

The villain was terror enough to empty a man where he sat.

Then Iris Ravenclaw was close, and the count learned he had not yet met the worst thing in his own hall.

Where the villain’s stillness had pulled the world small, her approach shoved it back into his face.

The banked ash lifted off the stones in the wake of her boots and would not settle. His own chains, lying slack, began to ring against the flagstones with no hand near them, and his back teeth ached in his ruined mouth as though the air itself had turned to iron.

Her eyes were swirling.

Red turned within red, slow as syrup, deep as wells, two lit windows onto a furnace that had been banked her whole life and just, finally, been fed.

The pressure came off her and filled the hall to the rafters, thicker than the smoke, older than the tolls. It was a bloodlust with no bottom and no far shore, and it had his name written on every drop of it, his whole name, the one his grandfather had built this house to carry.

His bowels loosened where he sat.

He felt that too, the heat and the reek of it spreading across the stones his grandfather had laid, and he could no more stop it than he could stop his chains from singing. The delicate woman crossing the floor did not slow, did not hurry, did not so much as blink.

One step.

Then the next.

And Count Corvane, who had priced a barony to the coin, left its people out of the book entirely, and slept soundly ever since, understood in the swirling red of a dead girl’s living eyes exactly what the rest of his existence was going to be, and that it had not yet even begun.

It began.

"PLEASE." The count broke apart entirely, forehead grinding the stones, bound hands scrabbling at the flagstones in front of her boots. "Please. Not her. The rope. I’ll give you everything, I’ll testify to anything, before any court, PLEASE..."

His voice shredded down to a wet whisper. "Mercy. Mercy..."

Iris crouched.

She took a fistful of his collar, lifted his ruined face out of his own filth, and gave him the last words he would ever hear on the living side of the world.

"Nobody came for him, either."

Then she opened her free hand above the stones, and the floor of the record-house tore.

"I already told you. You’ll know no mercy."

"NO!"

A seam split the flagstones beside the count, wide as a grave and getting wider. Below it there was no cellar and no earth.

Iris then cast her new spell, the first one as the Demon of Vengeance, her powers derived from the perfect culmination of her and the villain’s fury, and she sentenced her first target to...

"[Undying Damnation]."

A new dimension materialized before their very eyes.

Black metal ground ran away in every direction under a sky the color of banked coals, and the air of that place rolled hot, in and out. The whole dimension was breathing.

It was empty. It had been born tonight, it belonged to the woman crouched at its rim, and it was waiting for its first tenant.

She gripped Corvane by the throat and threw him into its entrance. The hall heard him scream the whole way down.

He hit the black metal ground of another world. Before the pain of the landing could even find him, words wrote themselves across his sight, patient and courteous, and they did not care whether his eyes were open.

[Welcome to the hell of the Demon of Vengeance.]

[Resident: 1.]

The seam stayed open. She stood at its rim and made the whole hall look.

Down in the ember domain, the ground began to move. It bulged under the screaming count and pushed something up out of itself, grinding, enormous.

What came up was a pillar the height of a watchtower, wrong in every way a built thing can be wrong: rugged black metal, crooked and scabbed, flaking rust in sheets, run down its whole length with fat living veins that pulsed and wept.

Every drop they shed hit the ground hissing.

It narrowed as it rose to a point, it glowed from the inside like a poker left deep in a forge, and the air above it warped with heat.

The count saw it and began to howl fresh.

The demon spoke down into her dimension with the doubled voice, hers riding on top, the villain’s authority running underneath, and it spoke straight past the count’s mind to his body.

"Climb."

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