Chapter 702: Swear Eternal Obedience

Beside him, the feathered Wind-Runner envoy pressed his chest flat against the stone, shouting with equal hysteria. “The Wind-Runners yield! We swear allegiance to the Sovereign of the Fifth Layer! Command our scouts, draft our youth, rule our skies! We are your people now!”

“The Scaled-Kin swear!” the amphibious envoy hissed, his gills flaring as he bared his scaly neck to the dais. “We submit to the Great Mother! We renounce our borders! We are your thralls, your hunters, your subjects forever!”

“The Horned-Clans pledge their horns!” the massive brute wept, pressing his snout into the stone crack. “Rule over us! Protect our hearths and take our strength! We swear allegiance to the High Seat of the Veynar!”

The great hall echoed with the thunderous, desperate vows of all tribes formally casting aside their ancestral freedom, competing with one another to surrender faster, louder, and more thoroughly than their peers.

On the lower platform, the Veynar elders watched the spectacle with eyes as wide as clay bowls.

Elder Bran stood clutching his oak cane, his mouth slightly open, feeling an odd, dizzying combination of terror and unprecedented triumph.

These were the same haughty, sharp-tongued emissaries who had treated the Veynar like an isolated, beleaguered clan on the verge of ruin.

To see them sobbing on the floor, offering their hunting grounds and lifeblood on a silver platter, was something no Veynar elder had witnessed in ten generations.

Magnificent, Bran thought, nodding slightly to himself with fervent, reverent awe. Truly peerless. Who needs council meetings when a single sentence from our glorious Warchief can conquer fall these tribes?

Standing beside the throne, High Shaman Zephyra leaned slightly on her staff, her milky eyes shifting downward toward the blubbering elders.

A tiny, almost imperceptible twitch pulled at the corner of her mouth as she let out a tiny, amused sigh through her nose, though she kept her mouth shut. She knew when Veylara had played with her prey enough.

She could feel the lingering traces of Veylara’s sovereign fifth-layer essence coiled behind the Warchief’s ribs… a dormant tempest held back by a thread of pure amusement.

Veylara definitely wasn’t going to exterminate them. She didn’t need to nor was she petty enough. It’s just these small tribes deserved to be taught a lesson to avoid future trouble.

Anyway, why waste the energy to cut a tree when you could get their fruit every summer without raising a single weapon?

Veylara let them weep for another dozen heartbeats, letting the dread soak into their bones making sure that it becomes an instinct their bloodlines would remember for ten generations.

Having had enough of their blabbering, she shifted her posture on the mammoth furs.

The casual change in her posture made the room fall into dead silence, the envoys choking on their words, freezing with their faces still pressed into the floor, not daring to let out so much as a whimper.

“The Veynar have no use for piles of worthless offerings,” Veylara stated, her voice carrying a resonant, sovereign weight that vibrated directly against the stone walls of the lodge. “Nor do we have need for dead envoys cluttering our floor.”

Sarn’s breath hitched, his tear-streaked face slowly peeling from the dust, his red-rimmed eyes wide with desperate, fragile hope.

“You want to live?” Veylara asked coldly. “You want your tribes to see the spring melt?”

“Yes! By the ancestors, yes, Great Sovereign!” Sarn stammered.

“Then listen well,” Veylara commanded, her sapphire eyes narrowing to slits of brilliant, molten blue. “From this day forth, the northern basin, the western ridges, and the southern river valleys belong to the high seat of the Great Orrath. Your hunting grounds are leased under my tolerance. Your trade paths exist by my decree.”

She raised three fingers, her tone clipping with absolute authority.

“First: every moon, a third of your dried meat, spirit-herbs, salts, and cured hides will be delivered to our storehouses without a hair missing. Second: whenever our construction crews expand our outposts, your clans will provide fifty able-bodied haulers to labor under our line warriors. Third…”

Her gaze hardened, turning cold as a glacial crevasse.

“…any foreign traveler, rogue scout, or envoy from the southern tribes who approaches your borders must be reported to my scouts before their feet touch your grass. If a single stranger breathes in this region without my knowledge, I will consider your entire tribe complicit in treason.”

She leaned forward, resting her forearms on her knees, her presence bearing down on them like the weight of an unmovable mountain.

“Serve me well, and your children will grow fat through the winter. Betray me, and I will erase your names from the memory of the trees.”

“We accept! We accept ten thousand times over!” Sarn shouted, slamming his face into the stone with such ecstatic relief that he barely felt the pain in his broken nose. “The Stone-River accepts! We swear by the first root and the river stones! Your decree is law! Your will is our breath!”

“The Wind-Runners swear!” the feathered youth sobbed, clutching his chest. “We swear eternal obedience!”

“The Scaled-Kin accept! We accept!”

“The Horned-Clans yield forever to the Sovereign!”

“We also accept.” Other tribes also hurriedly shouted.

Veylara waved a dismissive hand, as if swatting away a swarm of midges. “Leave your tribute at the door. Take your bruised heads, and crawl back to your councils. Tell your elders what you saw today. And remind them… that if they dared think otherwise, be prepared for a visit from our finest warrior”

The mention of the ‘finest warriors’… that dark-haired reaper leaning against the timber stack with the cold, slaughter-soaked blade and mountain of corpses beside him came to their minds, sending another violent jolt of terror through their bodies.

“We go! We leave at once!” Sarn scrambled backward on his hands and knees, not daring to turn his back to the dais until he was halfway to the heavy doors.

“Thank you, Sovereign! Blessings upon the Fifth Layer! Eternal life to the Veynar!”