More than a few matriarchs had lifted their heads enough for her to catch their look. The look was competition.

Her cheeks went rosier, but her chin did not drop as she declared,

"And I..."

She let the word hold.

"...have also been warming his bed. I have kept his heart full and never wanting."

The blush on her face and the supremacy in her voice did not contradict each other once.

The matriarchs closest to the front were no longer looking at Ayame’s belly.

They were glaring at Seraphiel.

Seraphiel’s composure held for exactly as long as it needed to.

Then she jumped.

Off the hilltop, off the crest, clean into the air above the road. Her ceremonial posture vanished somewhere in the descent. Her arms opened wide before she hit the bottom of the arc.

Quinlan caught her.

She folded into him the second her body met his. Arms locked around his neck. Face pressed into the side of his throat. Her thighs clamped around his waist in a way that pressed a visible amount of warm elven skin against black plate in full view of numerous high clans.

"I missed you so much..."

Her voice sat on the edge of a whimper.

Quinlan adjusted his grip under her and chuckled.

"It’s been a few hours."

"I know..."

It purred out of her against his throat, thoroughly unrepentant.

"A few hours too much."

She peeked above his shoulder a fraction as she said it, observing the women.

The look she sent toward the matriarchs on the far side of the road had nothing ceremonial left in it. Her blue eyes had narrowed. Her chin had angled up. Her smile had acquired a specific edge that the oldest matrons on that road understood on sight.

Every woman understood it, instinctively.

She was marking territory.

Shamelessly.

Every matriarch within twenty rows had spent the last hour quietly selecting which of her unmarried daughters to present to the Holy Son first. Every one of them, in the space of a heartbeat, understood that the race they had woken up to that morning was months into its final lap. The lead had belonged to House Vaelorith from the very start.

A young, formerly-enslaved, belly-dancer-clothes-wearing House Vaelorith.

Their teeth ground together so hard it hurt.

Seraphiel pressed closer against him. The curve of her chest flattened into [Synchra]’s breastplate. One gloved hand wandered up into the hair at the base of his skull and stayed there.

...

At the crest of the hill, Kaelira shifted her weight from one foot to the other.

She had been watching Seraphiel’s delivery with something between awe and panic. Her first instinct was to stay quiet. Her second instinct, arriving visibly later, was the realization that Seraphiel had just welcomed a nation on behalf of the elven women on the hill, and Kaelira was the only other elf in the harem.

The bluish-purple of her hair caught the noon sun.

She opened her mouth.

"I... um."

The Runeweaver Titan, facing the kneeling flower of Elvardia, began her first public address to her people.

"I also... permit you. To rise."

A beat.

Her hand came up and tucked a strand of bluish-purple hair behind one long ear.

Her cheeks had gone scarlet.

This time, the formation rose.

It came up slowly and unevenly, with a wave of gratitude rolling through it from the front rank to the last. Both of the Holy Son’s elven wives had now spoken. The ceremony was at last complete.

The matriarchs did not miss a beat of it.

Their scrutiny, which had been narrowing by degrees since Ayame’s belly had first failed their inspection, widened right back out. They took Kaelira in from boot to brow, and it was not a forgiving examination.

Kaelira was not a traditional elf.

Kaelira was not even close to a traditional elf.

She had a smith’s build, a warrior’s shoulders, and a presence that their template for ’elven mother of the Holy Son’s children’ had never once had to account for.

Every matriarch in the first ten rows looked at Kaelira’s stomach at once.

Their faces told the whole story.

They were attempting a fertility inspection.

They had no template for what they were seeing.

’Can...’ one of the younger matrons murmured into her silk collar. ’Will it... work?’

The matriarch beside her, older and bolder, had moved on to the hips. Her skepticism was open.

’How would a child even fit through that frame?’

The oldest matron in that row, two tiers deeper, had entered a state of personal crisis.

Her internal verdict was almost audible through her teeth:

’We are DOOMED.’

Kaelira could feel every one of those stares. She could feel their weight.

Her hands clenched at her sides. Her ears darkened to a shade of scarlet that matched her cheeks exactly.

She finally snapped.

"I-I can do it!"

The column went still.

"I’m perfectly healthy and capable, I will have you know!"

Her scarlet climbed into the very tips of both long ears.

"So stop looking at me like that!"

The air around Quinlan changed.

His presence had expanded outward in one quiet wave. The row of judgmental stares at his second elven lover’s abdomen had apparently crossed a line he was not going to be asked to explain.

The weight of it reached the ranks a half-second later.

The oldest matron in the inspecting row gasped.

Her head snapped downward. Her palms hit the dirt. The matriarchs on either side of her folded their gazes into their laps at the same instant, and a ripple of down-cast eyes traveled outward through the first twenty rows as dozens of noblewomen simultaneously remembered what they had been doing to Kaelira’s body and stopped.

No one breathed wrong.

The scrutiny ended on the same breath it had been escalating on, then Isveth rose from her knees.

"Holy Son, please, let us do our duty."

A beat.

"Not every city heard our runners. The matriarchs of Aelmarith shackled ours and sent them back bleeding. Some sent theirs back dead. Two inland sanctuaries did not even open their gates. The clans in the capital and the Council’s hearthlands have sided with Aelindra... Most of the high houses in Elvardia are rotten. Only a handful have risen for you. Allow us to cut the rest out ourselves. You should not be made to shed the blood of your Mother’s descendants. Let your followers do what we in this nation have always done, and clean a house that has fallen unclean."

Her palm opened at the column behind her.

"We are ready."

Quinlan looked at her for a long moment, blonde elf still clinging to him, then he nodded once.

"Then we’ll be visiting a couple of dwarven settlements in the meantime."

A half-beat.

"Good luck, everyone."

Every elf within earshot snapped upright.

Backs straightened. Hands tightened on bows and staffs. The word ’dwarven’ rolled outward through the column in a wave of murmur.

Quinlan turned to his women.

His gauntlet came up. Fingers spread. The air ten paces behind the hilltop split along a black seam, and [Warp Gate] bloomed in place.

It was time to put the finishing touches on the Rise of the Primordial Villain.