Chapter 698: Have Mercy!

There was no rage, pride or petty mortal triumph in her face

She was not a tribal chieftain. She was not a mortal warrior who had won just a war.

She was the mountain that crushed the valley; she was the winter that froze the herds; she was the sky that opened up to swallow the world.

She... was an ancient, primordial goddess descended from the highest heavens, sitting upon a throne of stars and bone, looking down upon a handful of worthless insects that had dared to crawl across her terrace.

To even breathe the same air as her felt like a profound, unforgivable sacrilege. To meet her gaze felt like an act of madness that would burn their eyes to cinders.

In front of such cosmic, absolute existence, the urge to speak, to offer diplomatic greetings, to cite ancestral treaties, "mutual sovereignty" were all reduced to meaningless, pathetic chirps of dust.

Whatever shredded remnants of pride or tribal identity lingered in the hearts of the envoys were burned to absolute ash.

Without a single word spoken between them, without needing a signal or a nudge, all twenty emissaries collapsed forward in unison.

THUD! THUD! THUD!

Their foreheads struck the flagstones once more, but this time, it was not the violent slam of an aura forcing them down. It was total, desperate, willing prostration.

Elder Sarn threw himself forward, slamming his forehead flat against the cold stone floor with a violent force without any regards for his well being..

The Scaled-Kin also flattened their nose against the stone ground; the feathered Wind-Runners weren’t slow either and pressed their faces almost instantly, the Horned-Folk almost buried their faces into the cracks of the floor, their massive horns digging deep into the ground.

All in all, they all flattened their bellies against the cold stone, their arms stretched out before them in the universal, primeval posture of mortal vermin begging an angry deity to spare their lives.

"M-Mercy!" Sarn’s voice cracked, bleeding lips babbled into the dust, his aged voice trembling so violently it was barely coherent."Have mercy, Sovereign! Have mercy on our ignorant eyes!

" Mother of the Orrath! Spare our pathetic lives!" another human tribe envoy whimpered, his forehead knocking repeatedly against the floor. "We did not know! We are worms! We are dust beneath your feet, Great Mother! Mercy!"

"Forgive our trespassing! We bow! The Stone-River bows! We surrender our rivers, our hunting grounds, our breath! Spare our clan!"

"Have mercy upon the horn-clans!" the massive horned emissary also whimpered, his giant body shaking like a dying tree, burying his nose into the cracks between the stones.

"We are ignorant! We are blind! We did not know the heavens had descended to walk the Great Lodge! We also yield our hunting grounds! We yield our rivers! Just grant us the right to breathe your air!"

The great hall echoed with the pathetic, babbling pleas of twenty seasoned tribal veterans, their voices harmonizing into a desperate, frantic choir of total surrender. They prostrated themselves again and again, weeping and knocking their skulls against the rock until the stone was spotted with fresh blood.

None of them dared to lift their faces a fraction of an inch to see if the wrath above them had softened or dared to stop groveling.

They stayed pressed against the floor, shivering so hard the stones beneath them vibrated, terrified that if they ceased their desperate chanting for a single second, the mountain would come crashing down again to wipe them from the world.

Up on the bone throne, Veylara leaned back casually into the white mammoth furs, one elbow resting on the armrest and her chin propped lightly in her palm, her sapphire eyes gleaming with a mixture of cold disdain and mild boredom.

A tiny, self-satisfied smirk tugged at the corner of her lips as she glanced sideways toward the High Shaman.

"See?" Veylara murmured, her voice carrying a dry, melodic smoothness that floated easily over the frantic weeping below."I didn’t even do anything. I barely let a breath slip out, and they collapsed like rotten thatch. They are just entirely too weak-willed."

Zephyra stood beside her, her milky eyes rolling upward beneath her lids as she let out a slow, thoroughly helpless sigh.

The old mystic could only shake her head. She knew the Warchief’s temperament better than anyone alive. Veylara was fiercely possessive, fiercely proud, and notoriously petty toward anyone who had ever looked down upon her clan.

These neutral tribes had spent winters sitting comfortably on their riverbanks, watching the Veynar bleed against the Coalition tribes while offering nothing but cold glances and inflated barter prices.

But she still had to say something to discourage her from becoming too unruly. She gently tapped the butt of her staff against the stone, shaking her head.

"You are petty when you want to be, Warchief. You could have simply accepted their tokens and sent them home to spread the word. Did you truly need to crush their spirits into powder before they even stated their names?"

"If you leave a wolf with its teeth, it will eventually remember how to bite," Veylara replied smoothly, her sapphire eyes gleaming with cool, ruthless calculation.

"When you break a beast, Zephyra, you do not tap its snout. You shatter its spine until it forgets it ever had claws. If I had smiled and poured them water, they would have walked out of our gates whispering about how they didn’t had any majesty and still had to treat them with respect and who knows if it went through their heads and they think we are weak and dare to test our borders.

Now? They will spend the rest of their miserable lives making sure their children do not even look toward our direction."

Zephyra’s mouth opened slightly to retort, but she closed it with another resigned shake of her head.

She knew better than anyone why this woman sat upon the throne. If Veylara had been gentle, if she had been lenient, if she hadn’t carried that relentless, vengeful spirit in her blood, she would have died long ago and the Veynar would have been erased by the enemy tribe before the autumn leaves had turned.

She was harsh, she was terrifying, and she was vindictive... and that was precisely why her clan was alive to rule the entire northern Veynar region.

If she wasn’t so ruthless and vengeful, Zephyra thought with a faint, private smile, she would never have survived to take the high seat, let alone broken the sky.

For a long, agonizing minute, the Great Lodge was filled with nothing but the frantic, breathless begging of the foreign envoys, their foreheads continuously thudding against the floor.